The mental imbalance of grief and the weight of loss
Reflections on a weight so heavy and so personal, where there are no right or wrong answers
A weight so heavy
We’re all born on the ground, looking up to our parents, the ceiling, the sky, the heavens.
We immediately, thanks to our natural programming, desire to grow in a multitude of ways: to eat, to talk, to walk, to run, to fly. Symbolically, we aspire to transform from beast to bird, to soar with a freedom that grounds us to reality and promises a confidence to search for enduring fulfilment and happiness.
Ultimately, we want to find love and to be loved. Always.
Looking up at the stars at night and thinking about the air we breath, the water we drink and the chairs we sit on, as well as our own brains and hearts and bodies – anything we can physically touch – they are all essentially made from the same matter, molecules made up of atoms, atoms made from electrons, protons and neutrons.
However, when we think or feel, no actual matter is involved. They don’t have a physical weight. Light allows us to see, but unlike air, light doesn’t weigh anything. Neither does happiness, hatred, hunger or heartache.
Our thoughts and feelings are thought to be linked to the movement of electrons creating electrical signals, and when electrons are kept in certain places, our brain is able to package up our emotions and hold on to these as memories.
We experience so many different feelings and emotions on a daily basis, which have the power to drastically affect our physical and mental health.
But if scientifically these emotional reactions weigh absolutely nothing, how can it be so that when we experience loss, a total absence of someone or something we love, the sensation feels so heavy it can cripple us completely and knock-over any equilibrium we might have shared in life?
“Every love story is a potential grief story.”
– Julian Barnes, Levels of Life
Looking beyond melancholia
Bereavement comes to us all at some point in our lives. This is the experience of losing someone important to us. Characterised by grief – the process and range of emotions we go through as we gradually adjust to the loss – every individual moves through bereavement in unique ways and across diverse timelines.
Losing someone important and much loved is emotionally devastating. It is natural to go through a range of physical and emotional processes as we gradually attempt to come to terms with the loss.
Sigmund Freud’s modern grief theory suggested that in order for an individual to move forward through their grief they need to work towards disconnecting their relationship with the departed, in order to make new connections in their lives and to avoid suffering from a form of depression called melancholia.
In Mourning and Melancholia (1917), Freud stated that mourning and melancholia are similar yet different types of responses to suffering loss. In mourning, we deal with the grief of loss in our conscious mind. In melancholia, we grieve for a loss which we are unable yet to fully comprehend or identify, and so this process takes place in our unconscious mind.
“In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.”
– Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia
Freud argued that every single one of the memories and future situations which demonstrate our attachment to the lost love one is met by a reality telling us this person no longer exists. When this happens, our ego is asked whether it will share this same fate, and over time is persuaded by the sum of the narcissistic satisfactions it derives from being alive, to sever its attachment slowly to the person that has been lost and to find a new connection to replace it with. In melancholia, however, we withdraw into the ego and identify ourselves with the loss in our grief.
Freud’s theory was more or less saying once we ‘get over’ the loss we will be fully recovered, which as we know is simply not true. This shows us how far our understanding of grief has come.
In contrast to Freud, the postmodern view of grief supports the belief that it is crucial for an individual to continue to have a relationship and share a dialogue with their lost loved ones, in order to understand their own loss and to move forwards with a healthy life alongside their grief.
Since Freud, there have been a great number of different theories which explores patterns of grief. Robert Niemeyer popularised constructivism, which argued that our reality is shaped by how we make sense of every experience in our lives. When we experience loss, we question the reality and the world that had previously balanced us.
Niemeyer stated that grief is the process “of reconstructing a world of meaning that has been challenged by loss”.
When we lose someone we love, we need to try to find meaning in our own life, as well as meaning in our loss.
Grief researchers Kenneth Doka and Terry Martin created the adaptive grief model, which looks at grief exactly as it is – a complex process with multiple and unique variables, such as personality and culture.
In their model, grief behaviour fits into three patterns:
- instrumental mourners (expressions of grief through physical, behavioural or cognitive ways, rather than expressions of emotions)
- intuitive mourners (the opposite of behavioural; a showcase of powerful emotions)
- dissonant mourners (occurs when someone attempts to suppress their natural way of grieving).
If we follow the thread of theories from Freud through to today, the indication seems to indicate we are usually all blended mourners – a mix of both instrumental and intuitive mourning.
In real terms, all the research in the world points to the fact that there are no right answers or right ways. Loss hits each and every one of us in different ways and we all need to find our own pathway through it.
She without he
“Nature is so exact, it hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain, I think. If it didn’t matter, it wouldn’t matter.”
– Julian Barnes, Levels of Life
In a few months time, it would have been their fiftieth wedding anniversary. But now this date will be marked by an absence, because he has now left her. He has died and she still lives.
