MetaChat - Thoughts on why we grieve (warning: intense post)

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21 January 2009

Thoughts on why we grieve (warning: intense post) I was wondering just now why do we grieve, rather than love people either a little or very much, but only while they're alive. After all, why not love people while they're there to appreciate it, and just get on with life after they're gone? →[More:]

Possible reasons:
We miss them because our subconscious does not realize they're dead, and therefore makes us love them more than ever so that we will look for them and protect them? Makes sense, but why don't we know they're dead if we've seen the body at the funeral home? Don't we grieve just as much when we watch someone die as when somebody just gives us the news?

Is it because we see their struggles in ourselves, and know that if their struggles were not important, then neither are ours, so we have to commemorate their life and their suffering. If they didn't count, what reason is there to continue to try in your own life.

We grieve because we have lost our most important connection that gave us strength, and that is like losing a limb. We grieve when we lose a limb because if we don't, if we just limp out into the world one-legged before we're ready, something will eat us.

Our connection gave us strength because the one who died was taking care of us, or because we were taking care of them, which makes us important, which gives us the strength to continue taking care of them. Evolution explains either situation. When you lose the connection, you lose strength.

Reasons for vivid dreams after someone's death (dreams that they never died or somehow got resurrected): because that is not only your deepest dearest wish in the world, but it's the only way you can have them in your mind without crying about it. Even though you have to wake up in the morning to their absence. For instance, just now, something recalled me to the dearest cat I ever had, and I could hardly get any pleasure from the recollection because there was too much emotional pain.

Very often the pain of grieving subsides and you are left with only pleasant memories of the loved one. I guess that's the difference between simple and what they are now calling "complicated grief". Seems if you really loved the person, and still have strong memories, and the person did not die happily or you're afraid they didn't, you get the complicated type. If you actually thought they had a happy life it's so much easier to find peace.

post by: serena at: 14:30 | 11 comments

We grieve because we have lost our most important connection that gave us strength, and that is like losing a limb.

That's what it feels like to me. Maybe I'm particularly selfish, but it's not so much the fact that they're gone, but that they've ripped out a huge chunk of me and taken it with them.

posted by TheophileEscargot 21 January | 14:58

I have some weird issues with grieving. In my family, we don't ever really grieve, in the typical massive hand-wringing sense of it. We deal with whatever practical issues present themselves, such as planning a funeral and closing accounts or whatever--and then that's it. Person is never mentioned again, unless it's in reference to a thing or some sort of dispute.
Maybe this is just one of those things that age brings wisdom or something, but it's just how things are dealt with in my household. When my father's mother died, I don't remember my father ever grieving. He handled everything with a cold practicality that is typical of him in all aspects of his life and then that was it.

Or maybe I'm just a cold-hearted bitch. Wouldn't be the first time.

posted by sperose 21 January | 15:01

Although there is some common biological underpinning to human behavior I would say that there are likely as many reasons to grieve as there are people who grieve.

posted by arse_hat 21 January | 15:04

Grieving is how we heal from loss.

Losing something often makes us realize the true extent of our love (or, sometimes fear) for that thing or person. The process of grieving lets us reconcile that realization ("This person was hugely important in my life") with a new reality ("This is person is no longer physically present in my life").

It's a process of adjustment, and the pain and struggle and difficulty and anger and guilt is because the adjustment may be enormous. Death or other major losses can call into question not only our relationship with the deceased, but our relationship to ourselves and to the world in general. Loss can highlight other areas of our lives that are not working, can bring to the forefront of our consciousness that life is finite and we need to make use of the time we have, rather than skating along.

It doesn't always trigger that, of course, for either good reasons (the griever has dealt with much of those issues in his or her life already) or bad reasons (the griever refuses to enter that space of awareness). Though I really believe that there's no such thing as "normal grief," what's called "complicated grief" tends to happen when there are other major psychosocial stressors in the griever's life already -- job issues, relationship problems, lack of social support, other recent (or ungrieved) losses, etc. It's "complicated" then because the grief is not a single event that one can focus on and get through, but tangled up in so many other aspects of one's life that untangling it and doing the work of grieving becomes, well, complicated.

Grief teaches us that we are capable of immense feelings -- immense love, immense sorrow, immense pain. We can hold those feelings and survive; we can hold those feelings and deepen. Not to experience pain upon loss would not be a gift, it would rob us of the gifts that death can bring.

posted by occhiblu 21 January | 15:21

To me, grieving is no different from a cut or scrape, except it's invisible, but no less palpable. The invisible ouch gets an invisible scab, and unexpected things pull & poke at it & remind us it still hurts under there. We have to honor its presence, or it won't heal completely.

I'm assuming the question is simply, "why do we grieve?" as opposed to "why do we grieve instead of love?". I don't think the two are related, as it's possible to grieve for those we don't know or love. I grieved for some of the people involved in 9/11 but had no relationship whatsoever with them.

I also don't see our existential boundaries stopping at our body edge. All kinds of things get woven into us just like our physiological things like arteries and neurons. Our whole reality gets integrated into us: memories, dreams, and people. So in the case of grief, something that has been woven in is suddenly snagged, and it's painful.

posted by chewatadistance 21 January | 16:08

"I don't think the two are related..." may be better said, I don't think the two are interchangeable.

posted by chewatadistance 21 January | 16:09

I do there's at least part of it that has to do with the way the brain works. Our brains like to go on autopilot as much as possible, and we get used to conditions as they are so we don't have to pay attention to them every second (the analogy often used is how when you're driving down a familiar road, you can think about anything, but when you're driving down a new road you tend to pay attention to the road).

