Grief
"This is far from all theology—simply the fact that the poorest woodcutter, heath farmer or miner can have moments of emotion and mood that give him a sense of an eternal home that he is close to."
It is a cliché, but a central question of human experience is when grieving should end and routine life resume. I imagine that this question was forced upon Ancient peoples without room to maneuver - their village was razed and burned, but in a week they were cobbling shoes and tilling the soil. One watches their child expire from an unknown disease, but tomorrow there's market to be done. To this imagined Ancient Person, daily life must have been monumental - You are always at the antechamber of a great event.
Us moderns in great cities, we can allow ourselves to fall into the stupor of grief. Our employers are fairly comprehensive on our personal suffering - in Europe I have seen depression cases receive over 6 months of medical leave -, the more mundane operations of eating and shopping are resolved with a click, friends and family have more available time to come and support us in our mourning. In theory many of us could live like the protagonist of Ottessa Moshfegh's "My Year of Rest and Relaxation", just sleeping through the days for a few months. Thus, our grieving can reach truly epic proportions, as we are encouraged to engage in self-analysis and to ruminate on ever more complex feelings by modern therapeutics.
My objective, however, is not to bash modernity. As the Ancients were given Sea Peoples and Famine, comfort is the burden allotted to us, and we should manage it as we can.
In her New York Times article writing on the death of her husband, Joan Didion describes the first day when all her support network went home and she has to sleep alone for the first time. Although normality was suspended for a few weeks, even close family and friends must return to their normal lives at some point. Normalcy is forced upon you - the angel of Death came to your home, it has taken someone yet you remained. There is strangely even a certain envy of the dead in those first days on the threshold between the grieving period and daily life, where you resent the expired person for not having to deal with supermarket lists and bills to pay while their absence still weighs upon you.
Eventually, our grief becomes performative. As days pass, the pure grief one feels is supported by guilt, the impression that any other feeling we have except mortification is an offense against the memory of the loved one. When my sister died, I kept asking myself: Should I be laughing so soon after she passed? Should I be playing videogames? Can I enjoy a nice meal? Although my sister was not one to care about such things, every action that was not pure grief seemed grotesque to me. At some point I knew life would have to carry on, I just didnt know when. Were I religious, I would have a much simpler answer: The Shiva mourning period for seven days, the Shloshim for 30. What peace this period must have given to the faithful, knowing that after 31 days they can do the things they did in the past and resume their lives without the feeling of guilt: God has removed the weight from their shoulders. Us seculars are not so lucky, we must thread our own path in the darkness.
When I think of loss, mourning and recovery, I think of the motifs of rebirth, of growth of the soil, of the Tree of Life. I would like my path to be clear as these symbols, sturdy and certain in their eternal significance. It would make my life easier, as I stay here grieving for myself, if I knew that after death life would surely return. I know this is real, yet it is hard for me to see it. The day I received the news that shattered my life, by coincidence that day was the solstice of winter. Like Didion in The Year of Thinking Magically, I held unto the solstice's symbol and believed to be at my nadir - from there on the arch of my days could only swing upwards, and the summer days would eventually return. But it was not so simple. Weeks later, it is a sunny day in Brussels, the first in many weeks. I shoud be like that sun, however I find myself in my lowest point since then. I am trapped between routine and mourning. There is no Shiva for me.