They had been together for fifty-five years and never been apart. It had always been them, him and her.
With never having children, their shared bond was their completely overwhelming love and affection for one another. A combined strength which solidified themselves as individuals and was spread far and wide, becoming the core values and model of the extended family. Their coupling united friends and family alike.
Joy and spirit, generosity and good humour. Together they were the heart and soul of many memories, shared across many lives.
But this has all changed when he died a calculable number of days ago.
(One day ago) She watched him go.
(Seven days ago) She is now without him.
(Twelve days ago) They, as they always had been, are no more.
(Twenty days ago) Where and what does this leave her, now faced with nothing but this black hole? How does she attempt to move on, when she has always, for so many, many happy years, defined herself by being a part of him and their unique shared bond?
He is suddenly no longer a physical presence. (Twenty-nine days ago) He’s gone, yet his shadow is absolutely everywhere. His touch, his thoughts, his steps and actions.
She can recall the last words he spoke, the last words he wrote, the last book he read, the final meal they ate together, the last time they shared their own bed, the last clothes he chose to wear, his last smile he gave her. How can she ever fathom that these lasts are truly the last? The final. The only.
At first, she wanted to follow him out of this realm. She was he and he was her. She could not distinguish herself from him. (Thirty-four days ago) Who is she now that she is separated from her other half? A half of something now lost. He always needed her, but now he no longer does, so what does that now make her? (Forty days ago) Forty nights ago. Forty different shades of black.
Every something new is a new something that he won’t get to experience. A something that she has to experience alone. (Hundred days ago) She still talks to him out loud, because she needs to. He is still here inside her heart and memories. And he still talks back, but now only through her voice.
She stills talks to others about him and they still listen, but for how long? (Hundred and nine days ago) She continues to wear that orange top he especially liked and stills buys those apples he never ate. She can still smell him in the living room. Picture him mowing the lawn. See his books resting on the shelf. (Hundred and twenty-seven days ago)
She’s never ever heard the house sound this way before. It feels so heavy and empty, bigger and also smaller. She is stuck inside a labyrinth, trying to locate the Minotaur potentially lurking behind every corner, but without the realisation that the Minotaur is actually several steps behind her, as well as around her and above her. She is wading beneath looming heavy clouds, raining thick blankets of melancholia.
She pauses often and asks God why he had to be taken so suddenly and why it couldn’t have been her. God had always been there for her throughout her life, but where is He now? She has never looked out of the window so much.
When the little things pop up, she asks out loud what he thinks.
‘Should I go for a walk or not? Should I open your half of the wardrobe? Should I put away your shoes you left out in the hallway?’
When another news story comes on the television about Harry and Meghan she knows what he would say even though he is no longer here. When the next match day rolls around and she checks his football results, she knows how he would react and what he would do next. With their neighbour’s birthday coming up, she knows what he would say to him (“Happy birthday, you old fart.”), and what type of bottle of wine to gift him.
She frets about how she will cope with new experiences, which contain no reference points to their shared past and viewpoints. She knows she will have to make new decisions alone and make new memories without him.
She knows a past only lasts for so long, that it isn’t endless, that it is bookended. That his past will never be her future.
She knows that as time trickles forward and turns and twists into a stream, then a river, the balance of her life will slowly shift from time together with him, to time spent alone. Memories will remain, but some may slip. Did he really like the colour of the paint on their bedroom walls?
Every day where night follows new day she begins to see this as something of a win. (A hundred and seventy-three days) She finds it is worth saying again. Every day where night follows new day is something of a win. (Two hundred and three) A number is just a number, but each and every day is a milestone, a moment, a chance to remember and a chance to keep on going.
She begins to understand she is allowed to take absolutely any number of days she needs. (One year ago) In her heart she knows she will always keep on missing him, and he will always be with her through their shared experiences and maze of memories in her mind, inside their woven timelines and the love that still beats strongly in her heart.
Grief is our own something
Although love continues after death, the person left behind no longer feels as if they can still fly like they did when their shared love was alive. They can feel completely weighed down by the loss. Grounded, but not in a stable sense. More akin to a drowning, sinking slowly beneath the earth.
Molecules or no molecules, loss and grief can be an unquantifiable amount of times more heavy, painful and impactful than any experience a physical object made from matter can make us feel.
“We will never fight again, our lovely, quick, template-ready arguments. Our delicate cross-stitch of bickers.
She won’t ever use (make-up, turmeric, hairbrush, thesaurus).
She will never finish (Patricia Highsmith novel, peanut butter, lip balm).
And I will never shop for green Virago Classics for her birthday.
I will stop finding her hairs.
I will stop hearing her breathing.”― Max Porter, Grief is the Thing with Feathers
