The Way We Grieve Now

I will not refrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul. Job 7:11

“A sudden blow: the great wings beating still” — the riveting first line of Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” initiates a classic story of divine rape, and yet it might well be the opening of almost any contemporary grief memoir. “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant,” notes Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking. “Those were the first words I wrote after it happened.” It. The sudden blow: the heart attack that felled her husband, the trauma that she would report both enduring and denying for months. Grief that seems to come out of nowhere — in myths, as an intervention of a god (as in “Leda”) or of Satan (as in the Book of Job) — shatters ordinary thinking, and at least temporarily destroys all confidence in the safety of daily existence.

Sometimes dramatically, sometimes almost casually, most of the memoirists I examine here testify to the shock and suddenness of loss. Bereavement counselors distinguish between “anticipated” and “unanticipated” grief, but as these writers show, even “anticipated” grief is unbelievable “in the instant.”

Meghan O’Rourke’s The Long Goodbye, for example, records the extended history of her mother’s struggle with metastatic colorectal cancer, but she notes that “Even when a death is foreseen … it still feels sudden — an instant that could have gone differently.” Joyce Carol Oates recounts the story of her husband’s hospitalization with fatal pneumonia, but A Widow’s Story opens with her discovery of a frightening message on the windshield of the car she has “haphazardly parked” just outside the medical center. Anne Roiphe, in Epilogue, describes a door that she has left unlocked as “a protest against the loss of something far more necessary than a key: my husband.” Elizabeth Alexander admits that the “story seems to begin with catastrophe,” and Joseph Luzzi even quotes Dante’s dramatic announcement: “In the middle of our life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood.”

In the aftermath of shock, the plots of grief memoirs explore the power with which the “great wings” of death have distorted what might otherwise have been quotidian narratives in which death is not an untimely catastrophe but a distant, appropriate end. Most people, after all, don’t produce book-length histories of grandma’s demise in a nursing home or grandpa’s end in the ICU, although many do write shorter works about such events. But the grief memoir as we have come to know it is almost always a narrative of crisis, its barely explicable causes, and its harrowing consequences.

Eliciting applause from some critics and disgust from others, such memoirs have proliferated in the past half-century, so much so that it would probably be easy to form a Bereavement Book Club.

Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking became not only a best seller but, rather weirdly, a hit Broadway show. Bereavement books by Oates, Francisco Goldman (the novel Say Her Name) and O’Rourke received mostly great reviews, while both Sonali Deraniyagala’s Wave and Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk won important prizes.

At the same time, though, the public display of sorrow at the heart of the genre was repellent to some. “O, St. Joan of Didion, stop ye whining and complaining. … Want to mourn? Have the dignity of doing it in private. Enough!” declared a letter writer in The New York Times Book Review. The “great pitfall of the grief memoir,” observed a scathing reviewer in The Guardian, is its use of “the dead as ‘writing meat.’ … No sooner have the cadavers cooled … than the grief memoirist begins consuming the identity they once enclosed.”

Disclosure: I have not only written a grief memoir myself but also have produced several elegiac volumes of verse, an anthology of elegies, and an extended study of grief in which I sought to theorize my own experience and contextualize it within the history of modern mourning.

Wrongful Death (1995) recorded the particulars of the unexpected death of my husband, Elliot Gilbert, in 1991, from what was evidently a “surgical accident” and functioned also as a sort of J’accuse about medical negligence. Like most of the memoirs I discuss here, the story began with crisis and lurched from discovery to discovery as my children and I sought to come to terms with our loss. And in Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve (2006), I analyzed my response in the larger setting of cultural ambivalence toward death, grief, and mourning, while also studying the decline of the traditional pastoral elegy and the rise of what Jahan Ramazani and others have called the “anti-elegy” — that is, the nonconsolatory elegy.

But now I realize that although I examined the testimonial writings of mourners such as C.S. Lewis, Primo Levi, and Paul Monette, I never explored the grief memoir as a distinctive genre, perhaps because I was so entangled in my own narrative that I couldn’t, then, distance myself enough to explore its dynamics. That it is a distinctive genre, however, seems incontrovertible.

