The Complexities of Loss
by Daniel Asa Rose
OCTOBER 31, 2011 TAGS:
Grief will out.
If there’s one lesson to be gleaned from the translucently beautiful new novel by Leah Hager Cohen, The Grief of Others, it’s that grief will always find a way to emerge from the frozen aftermath of death. Take it as a natural law: As water seeks its own level, as heat rises, grief will out. No matter how one labors to banish it or stop it up, grief is a force of nature that will, if need be, carve its way through rock.
Such is the case even when the death seems a relatively small one, as in this book -- the death of an infant boy diagnosed in utero with something called anencephaly. Ricky, the mother, begins resisting its awfulness right away. “Such a pretty word,” she thinks. “It might have been a Victorian girl’s name, or that of a minor deity: goddess of apocrypha, muse of nonsense verse.”
In reality, anencephaly is a brutal condition that means the fetus is missing the major part of his brain as well as the top part of his skull. “His head would be open to the sky.” From the moment the diagnosis is uttered, the wheels of his mother’s denial are set in motion. “The radiologist in the obstetric ultrasound suite explained that the condition was ‘incompatible with life,’ a phrase that took Ricky several seconds to understand, but which then struck her not as sneakily euphemistic but as surprisingly elegant and apt, free of judgment. A numbing fog sifted down upon her, an etherizing blanket. She experienced the overwhelming desire to sleep.”
At first, during the 57 hours the infant manages to stay alive after birth, she doesn’t even want to name him. Here’s how she rationalizes it: “[She] found that once he was in her arms, she didn’t want to name him anything, not even the name they’d picked out, Simon Isaac Ryrie, a name she had loved but which struck her ears now as a terrible quantity of pricking syllables. It was not that she was trying to resist forming an attachment, nor that she wished to deprive him of any blessing, any gift or token, but only because once he was in her arms it became obvious that a name was too clumsy and rough and worldly a thing to foist on such a simultaneously luminous and shadowy being.”
Finally she gives in, because “[w]hat did it matter? She recognized her child as he truly was: all-spirit, his limbs pale as candles, his eyes never open once, innocent of all terms.”
This first section of the book, four pages of prelude, is so achingly rendered it is like a Pieta prologue, mother and child swaddled in loveliness. (Of course it’s also the opposite of a pieta -- there the mother holds her son in her arms after a life as impactful as any on earth; here a life has not been lived at all.) But it takes the rest of the book – written in a slightly less resonant key than the prelude -- to travel through the process of properly mourning this reluctantly named being.
A family of passionate misfits even before their tragedy, Simon’s survivors delude themselves for a whole year thinking they have survived the death by basically ignoring it. His 10-year-old sister and 13-year-old brother are the first barometers of the family’s unspoken distress, acting out in wonderfully peculiar ways: The girl cuts school to perform her own primitive funerary rites, the picked-upon boy rises to the occasion of a schoolyard fistfight to emerge his own person.
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Yet whether they admit it or not, grief transforms everything; no act of daily life is unchanged. There are instances of pyromania as well as episodes of ferocious lovemaking that amaze both parents for their punitive tidal force. Every feeling has its shadow side -- even glee is not unalloyed, twinned as it is with “an awful glee, secretive and inside out, glee’s nasty, stunted cousin.” The father allows himself, once, to get rip-roaringly drunk (Cohen pulls off the most pitch-perfect drunk speech since J. P. Donleavy); the mother owns up to two very different kinds of infidelity. All this is delivered with the most felicitous economy: A cake baked by the father for the mother tastes “of disappointment,” a rainfall “stirred all manner of intricacies from the soil, and the air, though almost painfully cold in his nostrils, smelled plainly now of spring.”
Because emotions are held so much in reserve, there is no preparing for the grief when it comes, as it must, in unexpected ways. For the father, “it was as if he’d braced himself for a burn and been knocked down by a wave.” For the mother, it catches her unawares when she passes a car crash on the highway. “It wasn’t that accidents frightened her more now. It was that they made her feel more tired, as if by possessing a fuller understanding of the complexities of loss, she could not help experiencing more particularly the losses of others.”
There it is, then – the losses of others. Ultimately it’s by perceiving the grief of others, neighbors and relatives who’ve experienced deaths of their own and who thus constitute a de facto community of loss, that the members of Simon’s family start down the road of making themselves whole again. This fleeting, unwanted, yet vital insight – acknowledging that others face the same indelible measure of mourning every day, that we are all connected by an interwoven network of grief – rescues the survivors even as it readies them to get on with their lives. Listen to how the author puts it, in her quiet, heartrending fashion:
“How many are dying right now, at this moment, the whole world over? For just a moment his mind is able to grasp it, the existence of a vast, invisible, yet utterly real community of the dying, and then, it follows, another composed of the suffering, and one of the ecstatic and one of the healing, and one of those in despair and one of those in wonder. Somewhere on this earth, too, there are others like him, others paused at this very moment in contemplation by an open doorway. For just a moment he is able to grasp the perfect truth of this. Then it is gone.”
Daniel Asa Rose contributes frequently to Obit. His most recent book is Larry’s Kidney: Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China With My Black-Sheep Cousin and His Mail-Order Bride, Skirting the Law to Get Him a Transplant … and Save His Life.
