As Long as you Need: Permission to Grieve (Part 2)
Book Review (J.S. Park)
Review Part 2
See part 1 of this review for an orientation to the book as a whole. Today I carry on with the second half of things.
Losing Body
5: Loss of Autonomy
We tend to think of autonomy as simple: my right and ability to chose. This chapter came with some heightened baggage for me, as I read it right around the time I signed legal papers enabling me to make end of life decisions for my (still healthy and sound) mother, if and when a time comes when she is not able to make those decisions for herself.
Our autonomy never exists in an isolated vacuum, but is formed by a complexity of values, voices, histories, preferences, and community. (p.103)
This chapter is weaved through with Mayzie's story, and it's (like them all, really) gut-wrenching. But through it all, you get the idea: we don't all get the same choices, sometimes we don't get any real choices at all. Sometimes we need just the little bit of autonomy to make the smallest of choices.
I sometimes think this book is cataloguing griefs, different kinds. There's a whole bunch in here: anticipatory grief, grief at loss of function, grief at loss of value. The last one stings, doesn't it? They all do. But the idea that your worth is bound up in what you contribute, and when you stop contributing, you stop being valued. And when you get too much of a burden, then even the ones who love you the most might walk away.
6: Loss of Humanity
None of my trauma, really, made me tough. Only tired. Here, I forgo forced resilience. My respite is this: Our collective grief gathers a grace-filled village. Resilience for me is not foremost a toughening. It is refuge. Here, pain is our shared language. I receive your injured hand in mine. And we understand that this wound is something we never should have endured. Our strength is not in endurance. Our strength is in the speaking and hearing of what we have endured. Our strength is in the ongoing dismantling of what harms us. Here, my rage is not turned away. Here, resilience is to rest from this brutality, and to resist when I would be defaced. We are joining in an ancient lament. And I believe, must believe, that God laments here, too, a refuge for our rest and rage, our cover in a fire we did not want but do not have to resist alone. (p.137)
This is a chapter about, hmm, about systemic racism. About the history of bigotry. About how subjugating powers rob subjugated people of their right, and often ability, to grieve. How we code grief based on racist tropes. About how we un-see people and un-make them. Force them to be resilient, tell stories of 'determination'. About collective grief and intergenerational trauma. About sympathetic rage and what it is to be human when humans deny humanity.
Losing Heart
7: Loss of Connection
Loneliness is an agonizing hunger. A gnawing emptiness. It is particular, raw, churning. It’s more than a single loss, but an ongoing death. A perpetual deprivation. The grief here is both quicksand and fog: If you are lonely, you grieve being unseen, but also grieve that you see no one. If what gives us meaning and memory is moving with community in all our highs and lows, then without this, our achievements seem hollow and our setbacks unbearable. If no one sees, no one hears, no one cares, what does living mean? (pp. 153-154).
You know what I most appreciate about this chapter? The simple fact that Park doesn't blame lonely people for being lonely. That saying to lonely people, "hey, go find some friends" is about as helpful as "have you tried not being poor" and "be warm and well fed".
He talks about relational loneliness and objective loneliness. Relational loneliness is to be unseen by those closest to you. To be surrounded by people and yet erased. To be drowned out by the voices of your family, who render you an object to be spoken for.
Park talks too about relationships lost, communities broken.
You grieve their presence. You grieve their absence. You grieve the ghosts of the people you thought you knew, who never knew you, but only the nodding version of you that appeared to get along to belong. (pp. 158-159).
You had people, but they left or you had to leave because they'd already left you.
And then there is objective loneliness: "people pulled away by a situation outside of their control". When life, and circumstances, and disease, take us away. And when "a patient's condition becomes "too much", [and] their people often abandon them."
In all this, Park finds this grace: it's okay to make some small connections, even if for a little while. We don't have to give our all and invest our all, but to make a human connection with the lonely, with anyone, is always worth it. And no one, in the end, should die alone.
8: Loss of Loved Ones
It's ironic, and almost certainly intentional, that a book about grief ends with the grief of losing loved ones. You might have picked this book up thinking it was about that all along, that grief is just about people dying. No, grief comes in countless varieties.
I used to think that grief was about acceptance. But—to accept the loss of the one you love is too much like approving death. A betrayal of their life. (p. 177).
Death isn't something we should accept. It's something we should rage against. And that means it's okay, to react however. To kick and scream and beat the ground. And the goal of grief isn't to "let go" and "move on".
Grief is not acceptance of death. Grief is a defiance of death. What I mean is, grieving is not burying someone to keep them behind you. That’s suppression. That’s forgetting. Grieving is bringing them forward instead, the dead defiantly brought back to life. (p. 182).
Carrying them with you, not moving on without them. Grieve however you like, and you don't need to stop anytime soon.
Final thoughts from me...
I did a lot of quoting above. I wanted to give more a sense of Park's writing, and thoughts, more than a bunch more summary statements from me. But you also read this stack because you want to hear from me (presumably?). What did I come away from this book with?
Towards the end of last year I remember reading something saying that you never really stop grieving. The pain fades but never disappears.
That, and some wise advice from an acquaintance, who gave me permission to just feel whatever I felt, and accept emotions as simple "emotional facts" not needing to be justified and defended.
And so I've come to a place which I think is consonant with some of what Park says. The way I put it, is that grief is the shape of love when what we love is gone. Coming to terms with grief is not a letting go of love, it’s learning to carry love’s scars.