Left Speechless: Public vs. Private Grief and Loss

Reflections, Resources, Poetry

My mother went in for planned heart surgery on February 24^th, 2020. At that time, covid was not on our radar. We had no idea what was to come. The surgery, so far as we were told, was overall a success. The surgeon even expressed pride in overcoming an unexpected obstacle.

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For a few days things were looking up. Very quickly though, it seemed evident a long road was ahead. Mom was having breathing difficulties, so doctors felt it was necessary to insert an emergency breathing tube. Intubate for those who know the lingo. They ended up having to do this three times before it was determined a tracheotomy (trach) was necessary. In hindsight, some medical staff indicated awareness this action (trach) should have been done earlier. All this in and out of the tube damaged mom’s vocal cords (who knows how long recovery from that alone would have taken). The upshot was she could not vocally communicate even when not attached to an assisted breathing device. Mom was on a ventilator for the duration of her time in the cardiac ICU, other high-level care in hospitals, and what they call “step down” emergency facilities. But that’s jumping ahead.

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Wednesday, March 11, 2020, I went to see my mother at the hospital. She was asleep on a ventilator. Little did I know how much we, as a society, would be talking a lot about ventilators in the coming days. And here was my mother on one of them. The next day, due to covid, the hospital stopped allowing visitors.

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March 14, 2020 – National Emergency

On March 14, the National Emergency was officially declared. If you go back and read articles from those early days it’s surreal. I use that word, surreal, intentionally. That’s one sense of how life felt for the rest of my mother’s days.

Surreal was among the initial feelings when my mom died.

She died on June 6 after three months in medical facilities.

Months without visitors. Just more flowers and more cards.

We were unable to hold a funeral like so many others. No official ceremony was held. I scattered her ashes with three of my remaining family members.

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No two griefs are alike.

This is a new grief for me.

This grief is difficult and hard in unexpected ways.

Grief does share commonalities. That first time you go to pick up the phone – you think: “Jeez, it’s been awhile since I’ve heard from my mother.” And then you remember. Right. She’s not going to call. There’s never going to be another call. That’s a tough moment.

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I don’t believe in closure. Not in any cut and dry sense. Like many have said, we do not “move on” but we do “move forward”. Our griefs become a part of us. When you come out the other side, you begin to learn what the new you is like. The new you is usually a lot like the old you. Try not to be afraid.

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Help that Helps and Help that Hurts

A long-time family doctor, the psychiatrist Dr. Loren Crabtree, used a phrase I’ve not encountered elsewhere. Dr. Crabtree talks about “help that helps and help that hurts.”

In the interest of attempting to provide potential “help that helps,” I’d like to share a few resources that have helped me in times of grief and loss, as well as aided me in my ongoing efforts to come to a place of acceptance with compassion for myself in response to trauma.

If you are struggling, there are excellent resources out there to help you cope.

I highly recommend Nora McInerny’s TedTalk “We don’t “move on” from grief. We move forward with it.”

Two other TedTalks that may be help that helps include: Jonny Sun’s “You are not alone in your loneliness” and Andrew Soloman’s “Depression, the secret we share.”

Additionally, about 7-months before his death, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks recorded a beautiful TED live event on March 30, 2020 entitled, “We cannot let this divide us.” It’s truly inspirational.

Another inspirational speech is Temple Grandin’s “The World Needs All Kinds of Minds.”

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The Waves of Grief – Podcast Episodes Recommendations

There are times during the waves of grief that ebb and flow that you may feel it’s difficult to focus or concentrate on much of anything. During these challenging times, I recommend podcasts. You can drift in and out of attention while you listen. It really is ok to do so. A few podcasts that have helped me in difficult times include, Hidden Brain, the TED Radio Hour, and archived episodes of Innovation Hub. You may also find We Can Do Hard Things beneficial. Depending on your personal circumstances, you may find solace in episodes of Terrible, Thanks for Asking. For myself, I benefited from TTfA episodes that pertained to issues I was personally addressing. Episodes on other subjects felt upsetting, depressing, and unhelpful. I’d encourage focusing on those that seem like they can be beneficial. If you start an episode and it’s going south for you, by all means switch to something that feels like it’s help that helps.

