It is Never Too Late to Soften Grief

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By Kaethe Weingarten, PhD

This month marks the 45th anniversary of my mother’s death and, finally, it feels different.  I am carrying a piece of what pained me more lightly, which is making this time of year easier than usual. 

In the last year and a half, an estimated 600,000 people in the United States have died from COVID-19.  Some estimates are higher and if you count deaths that are related to the “fallout” from COVID-19 – drug overdoses, delayed medical care, unavailable medical care – the number is undoubtedly higher still.  For every person who dies, researchers estimate nine close family members are affected.  That means there are likely six million newly bereaved individuals, many of them children, who have lost a parent or grandparent.¹ The researchers point out that while considerable attention has been paid to the long-term health and mental health impacts of those who survive COVID-19, less attention is being paid to the health and mental health consequences of those who are bereaved.  The risk of negative impacts increases with unexpected death and deaths from COVID are in that category; they are often sudden deaths.²

In my seventies now, I have experienced the death of many people I have loved.  Grief for me is a profoundly sensory experience.  When I mourn, sounds, smells, my vision…all are heightened.  It is as if I am missing a protective layer of skin.  Over time, grief changes as we do.  Yet there may be a theme or a question or a regret that threads itself continuously over time.  My mother died when my first child was just six weeks old.  For me, that thread has always been my sadness that she never knew my children and that they would never know her.  I did my best to convey my memories of her to my children, but of course it was not the same as having her physically present in their lives.

My thread is like the thread of lots of people.  Many of my friends are grandparents and conversation often turns to the topic of remembrance, legacy, and loss. The other day, a friend was talking about her sadness that her husband who had died two years previously would never know his grandchildren. We paused together and acknowledged her pain.  That evening, in an uncanny coincidence, I received a text from another friend letting me know that her granddaughter had graduated from high school and that as part of the celebration, the young woman’s mother had given her a necklace from her grandmother that she had been saving for her. The two conversations seemed connected to me. It underscored that there are ways the living can weave the people we have known into the lives of the people we do know who have never known the ones who have died.

That is why this month feels so different to me from years past.  Last year, on the anniversary of my mother’s death, my daughter and her two children, ages five and nine, were with me.  They invited me to a tea party and surprised me with a set of questions.  The questions were in three categories: things we know about our great grandmother, things we think we know about our great grandmother, and things we want to know about our great grandmother.  We spent an hour or so talking about my answers to those questions.  I would never have guessed that our conversation would release me from a nagging heaviness attached to my grief but it did.  I had so wanted my mother to be a presence in my children and grandchildren’s lives and in one hour, through a structured conversation, I gained the reassurance that my mother’s essence would be carried forward.

The lesson I take from this is that there are ways symbolically to address the pain at the heart of grief.  My grandchildren will never know my mother but now they know something of her.  This comforts me.  Had my thread, had what haunted me, been something different, a different experience would have consoled me.  But my point is that it is never too late to soften grief.  Most experts give the advice that one must let the loved one “go,” that the necessary path through grief always entails letting go.  My experience complicates that advice.  For me there has been an intermingling of letting go and finding symbolic ways of holding on, remembering, sharing, passing on, and more.  Grief has shape shifted and I and others have played a role in the deliberate shaping of what felt better.

For decades I have collected poetry that relates to grief.  None speaks exactly to my feelings but all resonate.  This poem was written by the American poet Wendell Berry when he was nearing 60, younger than I.  He has gained a wisdom about each day that I aspire too as well.  I share it as a wish for each of you who reads this:

No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over the grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.

~ Wendell Berry ~

(The Sabbath Poems, 1993, I)
   

Learn more about Witness to Witness, Dr. Weingarten’s program at MCN, and access numerous resources: https://www.migrantclinician.org/witness-to-witness [2]. You can sign up for Dr. Weingarten’s Witness to Witness updates on that page as well. 

¹Verdery, A. M., Smith-Greenaway, E., Margolis, R., & Daw, J. (2020). Tracking the reach of COVID-19 kin loss with a bereavement multiplier applied to the United States. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 117(30), 17695–17701

²Eisma, M. C., Tamminga, A., Smid, G. E., & Boelen, P. A. (2021). Acute grief after deaths due to COVID-19, natural causes and unnatural causes: An empirical comparison. Journal of affective disorders, 278, 54–56. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2020.09.049 [3]

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