How we grapple with grief

‘The word death is not pronounced in New York, in Paris, in London, because it burns the lips,” declared Octavio Paz in 1950 in “The Labyrinth of Solitude,” adding that by contrast, the Mexican “is familiar with death.” Was Paz right? Is he still right?

More than 2,000 American soldiers have died in Iraq, along with literally countless Iraqi civilians, but the president of the United States has yet to attend a funeral , nor have we as a nation joined in any communal ceremonies of mourning. Joan Didion’s recent memoir, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” soared to the top of the bestseller list accompanied by glowing reviews -- but also by a letter in the New York Times Book Review that urged “O, St. Joan of Didion, stop ye whining and complaining.... Want to mourn? Have the dignity of doing it in private. Enough!”

Our cultural ambivalence about death and grief gets played out on the political scene and on the literary scene. On the one hand, we need and yearn to mourn; on the other hand, we’re “uncomfortable” -- to put it mildly -- with dying and mourning. We’re simultaneously a death-denying society and a society enthralled not just by morbid comedies (“Pulp Fiction” and “Six Feet Under,” for example) but by true stories of mortality.

For decades now, in an era shadowed by conflicting religious beliefs (and unbeliefs) along with the massive trauma of what one historian calls “death events” (World War I, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and on and on), we’ve struggled to slam death’s door. Exactly half a century ago, the sociologist Geoffrey Gorer commented that “rational men and women” are supposed to “keep their mourning under complete control by strength of will or character,” expressing grief “if at all, in private, as furtively as if it were an analogue of masturbation.”

And a few years later, in 1961, C.S. Lewis supported this point in his classic memoir “A Grief Observed” with a startling confession: “An odd byproduct of my loss is that I’m aware of being an embarrassment to everyone I meet.... Perhaps the bereaved ought to be isolated in special settlements like lepers.”

Such embarrassment and anxiety may explain why even after the AIDS pandemic and the catastrophe of 9/11 forced us to look through death’s open doorway, deep social bewilderment has continued to shape a number of sometimes contradictory modes of encountering loss. Grief “therapy” -- most of it designed to ensure that the bereaved will healthily “recover” and achieve what pop psychologists call closure -- is now so widely practiced that it’s become a lucrative industry. More-mystical counseling seeks to cheer mourners by arguing that the dead are really alive and well: Dying “can be the most wonderful experience of your life,” claimed the late Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, because “death is simply [a] transition to a higher state of consciousness where you continue to perceive, to understand, to laugh, and to be able to grow.”

Predicated either on the tenets of grief therapy or more radical alternatives, peculiarly cheerful do-it-yourself memorial services focus on “celebrations of the life” of the “departed” rather than the pain that his departure caused, while “New Age” activities, from channeling to past-life therapy, retool Victorian spiritualism with 21st century technology. Among the thousands of websites devoted to these activities, for instance, www.pastlifetherapy.org welcomes Internet users interested in hypnotherapy with a glamorous homepage titled “Phoenix Rising,” and www.channeling.net offers “Spiritual Connection: a Path to Love and Light.” Numerous virtual cemeteries give casual surfers and serious mourners chances to leave imaginary “flowers” at electronic graves. To make matters more bewildering, for much of the last century, film and video have let us see the dead in movies, on TV and even, more recently, on computer screens, iPods and cellphones, as if long-gone celebrities -- and our lost loved ones -- are alive and well.

No wonder some of us desperately yearn for what we have come to define as closure, and others try to handle grief through technologies even more bizarre than spiritualist websites and Internet cemeteries. In 2001, the New York Times reported that a grief-stricken mother and father planned to clone their dead 10-month-old boy with the help of a “science-loving, alien-fixated sect called the Raelians,” who describe themselves online as “the world’s largest atheist, non-profit UFO-related organization.”

And in 2002, the Washington Post described the project of a Chicago company named LifeGem, which has undertaken to transform “the ashes of your loved one” into “a synthetic diamond.” In this company’s view, diamonds -- not tears -- are a mourner’s best friend.

Yet despite widespread confusion about how (or even whether) to mourn, or perhaps because of this confusion, the grief memoir has become an extraordinarily popular genre. After all, as feeling beings we need to grieve, just as we need to love. Didion’s book is thus only the latest in a set of works that could easily be selections in a Bereavement Book Club. Lewis’ famous memoir, the basis for the 1993 movie “Shadowlands,” was preceded in 1949 by John Gunther’s widely read “Death Be Not Proud,” which vividly recounted the story of his 17-year-old son’s death from a brain tumor. And a decade after “A Grief Observed” appeared, Americans were riveted by Lynn Caine’s autobiographical bestseller, “Widow.”

These are just a few of numerous prose works. But my hypothetical Bereavement Book Club also could include a library of widely read and often taught volumes in verse, for example Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish” (1961), lamenting the death of his mother; Tess Gallagher’s “Moon Crossing Bridge” (1992), mourning the loss of her husband, Raymond Carver; and Ted Hughes’ top of the charts “Birthday Letters” (1998), about his grief over losing his first wife, Sylvia Plath.

And just as dramatic would be the works on another shelf in the Bereavement Book Club’s library: narratives by writers who produced records of their own dying -- in effect, self-grief memoirs. A notable recent example of such a work is Marjorie Williams’ “The Woman at the Washington Zoo,” featuring an accomplished reporter’s meditations on her own impending death, but equally compelling precursor volumes include “Intoxicated by My Illness,” the critic Anatole Broyard’s 1991 diary of his losing struggle with prostate canc

er, and “This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death” (1996), a chronicle of terminal AIDS that the novelist Harold Brodkey produced as his life came to an end.

Although some may believe the details of pain that such books disclose ought to stay private, most of the selections offered by my Bereavement Book Club find receptive, even passionate audiences. Why are so many readers engrossed in books that feature such apparently uncongenial subject matter? As Gorer suggested 50 years ago, what sex was to the prudish Victorians, death has become to us squeamish moderns.

Yet just as the great novelists and poets of the 20th century refused to repress the realities of the erotic, so contemporary writers insist on testifying to the truths of loss. Especially in a society in which death often seems so unspeakable that grief is deemed equally unspeakable or at least embarrassing, the sometimes painful candor of the Bereavement Book Club teaches us much that we need to know about dying while giving us permission to mourn. And after all, to be mortal is by definition to have to learn to mourn.