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Most of all, perhaps, is On Being with Krista Tippett.

On Being episodes that offered great utility include but are by no means limited to: Pauline Boss “Navigating Loss Without Closure” and Boss’ other conversation “The Soul in Depression”; Atul Gawande “What Matters in the End”; Rachel Naomi Remen “The Difference Between Fixing and Healing”; Gregory Orr “Shaping Grief With Language”; Jennifer Michael Hecht “We Believe Each Other Into Being”; Mary Karr “Astonished by the Human Comedy”; Alain de Botton “The True Hard Work of Love and Relationships”; Richard Rohr “Growing Up Men”; Jonathan Sacks “Enriched by Difference”, Cory Booker “Civic Spiritual Evolution.”

These are all beautiful, eloquent conversations about the nature of our reality that can help nourish your mind and body while you’re in need of healing. 

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Always keep in mind, it’s ok not to be ok. That being said, if you feel at risk of harming yourself or others, it’s essential that you reach out for help as soon as possible. There’s no shame in asking others to help you in a time of need. In fact, you are giving them a gift—the opportunity to show compassion and provide care.

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Public vs. Private Grief

For some time, we were hearing a lot about ambiguous grief, about national grief, national mourning. This was understandable. It was also evident to me as someone mourning a personal loss that there was a piece missing from this conversation.

There is a certain loneliness for those of us who had personal losses during the pandemic. Loss came for us all, but not in the same way and perhaps by degrees of devastation.

During the pandemic, people simply did not have the bandwidth to be there the way they seemed to in non-pandemic times. Everyone was worried about their loved ones, their livelihoods, their future, the future of their loved ones. It was not like people stopped caring about you or anyone else— they simply could only afford to spread themselves so thin.

We know there’s danger in vulnerability and these were vulnerable times. It turns out we only have so much of ourselves to give. Should this really have come as a surprise?

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Public grief is complicated.

Mark Doty writes, “I fear that public grief is so easily manipulated […] designed to replace feeling with some simulacrum of emotion.”

In past instances of national public grief, like 9/11, it speaks of the caliber of poets like Wisława Szymborska and Adam Zagajewski that they were able to write poems that responded with such keen awareness of the moment as it was continuing to unfold. As Doty points out, “All poems of public grief are private poems first. […] and not merely occasional pieces…”

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Writing or Not Writing in Times of Grief

Sometimes you can write through grief. Sometimes, with certain griefs, you’ll feel you need a break. You cannot approach the page. This is totally fine. Totally ok. Totally understandable. Totally normal. There are particular texts I’ve turned to during my griefs. Ada Limón’s “The Carrying”, Mary Ann Samyn’s “Air, Light, Dust, Shadow, Distance”, and Adam Zagajewski’s “Asymmetry”. I’m convinced these are all very much grief texts in and of themselves. Maybe you will gravitate towards work that does not inherently feel like it’s about grief/loss/trauma/recovery. It’s all about what you require in your time of need, your time of healing. 

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In Zagajewski’s poem “We Know What Art Is” he questions “Why our souls also close at times, and slam shut […] Why art goes mute when terrible things happen, / why we don’t need it then—as if terrible things / had overwhelmed the world, filled it completely, totally, to / the roof. / We don’t know what art is.” Similarly, in Mary Ann Samyn’s poem, “Such As It Is”, she writes, “The great poets’ words matter, and don’t.” Some of us will feel the need for words to flow from us at whatever cost; others will feel silenced by the gravity of loss.

If you’ve been in this place, where “art goes mute”, where powerful words that have long mattered to you cease to matter, it is horrible. I have been there. The poems you love, the music that soothes, the solace of go-to tv shows and much-loved movies—it seems nothing will provide solace. It is, in my experience, a moment for the distraction and entanglement of newness. Let yourself wander, stumble, find whatever holds you over.

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In Mark Doty’s seminal essay “Can Poetry Console a Grieving Public?”, he writes: “The poem of witness requires a profound understanding of the ways in which pain refuses articulation and horror cancels out speech.” and “…surely the first response to such a rupture in the fabric of the world ought to be a resonant, enormous silence. To come too quickly to words is, ultimately, a form of arrogance; the easy poem suggests that loss is graspable, that the poet has ready command of speech in the face of anything.” 

