The way of grief

Here follows the opening of my chapter in Eric Miller’s book, Stories of Complicated Grief: A critical anthology.

There are many more chapters written by others that are well worth reading.
Twenty years ago when I was still
young, I stood under the shower one morning and found a pea-sized lump in my
left breast. I had soaped myself down as usual and with my right hand I pressed
the skin against my rib cage to feel the texture of my otherwise smooth breast.
I was in search of imperfections.
A friend had not
long before been diagnosed with breast cancer and I was more diligent in my
search than usual. Only that night I had dreamed of my friend’s gaping breast
cut open by a surgeon’s knife. I took it as an omen.
‘It’s probably
nothing, but it feels a bit fibrous.’ I imagine the doctor did not want to
alarm me. ‘Best to get it looked at.’ It took a few anxious days before my next
appointment.
‘This won’t hurt
a bit,’ the specialist said, ‘ just like a mosquito bite’. He pushed a long
silver needle into my breast above the lump.
A mosquito bite?
Clearly no mosquito had ever bitten this surgeon before otherwise he would have
known not to lie to me. On a scale of one to ten – toothache being one, childbirth
ten – I rate this pain from my memory today, at seven. But it was gone in a
flash. The surgeon peeled off a pink bandaid to cover the drip of blood from
the pinprick hole he left behind.
The results came
back negative but still, ‘to be certain we should take that lump out,’ the
surgeon said. ‘I might have missed the growth itself.’
The night before
the day of the knife, I looked at my breasts in the mirror. I had a mixed
relationship with them. They were the love of my babies’ lives but they stirred
up unfathomable and ambivalent feelings in me. They were not however available
for serious wounding. I woke from the anaesthetic without pain, still groggy
from the drugs. The surgeon visited before my discharge.
‘All fine,’ he
said and used an unrepeatable word, which when translated into layman’s terms
means a benign fatty deposit. The white bandage held both breasts firm and
hugged my ribcage. I was mummified. ‘Keep the bandage on for a week. Cover it
with plastic in the shower. I’ll be able to take the stitches out then.’
In twenty years
the scar has faded but it remains for me to see, a tiny junction on the left
side of my left breast. ‘There is something peculiarly distressing about the
first wound on new skin’, writes AS Byatt in her book, Still Life (1985, p. 157). And so it was for me – this scar,
this wound, this mark on my breast. But as they say, I should be grateful, it
could have been far worse.
I have other
scars that are not so visible. They exist beneath the line of my skin, etched
into my mind. These are the scars of trauma and grief, the complicated
difficulties that have beset me from my earliest days. These are also the
childhood scars that steered my vocation and later joined to form other scars
through further traumatic experience. That is the way with grief. It becomes a
scar, a hard inflexible stretch of skin, which takes the place of healthy
tissue, the body’s attempt at healing itself. But scar tissue looks different.
It is paler and more dense. There is a limited blood supply available and
therefore less movement and circulation and in cases where there is too much
scarring, it can block otherwise healthy functioning. So, too, when grief
appears to have sealed over, when the initial trauma is past, the area of the
wound or loss becomes less flexible. If we are to avoid such hardening, our
grief must be worked through over time. 

Fog

One morning I sprayed window cleaner onto my reading
glasses so that I might see better through the usual smear of finger prints and
collected grime, the build up of days of use.  That morning the fog was out thick and crusty like dirty
glasses and the air was filled with moisture, tiny invisible water droplets that
together created a grey blanket shrouding the back yard in sorrow.  Everything outside was wet to touch and
the washing on the line would take days to dry.  
This sort of moisture permeates the washing in ways a good
drenching never does.  A good
drenching is in and out in no time, but a moisture soaked fog gets into the
fibres of my sheets and stays there for far longer.  It lies like a curse and refuses to budge. 
I heard Craig Sherborne on the radio speaking of how he feels compelled to make sense of the
details of his life and relationships by including whatever comes up for him in
his writing.  
At times he thinks
this is fine.  This is art.  This is the only way he can write with
authenticity, even if it upsets some of his readers who imagine, rightly or
wrongly, that they find themselves described in his stories. 
At other times he tortures himself with the unethicality of
it all.  It is reprehensible.  He should not do it and yet he cannot
do otherwise.  It is his way of
coping with his life.  It is his
passion, his obsession, his reason for being.  
I struggle similarly to justify my writing, on the one hand
as necessary as a means of coming to some greater understanding of the meanings of my life.  
It’s all about having
greater insights into what it means to be human, as Sherborne suggests, and at
other times I thump myself internally for daring to write as I do.  
Somewhere in here the desire for
revenge pops up its head and insists on being counted, alternatively as
a reprehensible motive for which I must apologise, at other times as a valid
basis on which to build an argument.  
Perhaps it is not so much the fact of the writing itself, it is the
business of preparing that writing for public consumption.  It is the
determination to put on view to allow others to read it that both
attempts to satisfy the desire for revenge and also shifts it.  
Once the words are down on the page the
hot feelings pass.  They have entered another sphere.  Perhaps they enter into readers who can now detect those
yearnings in themselves through the vengeful one’s writing, or perhaps it transforms
into something else, some deeper understanding of the human condition.  
No wonder the reader might imagine, no
wonder the writer feels like this, I would too.  Such hurtful behaviour meted out towards them.  
I, too, want to hit out.  I, too, want to find some way of releasing that pressure as if from a cooker valve. I, too, want someone else to recognise my grief, and if in so doing I dishonour
the perpetrators of that grief, if in the process, I get behind the veil of
respectability of polite society, if in writing in this way I strip off the
masks from the faces of those who would prefer to remain hidden, even including
my own mask, then so be it.  
I can always put it back on later, when we meet for
polite conversation.  But in my
writing we are stripped bare of such false sensibilities.  
Through my writing hopefully we can approach
one another with honesty and integrity even if that experience causes one or
both of us pain.