I'm not sure how to return to this site after the loss of my son. A one-line statement of his death on Friday and then straight back to politics a day or two later seemed awkward, even cruel. Hence this, on living with grief.
First, because I know some of you on a personal level — a cherished relationship of more than just writer and reader — I believe I owe you something of a note on the why of Nathaniel's death. He died of a cancer — a cancer of the soul, I'd call it. He allowed it to go untreated and, at an early age, it caught up with him: years of addiction, ending in an overdose. I could offer a hundred reasons as to what led to his condition, but this isn't a biographical note on my son's nearly endless struggles with life, so I'll leave it at that. Any more would be intrusive, and I don't fully understand it myself.
I spent the weekend "processing," as they say. To me that's just a euphemism for "waiting it out." I've consumed two days of watching movies and football as effortless distractions; reading I have found difficult. One front-page NYT piece arrived serendipitously yesterday morning, however, and I read it not so much with interest as involvement.
The article was on The Myth of Closure, a recently published book by Pauline Boss, a sociologist of family science. Like so many of you, I have known close family loss before, and my experiences taught me to disbelieve in "closure." I'm not even sure what is meant by the word. Close what? Feelings? Memories? Connections? If one is human, such a permanent, artificial disconnection is impossible. Thus "closure" is a myth.
It seems the theory was originally developed by Freud, in Mourning and Melancholia, 1917. His work "promoted detachment from the deceased as a healthy grief response, and therapists following this model counseled their clients to let go of whomever they had lost," says the article. Later came the familiar five stages of grief, which the article calls a "model." It "implies that if we work hard enough and follow certain steps, we’ll be able to get over our losses within a reasonable timeline." I no more believe in five steps than I do 12. "Steps" seem to me a kind of factory-line type of reasoning, yet there is no reasoning in grief, which is purely emotional.
Instead, Boss suggested as far back as the 1970s the term "ambiguous loss." It rejects "closure" and "steps" and embraces, or accepts, irresolution. "Its haziness is the point," says the article. Says Boss: "It’s a theory about imprecision, and how do those of us who like precision live with such ambiguity." In short, her theory reworks "expectations" after a death. (It also expands far beyond personal loss, reaching into societal grief, such as that which follows deaths inflicted by centuries of racism.)
I found two elements of Boss' work particularly, and personally, striking. One is a question: "Can you grieve a foreclosed future?" — particularly apt in my son's situation. The other is a recommendation: ["One should relinquish] one’s desire to control an uncontrollable situation" — also particularly apt. Nathaniel's existence was, by others, simply uncontrollable. He was, in the end, the navigator of his own fate, notwithstanding certain vastly unfortunate, external circumstances that influenced it. That's a hard thing to say, but it's about all I can say in my acceptance of something so ungovernable. That, and I loved him, of course. And that, I can never let go.
I'll spend one more day of hazy, imprecise "processing" of this acceptance. Then, back to work.