When someone dies, conditions change (if they were involved in our lives in any way that affected our activities and habits). Change is awfully uncomfortable and hard for a lot of people. The place in your brain where those autopilot functions for that person lived doesn't work right any more. You have to pay attention, because there's something new going on instead of the patterns of thought or interaction you used to have. Your brain tries to have them anyway, and then you have to say "NO, that won't be happening today," and that triggers a lot of sad feelings because you don't have the concrete relationship you formerly enjoyed, adn are conscious of the missing pieces. And that gets compounded when you realize it isn't only today. There is often a feeling of being lost, of having absolutely no idea what to do. We don't know who we are in this new set of conditions yet. It changes us too.

I don't think that's all of grief, because it's definitely deeper and not the same as other changes we experience. It's not just simple change. I always liked the way Elizabeth Barrett Browning put it - "grief indeed is love and grief beside." It's a really moving poem, about loving again after loss:

XXXV.

If I leave all for thee, wilt thou exchange
And be all to me? Shall I never miss
Home-talk and blessing and the common kiss
That comes to each in turn, nor count it strange,
When I look up, to drop on a new range
Of walls and floors, another home than this?
Nay, wilt thou fill that place by me which is
Filled by dead eyes too tender to know change
That's hardest. If to conquer love, has tried,
To conquer grief, tries more, as all things prove,
For grief indeed is love and grief beside.
Alas, I have grieved so I am hard to love.
Yet love me--wilt thou? Open thy heart wide,
And fold within, the wet wings of thy dove.

posted by Miko 21 January | 16:48

Also, what aresy said. Very true.

posted by chewatadistance 21 January | 17:05

Though not prosaic, one of the conditions in grieving is that the images we have of the current and future states of our lives still contain the missing person. Then we look around and the person is, well, gone.

I think it takes a while to re-map those images to exclude the person who is gone and that it is, in itself, a difficult process.

Apologies for the analytical approach to an emotional question.

posted by trinity8-director 21 January | 17:34

I saw the "warning: intense post", popped my head in here a few hours ago, and then backed out quickly as my eyes filled with tears when I tried to make a comment. (They're doing it again, stupid eyes)

Ok, better spill it before I loose it again. I was, when reading it at first, thinking that the "We grieve when we lose a limb because if we don't, if we just limp out into the world one-legged before we're ready, something will eat us." idea could be the cause but then this expects a healed period and frankly, it don't always heal. My father died twenty years ago - that's a long time, right? - and back then I was angry, sleepy, confused and whatever other 'levels' you go through at a young age but I wasn't sobbing all day (I did for one full day and thought I'd be done with it right then and there). I've even compared the new feeling that has been with me ever since to limbs, but it's not loosing a limb, it's like you a grow a new invisible arm and it's always in the frickin' way but after a while you learn how to avoid slamming it in doors and can live with it. But then some days, when you haven't slammed you third arm into a door for eons, kablammo-ow. When I picked up Perle at preschool today I gave her a hug and said "I love you!" like I do, practically every time I pick her up, and she hugged me back and said "I love daddy!" and I laughed and said "I love my dady too!". And then I had to run to the bathroom and say I needed to blow my nose because for some reason that brought out the biggest gush of tears I've cried in ages. Like it was yesterday and not twenty years ago.

So, hey, if it was all about not to walk around and get eaten when weak, you'd think there'd be a time limit on grief.

posted by dabitch 21 January | 20:55

I read a quote a while ago, and it perfectly summed up the feeling for me.

It likened grief to a hole in a sock. Over time we darn the hole, and bit by bit the sock is filled in, until it's wearable again. It's not the same, there's a great big darn in it, but it's usable, and can move on and be functional again.

That struck me as very true.

The other quote that I remember that I think about in connection to my grief at losing my dad, is one from an L M Montgomery book. She described the heroine as "one of those vital creatures, whom, when they have died, it seems impossible that they could be gone".

I remember when it first happened it was hard to relate the recent experiences with ME. Having your father drop dead in front of you is something that happens to *other people*. I felt like I was playing a part. The other kids at school who's dad had died were linked - we all knew who they were. I was the one that had the two sisters and the two parents that got along well. This was NOT my story. I had no reference to base these new experiences on. I'd felt sad when my grandfather had died, but it had little other effect on me, being young at the time, and more than a little relieved I wouldn't have to visit him at the old peoples home anymore.

Grief eventually becomes a link. I think that in the end, if you give up that last link of a connection, it feels like you're letting them go. I don't think of Dad sadly anymore, I can think of all the happy times I spent with him, and so forth.

But every now and again, like dabitch, something can trigger it, even 10 years later.

The other day it was telling my aunt - his sister-in-law that Dad's last words were - "you're such a good girl, [jonathanstrange]".

A couple of months ago it was sitting near the chair that we dedicated to him in the State Theatre (row K, seat 25 - or 25/11 - his birthday).

I just go with it.

And in terms of seeing someone die, I don't really think it means that you find it any easier to accept. And, especially in the case of a sudden death like Dad's, it certainly ends up leaving a legacy of guilt and pain that is hard to move on from.

posted by jonathanstrange 21 January | 21:59

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