How and why has it become so popular among writers and so compelling — and controversial — to readers?

“The word death is not pronounced in New York, in Paris, in London, because it burns the lips,” declared Octavio Paz in 1961 in The Labyrinth of Solitude, and indeed, when he made that claim it would have been relatively easy to support. In the same decade, the British sociologist Geoffrey Gorer ruefully commented in Death, Grief and Mourning in Contemporary Britain 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.” C.S. Lewis agreed, confessing in his classic A Grief Observed: “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.”

But maybe precisely because of widespread cultural confusion about how and where to mourn in an increasingly secular society, the mid-20th century — whose customs troubled Paz, Gorer, and Lewis — was the era in which the grief memoir as we know it was born. The genre itself may have been a gesture of rebellion consciously or unconsciously intended to shatter the silence imposed in circles where the “word death … burns the lips.”

As observers from the historian Philippe Ariès to contemporary thanatologists have noted, the bereaved must cope with the privatization of grief because, increasingly, unchurched survivors have few public modes of mourning. Thus the unspeakable word “death” has been increasingly replaced by euphemistic phrases like “passed away” and “passed.” They imply not a celestial departure, as such phrases might have suggested in the 19th century, but an indeterminate leave-taking: “Passed out”? “Passed by”? Passed along”? “Passed” by failing, or by, as physicians sometimes put it, “not doing well”?

In our era of fitness obsession, diet debate, and death denial, death has come “perilously close to being declared a personal guilt,” or so argues the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, drawing on the comment of a precursor sociologist, Robert Fulton, who noted in 1965 that “Death is coming to be seen as the consequence of personal neglect or untoward accident.”

To be sure, Lewis’s A Grief Observed (1961), one of the best-known early grief memoirs, has often been read as a traditional spiritual autobiography by a renowned Christian writer, while John Gunther’s Death Be Not Proud (1949), an earlier best seller in this mode, is hagiographic in its portrayal of the “unflinching fortitude” with which the teenage Johnny Gunther confronts his death from a brain tumor. But even while Gunther reports that his son had become fascinated by the Book of Job, which the boy hoped would teach him “patience,” Johnny’s mother observes that the law of nature, “still mutating, destroyed him. God himself no less than us, is part of that law.”

As for the famously devout Lewis, he confessed at one point that he couldn’t imagine an afterlife for Joy Davidman, the wife he was so passionately mourning. “Can I honestly say that I believe she now is anything?” he wondered, noting that the “vast majority of the people I meet, say, at work, would certainly think she is not.” Though he was embarrassed by what he considered his “morbid jottings,” Lewis finally sent them (under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk) to Faber and Faber, where — before his true identity was revealed — the equally devout T.S. Eliot found them “distasteful” and reported that “no one seemed sure that N.W. Clerk, whoever he was, should be allowed to burden the world with unhappiness.”

It is against this pervasive muffling of mortality that so many contemporary grief memoirists testify to trauma and loss. As Gorer implied in the mid-1960s, what sex was to the prudish Victorians, death has become to some squeamish contemporaries and to the artists who react against such aversion. Is death “the new sex”? a radio interviewer once asked me. Certainly, just as the pioneering modernists refused to repress the erotic, the grief memoirists, along with anti-elegiac poets, have for the past several decades insisted on recording the realities of dying and bereavement. And just as some of the first readers of, say, Joyce, Lawrence, and Miller were shocked by sexual frankness, so some readers of grief memoirs are disturbed by the painful candor with which these works confront not only the materiality of death and dying but also the minutiae of mourning.

For if death is indeed the new sex, it is scandalous — as sex once was — because, like sex, it reminds us of our intransigent physicality, and unlike sex, it is no fun. Even so, death is a major issue in an aging, medicalized society, and despite a few censorious reviewers, countless readers are riveted by the subject.

