Below are two excerpts from The Next Day, which is about grieving over a lost vocation. The Next Day is currently available for free on my online shop. And, remember, as a paid subscriber you can order a free copy of any other e-book as well. Just reply to this email and tell me which one you want.
Grief isn’t about resolution
On the 3rd of June 2019, just 11 days after Mum’s funeral, I wrote this one line in my journal:
“Grief is about learning to live without resolution.”
People seem to think that grief is all about closure (a vile word in this context, and impossible to say without a soupy reality TV accent). But grief isn’t about closure because closure is not possible. Life doesn’t work like that. People don’t work like that.
People are messy, complex, inconsistent. It’s what makes us so full of potential and danger all at the same time. That’s why there are gangsters who love their mums, and life-saving surgeons who beat their wives. In his novel Hogfather, Terry Pratchett has his character Death, a cowled horse-riding scythe-carrying skeleton (who loves kittens), ruminate on humans and describe them as the falling angel meeting the rising ape. In his Essay on Man, Alexander Pope describes humans as “darkly wise, rudely great”.
We are social: all of us falling-apes—rising-angels mix constantly with other brute-divines and madness ensues, be that delightful or horrifying. After a lifetime of driving each other mad (with lust, frustration, adoration, or need?) we are then, when one of us dies, supposed to tie this all neatly off while processing some of the most challenging emotions we will ever feel while grieving. To resolve the madness. To have closure.
In a similar vein, we are supposed to brush off the termination of a job that gave us income, identity, perhaps status, perhaps the social connection of a good team of colleagues, hopefully satisfaction and an outlet for our talents and ambitions. Even if we have mixed feelings about our work, it is still a thing into which we pour time, energy, focus, goodwill, and emotion. Work is one of the things that defines our place in this world, for better or for worse, and we are supposed to just get over it when we are displaced from it?
Nuh.
This is crazy thinking. Why do we demand this of ourselves? By doing so we are demanding something unrealistic and tainting what should be a special time.
Grief is special. It’s not comfortable but it can be enriching.
I approve of it.
Even at its mankiest grief has a clear reason for happening: grief is the process by which we adjust to the reality that that person or thing just isn’t here with us anymore and won’t be ever again. That’s a stark reality. For some people it’s traumatic to come to terms with, for others it can border on relief. But whether you loved or hated the person or job you are grieving (and, yes, you can hate and grieve at the same time) the adjustment you have to make to the absence in your life is huge. Grief allows us to do that.
So, grief isn’t about resolution. It’s actually about accepting what you can’t resolve. It’s about adjusting to living with an absence.
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