Roxanne Suson, a Brookfield native and graduate of Brookfield East High School, provides readers with an eclectic mix of topics. Once a trial attorney, now a full-time mom, Roxanne blogs about the happiness, sadness, and absurdity of life and family in the suburbs.
Wisconsin Memorial Park is a beautiful cemetery in Brookfield. My mom is buried there. Whenever I go there to visit, I am always affected by the silence. It seems no matter how many people are present, there is always that silence, a quiet, born of respect, regret, and grief. On Memorial Day, we remember those who passed away in service to our country. In their honor, Wisconsin Memorial Park is resplendent with flowers and flags, but despite the pomp, the stillness remains. That is what grief brings.
This is not a feel-good blog. It is a blog about grief and remembrance, and on this Memorial Day, I want to share with you a book about both of those things. The Year of Magical Thinking, authored by Joan Didion, is an account of the year after the sudden death of her husband. Magical thinking refers to the actions she engaged in during that year that she somehow thought would allow her husband to come back, actions she stopped when she realized he never would. Her book really connected with me, not because her words were comforting but because her words were true. I would recommend the book to anyone who has lost a loved one, whether from illness, accident, or combat. I would like to share some of Ms. Didions truths and some of the ones I have discovered during my own year of magical thinking.
Grief turns out to be a place none of us knows until we reach it.
It does not matter how long you have or what you do to prepare for the death of a loved one. It does not matter if you are ready to accept death as a consequence of military service. It does not matter if your loved one has lived a long life. It does not matter if funeral arrangements were made in advance. You will never be prepared. When it happens, although many will sympathize, the only people who will truly understand are the ones to whom it has already happened. During this past television season, on the show Greys Anatomy, the father of one of the main characters dies. When he shares his feelings with his fellow intern, she welcomes him into the Dead Dads Club, and I found myself nodding at her statement. As crass as those words may seem, it is the truth. You just cannot possibly understand until you are actually there.
Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows.
In the first few months after my mom passed away, there were times when the phone would ring, and for a second, I would think she was on the other end. I would be at her house, hear a sound, and expect to see her come around the corner. But as quick as those moments appeared, so too did they fade, each time renewing the sadness that comes from realizing that she will never be there again.
Grief is a sneaky visitor. It catches me during the ordinary moments, seeing a grandmother and granddaughter walking hand-in-hand at the mall, hearing a commercial that my mom liked on TV. I feel her absence most in the little things.
It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
In the months since she has been gone, I have occasionally engaged in my own bits of magical thinking. I have not been trying to trick myself into thinking that she is coming back, but I have tried to draw comfort from a sense of her presence. When times were rough, I would sit by myself, close my eyes, and imagine that she was next to me, with her hand on my shoulder, telling me that I would be okay. For those moments, that is what I needed to survive, and who knows, perhaps for those instances, she was there.
I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table. Let them become the name on the trust accounts. Let go of them in the water. Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of them in the water.
I hate the phrase letting go. When my mom was dying, people kept telling me I had to let her go. I did not want to let her go, but I knew what they were trying to say. There comes a time when you need to accept that there is loss, that there is absence, that there is a void. One of my best friends who lost her father to a long illness close to ten years ago told me to give it a year. It will be a year in August, and as much as I hate the words, I am still letting go.
(The quotes in italics are from the book The Year of Magical Thinking, authored by Joan Didion, published by Alfred A. Knopf (2005). It is available in paperback. Also, I heard recently that the actress Vanessa Redgrave is currently starring in a one-woman show based on the book in New York.)