In the last third of the 20th century, as grief memoirs began to become more popular, Elisabeth Kübler Ross’s On Death and Dying became a best seller, its sales figures not quite matching those of The Joy of Sex but nonetheless impressive. Recently, The New York Times introduced a column called “The End,” and now worldly baby boomers study Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal the way pious 17th-century Christians confronting finality brooded on Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Dying.

“Love’s mysteries in souls do grow,” declared John Donne, “but yet the body is his book.” For most contemporary memoirists, however, the body is the only book. Not one of the writers I consider here has serious recourse to the notion of divine consolation. “What does it mean to grieve in the absence of religious culture?” Elizabeth Alexander wonders, and though she muses on Jewish ancestors, African-American spirituals, and the rituals of her husband’s Eritrean background, she finds no consolation.

As for the sudden blows with which I began, they are rarely, if ever, mythologized as transcendent interventions. If there is a god involved, he/it is identical with the fabric of the natural world that Spinoza, initiating the reign of the secular, considered the only deity there is. As such, he/it is as inexplicably whimsical as the Yahweh who torments Job or the “Crass Casualty” that hovers over Thomas Hardy’s heaths.

So the grief memoir is an attempt, through obsessive re-examinations of a death and its consequences, to explain the inexplicable in a context that is determinedly and even deterministically secular. But secular though it commonly is, this genre took its shape from the spiritual autobiography, with A Grief Observed functioning as a kind of mediating text. For just as the spiritual autobiography, from Augustine’s Confessions and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress to Cardinal Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua, moves from oblivion or downright sinfulness to an epiphanic moment of conversion and then on to an exploration of religious grace, so the secular grief memoir moves from the innocence of the quotidian to the traumatic crisis of loss and then on to an examination of the often excruciating dynamics — even the madness — of the mourning process, through which the bereaved narrator comes to accept the profane reality of death rather than the sacred promise of redemption.

There is often an undercurrent of yearning in all these contemporary works, as if through the necromancy of narrative the writer might somehow reverse or revise the plot and even, in a mysterious way, resurrect the dead. "[I] felt that if I told the story of [my mother’s] death, I could understand it better, make sense of it — perhaps even change it,” [italic added] confides O’Rourke.

At a certain point in Wrongful Death, I seem to have been under the impression that my transcription of the story of my husband’s death was somehow keeping him alive. “A few days ago,” I confessed, “I said the strangest thing. ‘I have to finish the book before Elliot dies.’ "

In a more specific example of what she, too, calls “magical thinking,” Oates describes receiving a phone call telling her that her husband’s condition was “critical.” This, she notes, was “the very summons I’d been dreading [although] I’d wished to think … that if I dreaded the call … surely then the call could not come.”

Elaborating on the hypothetical “if,” Elizabeth Alexander muses that if she had known that the night before her husband’s death was his last, “we could have stayed up all night together, entwined, [and] … I could have braved the countdown with him,” as if he were “a man waiting for his execution.” Yet even as she acknowledges his death, she insists that “I can wait forever for him to come back. I leave the light on in the living room, the light that faces the street. If I am patient he will come back.”

Didion is, of course, the most notable practitioner of necromantic narrative — or perhaps, to put it differently, of the fantastic hypothetical — as the title of her book indicates. Meditating on the autopsy she had authorized, she remembers bizarrely wishing that the procedure would prove that “he was dead all along,” because “If I did not believe he was dead all along I would have thought I should have been able to save him.” In fact, if, through the autopsy, “they” had discovered “what had gone wrong … they might still be able to fix it.”

In this same vein, she worries that donating organs or even giving away shoes would pose problems for the dead man “if he was to return.” Even when, several months after her husband’s death, she arranges a memorial service for him, she finds the ceremony disappointing because “it still didn’t bring him back.” Perhaps most horrifyingly of all, Didion confesses her fear, after the funeral, that “I had allowed other people to think he was dead. I had allowed him to be buried alive.”