Second Photo: Novelist Leah Hager Cohen
If there’s one lesson to be gleaned from the translucently beautiful new novel by Leah Hager Cohen, The Grief of Others, it’s that grief will always find a way to emerge from the frozen aftermath of death. Take it as a natural law: As water seeks its own level, as heat rises, grief will out. No matter how one labors to banish it or stop it up, grief is a force of nature that will, if need be, carve its way through rock.
Such is the case even when the death seems a relatively small one, as in this book -- the death of an infant boy diagnosed in utero with something called anencephaly. Ricky, the mother, begins resisting its awfulness right away. “Such a pretty word,” she thinks. “It might have been a Victorian girl’s name, or that of a minor deity: goddess of apocrypha, muse of nonsense verse.” In reality, anencephaly is a brutal condition that means the fetus is missing the major part of his brain as well as the top part of his skull. “His head would be open to the sky.” From the moment the diagnosis is uttered, the wheels of his mother’s denial are set in motion. “The radiologist in the obstetric ultrasound suite explained that the condition was ‘incompatible with life,’ a phrase that took Ricky several seconds to understand, but which then struck her not as sneakily euphemistic but as surprisingly elegant and apt, free of judgment. A numbing fog sifted down upon her, an etherizing blanket. She experienced the overwhelming desire to sleep.”
At first, during the 57 hours the infant manages to stay alive after birth, she doesn’t even want to name him. Here’s how she rationalizes it: “[She] found that once he was in her arms, she didn’t want to name him anything, not even the name they’d picked out, Simon Isaac Ryrie, a name she had loved but which struck her ears now as a terrible quantity of pricking syllables. It was not that she was trying to resist forming an attachment, nor that she wished to deprive him of any blessing, any gift or token, but only because once he was in her arms it became obvious that a name was too clumsy and rough and worldly a thing to foist on such a simultaneously luminous and shadowy being.”
Finally she gives in, because “[w]hat did it matter? She recognized her child as he truly was: all-spirit, his limbs pale as candles, his eyes never open once, innocent of all terms.”
This first section of the book, four pages of prelude, is so achingly rendered it is like a Pieta prologue, mother and child swaddled in loveliness. (Of course it’s also the opposite of a pieta -- there the mother holds her son in her arms after a life as impactful as any on earth; here a life has not been lived at all.) But it takes the rest of the book – written in a slightly less resonant key than the prelude -- to travel through the process of properly mourning this reluctantly named being.
A family of passionate misfits even before their tragedy, Simon’s survivors delude themselves for a whole year thinking they have survived the death by basically ignoring it. His 10-year-old sister and 13-year-old brother are the first barometers of the family’s unspoken distress, acting out in wonderfully peculiar ways: The girl cuts school to perform her own primitive funerary rites, the picked-upon boy rises to the occasion of a schoolyard fistfight to emerge his own person.
Yet whether they admit it or not, grief transforms everything; no act of daily life is unchanged. There are instances of pyromania as well as episodes of ferocious lovemaking that amaze both parents for their punitive tidal force. Every feeling has its shadow side -- even glee is not unalloyed, twinned as it is with “an awful glee, secretive and inside out, glee’s nasty, stunted cousin.” The father allows himself, once, to get rip-roaringly drunk (Cohen pulls off the most pitch-perfect drunk speech since J. P. Donleavy); the mother owns up to two very different kinds of infidelity. All this is delivered with the most felicitous economy: A cake baked by the father for the mother tastes “of disappointment,” a rainfall “stirred all manner of intricacies from the soil, and the air, though almost painfully cold in his nostrils, smelled plainly now of spring.” Because emotions are held so much in reserve, there is no preparing for the grief when it comes, as it must, in unexpected ways. For the father, “it was as if he’d braced himself for a burn and been knocked down by a wave.” For the mother, it catches her unawares when she passes a car crash on the highway. “It wasn’t that accidents frightened her more now. It was that they made her feel more tired, as if by possessing a fuller understanding of the complexities of loss, she could not help experiencing more particularly the losses of others.”
There it is, then – the losses of others. Ultimately it’s by perceiving the grief of others, neighbors and relatives who’ve experienced deaths of their own and who thus constitute a de facto community of loss, that the members of Simon’s family start down the road of making themselves whole again. This fleeting, unwanted, yet vital insight – acknowledging that others face the same indelible measure of mourning every day, that we are all connected by an interwoven network of grief – rescues the survivors even as it readies them to get on with their lives. Listen to how the author puts it, in her quiet, heartrending fashion:
“How many are dying right now, at this moment, the whole world over? For just a moment his mind is able to grasp it, the existence of a vast, invisible, yet utterly real community of the dying, and then, it follows, another composed of the suffering, and one of the ecstatic and one of the healing, and one of those in despair and one of those in wonder. Somewhere on this earth, too, there are others like him, others paused at this very moment in contemplation by an open doorway. For just a moment he is able to grasp the perfect truth of this. Then it is gone.”
Daniel Asa Rose contributes frequently to Obit. His most recent book is Larry’s Kidney: Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China With My Black-Sheep Cousin and His Mail-Order Bride, Skirting the Law to Get Him a Transplant … and Save His Life.
Second Photo: Novelist Leah Hager Cohen
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