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Reflecting, disturbed again, what my mother may have thought about, unable to communicate her wishes for months, chained to hospital bed after hospital bed, plugged in to a ventilator—I reflect on Mary Ann Samyn’s words from the title poem of her collection (with a nod to Denise Levertov) Air, Light, Dust, Shadow, Distance (42 Miles Press). Samyn writes, “All the while, my father suffers exactly how he didn’t want. / In honor of him, I grow up.” No one wants to die alone in a hospital. No one wants to die a slow death. The poet, Samyn, is an adult at the time of writing this poem, but I think we all know what she means by growing up in this situation. You look directly at the situation without turning away. You see the long shadow of mortality for what it is. You push yourself to take the meaning of your remaining days in our world with a greater sense of seriousness. After all, we are never just living for ourselves.

Samyn ends this collection with words that suggest she continues to question as we all must. She writes, “I speak as kindly as possible. / I don’t know any more about danger than I ever did.” The takeaway for me, apart from reminding myself about the importance of kindness and compassion, is that one grief does not necessarily inform another. The poet has now learned how to approach a single grief. We have now learned how to approach a particular pandemic, a specific instance of social/public grief—this does not necessarily mean we are entirely prepared for the griefs to come. That being said, we must hope that each grief steels us a little more against the personal devastation grief can bring to our lives. It is too dangerous to allow ourselves to be wholly in the grip of grief.

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Misquoting Ralph Waldo Emerson— “Griefs do not believe in each other.”

Roxane Gay, in conversation with Monica Lewinsky, shares powerful insights about the nature of trauma. Gay says, “I always think we have to err on the side of respecting other people and their lives and not putting words or experiences into their mouths that they have not shared. I don’t ever want to suppose that I know anything about someone who’s experienced trauma, if I haven’t asked them about it directly.” Further, “I’m actually way more comfortable talking about the healing modalities that I am using than I am talking about the trauma itself.”

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Framing Grief: The Window into Your Experience

Mark Doty reminds us that at some point the poet refocuses on “the words themselves” (and not simply the grief/loss/trauma or the event/experience). At this point, the poet is able to describe an experience of “pleasure” (a word choice worth reflecting on)—this newfound ability to refocus constitutes a “translation point”—an inflection point from which the poet’s individual experience begins to fall away to an extent that allows for the personal circumstances of readers to gain entry. A reminder that, done right, the personal becomes universal. That is, personal experience looked at with distance and self-awareness, allows for the poet to create a framework where the specifics of personal experience feel universal and allow for readers to connect. Here, we find ourselves at a point meeting ground where readers can both find access, footing (with an appropriate degree of guidance), and meaningful takeaway, while the poem retains a source of intrinsic power.

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The Long Echo of Trauma

The following, as shared by Roxane Gay with Vanity Fair, feels true to my experiences with trauma:

“What is interesting is, for me, is just how long trauma can linger and how sometimes when you least expect it you have these reminders. And that has been one of the more stunning things about living through trauma. Trauma compounds. It just surprises me where I feel like I’m doing something normal, everything is cool, and then something happens and all of a sudden nothing is okay, everything is terrible and I am falling apart. And then I have to pull myself back together all over again.” Gay continues, “We don’t talk a lot about the messiness of recovery, because people like to believe that it is a contained and discrete experience. It happens, it’s over, you heal, you move on. You heal, but sometimes the wound reopens, and it heals again and then reopens and scar tissue develops, and so on.

A powerful concept Gay mentions is “the long echo of trauma.” How you think you’re doing better and then you’re unexpectedly triggered and “…surprise! Trauma has its own way of wanting to deal with something.”

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We write to grapple with what we struggle to wrap our minds around. If we had the headspace, the bandwidth to consider all the facets of grief at once, maybe we would not need to write poems and entire poetry collections to tell ourselves how we feel about experiences of grief and loss. But we do. We need to do this in order to, as Maggie Smith encourages, “Keep moving.”