The mad notion that the dead are indeed alive in their deaths is in fact a common one, though few grief memoirists discuss this Gothic anxiety as candidly as Didion does. I can remember confiding that when the California rains came in the winter of my husband’s death, I worried about him “being out in the rain by himself, with only a few shiny wooden boards between him and a ton of wet dirt.” Similarly, in Losing Malcolm, a memoir of her infant son’s death, the writer Carol Henderson quotes another bereaved young mother who fears that her dead baby “was going to get wet out there, buried in the ground. I … wanted to go out and put a tarpaulin and a baby blanket on her grave.”

Though such thoughts can be traced back to the fantasies of living burial that inspired some Victorian undertakers to install bells in coffins in case a supposed corpse should wake to find that she had been wrongly interred, they were formulated as late as 1912 by Thomas Hardy, who lamented in “Rain on a Grave” that clouds “spout” on her who always “shivered with pain” at “arrows of rain.” But these imaginings persist in our own scientific era.

The madness that shadows some of these narratives is balanced by, even grounded in, the sanity of memory. Magical thinking gives way to Proust’s magic lantern. Can we (at least mentally) resurrect the dead, even re-member them, by remembering them? Many of these authors write as if that is their secret belief. Oates, for instance, examines her late husband’s life in detail, even struggling to explore what she calls his “otherness” by analyzing a draft of an unfinished novel, “Black Mass,” that he had begun in his youth.

O’Rourke tells the story of her mother’s life, her parents’ meeting, and her own childhood as if by constructing a tale of origins she could rewrite its ending. Alexander and Goldman devote the largest part of their books to detailed reminiscences of the partners they have lost. Alexander describes the paintings produced by her husband, Ficre Ghebreyesus, and puts one on the cover of her book. Goldman produces a biography of his young wife, Aura Estrada, who died in a surfing accident after only a few years of marriage. He studies her writings the way Oates looks at her husband’s manuscript, relates the history of her family, and reproduces a photograph of her when she was 5.

Didion doesn’t include such documents in her book, but its back cover offers a moving 1976 photograph of the author, her youthful husband, and Quintana, their then-11-year-old adopted daughter, who was to die, at age 39, within two years of her father’s death. In the photo, Didion leans on the railing of the family’s deck in Malibu, gazing at the others, who appear to be together on a different part of the structure, separated from her by a railing that presages the separation she will also lament in Blue Nights, about her daughter’s death.

Oates, too, presents a photograph as a sort of epilogue: She and her husband are appropriately posed — a mature, contented couple — as guests “at a garden wedding.” And in Wrongful Death, I included a set of photographs of my husband at various stages of his life as, in effect, supplemental memories.

All these testimonials — photographs, writings, histories of childhood, tales of origin — constitute crucial evidence for the memoirist, proof (to both writer and reader) that yes, this person who is so irretrievably gone did once in fact exist and move meaningfully through the world.

Of course, despite the various narrative imperatives that so many grief memoirs share, there are differences among them that are shaped by the nature of the bereavement being examined. What the literary critic Jeffrey Berman has called the “spousal loss memoir” is a subgenre that can be traced beyond A Grief Observed to such classic poems as “Exequy,” by the 17th-century bishop Henry King for his wife; Milton’s “Methought I saw my late espousèd saint”; and Hardy’s Poems 1912, mourning his first wife, Emma.

Some biographers, Berman observes, have disputed the story that Lewis first submitted his book under the pseudonym “N.W. Clerk.” They argue that he used the pen name “Dimidius,” for “halved” or “divided in two.” Indeed, almost every author who mourns a spouse has testified to an almost physical sense of diminishment, of having been cleft in two. Confessing, “I am not sure that I exist,” Oates confides that “I feel as if I’m missing something visible — an arm, a leg.” Didion summarizes the problem succinctly: “Marriage is memory, marriage is time.” In fact, she explains, marriage “is not only time: it is also, paradoxically, the denial of time” because for “forty years I saw myself through John’s eyes [and] did not age.”

