Grief, I have discovered, is not something that I can separate from myself and set in a box and put on a shelf somewhere. I know that boxes are great cliched metaphors we like to use when we think about emotions we’d like to control. But grief is as much in me as it is something that has happened to me. The problem with grief, for me, at least, is that it is more like a thread that runs through the contours of my life than it is a category I can refuse.
This means that my comments last time about the rambling of grief will need more commentary. The world we inhabit is a world of commerce and schedules. So often we ourselves don’t fit our schedules, but we run to fulfill them anyway. We deal with those who grieve lost loved ones the way we deal with other problems. We talk to them, we care, and we do things for them. We try to tell people that they will be alright. This is all well-intended, except that we use clichés.
Time will heal your wounds, we say. At least you have your wonderful memories of your son, I have heard. At least he is in a better place, people say. Again, these are clichés. They are simple, they give us a bow or a box to put ourselves in, and they seem to be at least a little bit true.
If grief, however, is more like a thread that runs through our lives with us, then it is not to be contained in neat little sayings. It rambles. Cliches are neat, nip, tucked, and ordered. Grief rambles and runs on because it has to, because it doesn’t know the cliches, and we need to keep going through it until we find our lives in a place where the rambling has exposed to us all of the pain it will.
I say all of this because sometimes grief doesn’t even seem like a process. It just continues. And now we approach the holidays again, and it would seem nice to have a box to put the grief in until after the new year begins. But that doesn’t happen. With the holidays, that thread still runs through all of the planning and the festivities. Those of us who grieve must face the holidays with our grief.
For me, the holidays are to be endured. I like getting the rest. But I also have grieving friends who do not observe the holidays. For them, Thanksgiving is “just going to be another day. We aren’t going to do anything about it,” they say.
Other grieving friends are not helped by their family, so they will not be spending time with them–and they feel a certain cover for this with the current pandemic conditions. They can simply stay at home and observe the usual social distancing.
These are reasonable reactions and expectations. One little thing I did this season to help me get through was to read up on the origins of Thanksgiving. I learned that what we do and observe today has only them most tenuous connections to the original band of settlers who stepped out at Plymouth Rock. The holiday did not even exist until President Lincoln instituted it in 1863 as one way to try to bring the Union back together. And there actually was not a dinner to which the local Native American tribe was invited. In fact, that tribe, the Wampanoags , had almost been wiped out by disease infected blankets from other English settlers. The Mayflower folk actually knew this and were headed toward what they thought would be vacant land. And when the remnants of the Wampanoags showed up to the Pilgrim’s feast, it was to remind them that the tribe was still there.
Detent, at best. As with so many other of our observances, I want to say that we are engaged in a national myth. Later on, when we are done with our over-eating, we might think about what is behind this myth.
Thanksgiving, okay. It’s always good to be thankful. As Trevor Noah said recently, why not just do your Thanksgiving in July? That way it won’t be overshadowed by Christmas.
I hope that your holiday season is one of comfort and rest. May the threads of your grief and the threads that sustain you be yours in equal measure.