Those who grieve for a life partner experience not only the loss of a beloved other with whom they have shared what has often been a long, quotidian existence, but also a loss of the self who was mirrored in and affirmed by that other. Even such writers as Luzzi and Goldman, who tell tales of early grief — the death of Goldman’s young wife in that surfing accident is paralleled by the death of Luzzi’s young wife in a car crash — are as devastated as the survivors of long marriages. Goldman tells of maintaining a shrine to Aura in his Brooklyn apartment, while Luzzi, in his book In a Dark Wood, describes regressing — bringing the infant daughter who survived the catastrophe to his family home and sleeping for several years in his childhood bed while his mother cared for the baby.

Some of these memoirs deal with other kinds of bereavement, notably parental loss and the loss of children. O’Rourke’s The Long Goodbye focuses on her own life with her mother as well as her mother’s death. Macdonald’s fierce H Is for Hawk takes off from the sudden death of her father. Didion’s Blue Nights and, in part, The Year of Magical Thinking address the illness and death of her daughter, Quintana. And Deraniyagala’s powerful Wave bitterly mourns the sudden loss of her entire family.

About the death of a parent, O’Rourke is eloquent: “When we talk about love, we go back to the start, … [but a] mother is beyond any notion of a beginning.” The death of a parent, in other words, is the loss of origin, of history, even — as O’Rourke implies — of the unknowable past that has made us who we are. And about the death of a child, Didion quotes Euripides: “What greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead,” adding her own comment: “When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.” For if to lose parents is to lose the past, to lose children is to lose the future.

But what if the story is from the start one of multiple losses or unspeakable pain?

I have saved for last two memoirs that are outliers on the spectrum of contemporary grief writing: Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk and Deraniyagala’s Wave. The first of these tells the riveting tale of a young woman falconer who, after her father’s sudden death, develops an impassioned (yes!) relationship with a goshawk, on whom she bestows the curiously homely name Mabel, “from amabilis, meaning loveable, or dear.” The second recounts and confronts the loss suffered by a young economist whose entire family (two little boys, husband, father, mother) is swept away in the tsunami of 2004 while they’re on a beach holiday in Sri Lanka.

Both works represent grief as madness, but in notably different ways. Macdonald describes and even dramatizes a grief that has become, in her own word, “feral,” like the hawk she gradually tames. Deraniyagala, though she, too, confesses to rage and madness, explores the agony, even the abjection, generated by an experience that she has appropriately defined, in interviews, as in the realm of the biblical or mythical.

Like most of the other memoirists I’ve discussed, Macdonald reports a sudden crisis of loss: a phone call from her mother informing her that her much-loved father, a newspaper photographer, has died of a heart attack. At first her focus is on what it means to be “bereft.” But soon her grief morphs into a “madness [that was] quiet, and very, very dangerous,” and, strangely, she purchases Mabel, the goshawk whom she undertakes to train. The very act of “taming” the wild creature, however, intensifies the wildness of the writer’s bereavement. “I was turning into a hawk,” she confesses, noting that the “change came about through my grief … my not being myself. … I had put myself in the hawk’s wild mind to tame her, and … my humanity was burning away.”

Now the reader understands the ambiguity of the book’s title: “H is for hawk” means, also, the “H” of “Helen” is “for hawk.” For though Macdonald intermittently follows the usual pattern of the grief memoir, offering some poignant memories of her father, she frequently swerves from the past to meditate on her obsession with falconry, devoting considerable attention to the Arthurian novelist T.E. White’s adventures raising a goshawk. Nonetheless, the heart of the work is her own metamorphosis into a half-savage creature animated by a grief-fueled murderous intensity.

If Macdonald’s displacement of mourning into predation is in some ways astounding, Deraniyagala’s fate is in itself far more shocking, for when her book begins she has been almost immediately engulfed by the tsunami that drowns the rest of her family. Initially the situation had appeared trivial: “The ocean looked a little closer to our hotel than usual. That was all.”

Those are the cool opening sentences of her beautifully written memoir, but within a few pages she herself will be “spinning” in a murky nowhere. “What is this knocked-down world?” she reports wondering as she surveyed the wasteland created by the flood. “The end of time?” But even at that point, she intuited the outline of the story in which she was immersed. “I don’t want it to be tomorrow,” she remembers thinking. “I was terrified that tomorrow the truth would start.” The truth was that for a long time, the bodies of her children, husband, and parents were not found. The truth was that “tomorrow” brought her a biblical desolation unimaginable to most of us. If there is something of Job in every mourner, begging the power in the whirlwind to explain inexplicable calamity, Deraniyagala virtually re-enacts Job’s suffering.

How can her husband, parents, children — especially her children — have disappeared so rapidly in the swirling waters? Inevitably the writer tries to unravel the mystery. “It was not like I tried to cling to my children as they were torn from my arms, it was not like they were yanked from me, not like I saw them dead. They simply vanished from my life forever.”

The consequence of this enigma? A willed, though temporary, amnesia. “In order to survive this bizarre and brutal truth, do I have to make murky the life I had with them?” Indeed, Deraniyagala is drowned in murk for at least the first part of her book, remembering what was surely neither mere sorrow nor ordinary grief but utter horror. Staying in Colombo with relatives, she gobbles Ambien, she drinks, obsesses, sleeps, denies, raves, and is cared for by comforters who hardly know what to say or do. Then, as she slowly recovers, she is drowned in a new flood — of guilt and shame.

Almost all grief memoirists record such feelings. Anxious self-reproach is part of the very construction of the bereavement narrative. Why didn’t I take him/her to a different doctor/hospital/city? Why didn’t we turn down a different street? Why did we go to that beach resort, on that day? The very possibility of a different plot exacerbates the survivor’s guilt that almost every mourner feels, and then guilt evolves into shame, even sometimes self-loathing. In Robert Browning’s poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” the wandering knight gazes at a “stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare” in a sparse field and thinks, “He must be wicked to deserve such pain.” This is the conclusion to which Deraniyagala comes, as she broods on the magnitude of her losses:

I recoil at my desolation. How I have fallen. When I had them, they were my pride, and now that I’ve lost them, I am full of shame. I was doomed all along, I am marked. There must be something very wrong about me. … Why else have I become this shocking story, this wild statistical outlier? I speculated that I must have been a mass murderer in a previous life and was paying for that now. And even as I have discounted such possibilities over time, shame remains huge in me.

After such bereavement, what consolation? Most of these memoirists would agree that grief abates but never disappears. The vanished one remains beloved, a cherished though absent presence, and the memory of that beloved is sometimes painful, sometimes comforting. Of course, as some memoirs of spousal loss reveal, widows and widowers often seek and occasionally find new partners. Luzzi’s, Goldman’s, and especially Roiphe’s books are occasionally comic in their accounts of bad dates set up through newspaper “personals” and match.com. Roiphe, in fact, devotes much of her narrative to this particular “epilogue” to widowhood, while Luzzi’s story concludes with a new marriage and the words incipit vita nova (here begins the new life). Even Oates, who had remarried by the time her memoir appeared, hints at an impending change in her life.

But whether the mourner has remarried or in some other way replaced the dead, “love endures,” as Deraniyagala repeatedly says in interviews. Lewis testifies, “At the very moment when … I mourned H. least, I remembered her best.” And Deraniyagala explains that “I have learned that I can only recover myself when I keep them near.”

What all these memoirists would surely agree on as well is that one of the most empowering ways of keeping the dead near is through writing, testifying, telling their stories. Job’s comforters, remember, sought to find excuses and explanations for what seemed like inexcusable and inexplicable suffering. But Job himself simply insisted on telling. “I will not refrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit,” he insists early in the text, and even at its vexed conclusion, he addresses the whirlwind: “Hear, I beseech thee, and I will speak.” We’re told that God replaces Job’s children and servants with new ones — but the dead ones are irretrievably gone; they won’t be resurrected.

So perhaps, at least from a contemporary perspective, Job’s sole comfort is in speech and in his confrontation with mystery. As long as love endures, so too does testimony.

Sandra M. Gilbert is a distinguished professor emerita of English at the University of California at Davis.

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