Writing through Grief (or, How I got over critical distance and just started writing)

Kate's recent post on grief was inspiring and honest and brave, and the fact that it led to so much wonderful discussion, both in the blog comments and in other forums, indicates that others found it inspiring as well. Her ideas on grief specifically struck me, since grief has been a powerful force in my graduate career thus far, but I was also interested in her combination of the personal and the professional. I admire those people who admit their personal connection to their work, those people who admit that they have lives and loves and families and that those things don't just take away from their work but actually inform and influence it. Finding a way to do so can be tricky, and can also be scary, especially to grad students who are trying desperately to professionalize. However, I do think it's important and rewarding, so I will try it out here and see what people think.

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In my second year of PhD work, my father died. The loss was crippling. I didn't know how to function in the world, no less to go on with my work. My dad had believed I was intelligent, capable of anything, but I didn't know how to be these things once he was gone. Yet I simply returned to my courses and my work and tried to understand how to exist in a world without my father. I had been writing a seminar paper on a 15th century play, the Digby Mary Magdalene, and, though I forced myself to continue with my coursework, I couldn't return to that paper right away. I took an incomplete (something I would warn other grad students to avoid at all costs), and focused on my other work. When I came back to that paper, I saw it in a new way. Near the play's opening, Mary's father dies suddenly. I had previously seen this plot point as a clumsy bit of writing. Right after a perfectly nice conversation with his children, the father is struck down by death with no warning and no explanation. Before, this seemed far-fetched. But after my own father's death, I suddenly understood. Death is sudden, inexplicable, and terrible. Even in cases of lingering illness, death itself rarely feels anything but shocking. The timing is seldom right. I had been writing vaguely about the positive way in which Mary Magdalene is depicted in the play, but I was now able to understand what was so different about this depiction of the saint.

Though Mary Magdalene is meant to represent the redemption possible to every sinner, many medieval sermons discussed her early life in a decidedly misogynist way. Her early sins (completely fabricated, by the way -- there's no mention in the Bible that she was a prostitute) were represented as evidence of female weakness and wickedness. Fathers and brothers and husbands were warned not to give their daughters and sisters and wives too much freedom. If the Magdalene was any example, an unchaperoned woman couldn't help but turn to sin. (For more information on these sermons, see The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages by Katherine Ludwig Jansen.) But that's not how it was depicted in this play. In the Digby play, Mary's a sweet but naive young woman, a dutiful daughter. She grows lost not because of female weakness but because of human grief. The playwright never denigrates Mary, something that I'd noticed in my initial readings of the play. Yet now I saw something more. Mary says that grief has wounded her. She's struck down by the loss of her father and no longer knows how to exist in the world. Most everyone in the audience would have experienced some kind of grief. Her heartache would have made sense, particularly at a time when the infant mortality rate was high and the Black Death was still in recent memory. Mary's fumbling to recover from her loss and reclaim her identity, perhaps making a few mistakes along the way, would have evoked sympathy, not derision. Her mistakes are not those of a wicked woman, but a grieving human. What I had written off as an awkward side note turned out to be the key to Mary's positive characterization. Anyone who has experienced any kind of heartache can recognize a bit of him or herself in Mary, a point I find crucial for the play's message.

This is not to discount rigorous research or careful examination of the evidence in the play, but rather to demonstrate how I could see important aspects of the play better when I approached it as a human who had experienced loss as well. My attempt at critical distance had blinded me to those features of the play meant for a very human audience. Combining my own personal response to my research and analysis brought me a much fuller picture of the play, and allowed me to clear up my incomplete. That paper has turned into several presentations, an article, and a dissertation chapter. I had discovered a new way to engage with my sources, and people seemed to be responding to it as well. I used a similar tactic when writing about Joan of Arc. My own horror at the sight of my father's ashes turned into an examination of the symbolism of Joan's execution. Joan was burned twice, and her ashes were thrown in the river, and I wondered what to make of this horrifying spectacle. I found a great deal to say about the way in which Joan's enemies attempted to annihilate Joan's body and keep peasants from making relics out of her. More to the point, I found a great deal of fascinating evidence. By the time I finished, I felt better about my father's ashes, and about my research. Joan was a real human who lived and who died, and it seemed right to take her death seriously (and even a bit emotionally). Instead of keeping me from doing careful scholarship, my human response to Joan aided me once again.

I am not saying that I have any real answers. I'm still sometimes overwhelmed, confused, scared, sad. I'm still not sure how to write a dissertation. And I am not saying that my father died so that I could learn something or so that I could write better papers, but rather that the only way for me to survive the rush of emotion that flooded me in the wake of my father's death was to allow it to flow into my work. The texts I read were written by humans for other humans. I am, after all, in the humanities, and admitting that I was a human with all of my faults and feelings was a relief. Pretending to a kind of objectivity which I simply cannot (and don't really want to) have is neither honest nor productive. It's scary to admit my emotional connection to my work, but it feels right, too. It is not necessarily narcissistic to focus on one's own experiences. It may be self-centered to wallow indefinitely (though a little wallowing can be quite helpful), but I think that bringing personal emotions and experiences and traumas into a larger conversation is quite the opposite. It's a way that we can all connect and gain a greater understanding. We can't say that people or literature were just the same in the Middle Ages as they are now. We can't say that people around the world or even in our own neighborhoods experience anything in the same way as we do. Grief is particular, to be sure. Neither can traumas be compared. One child experiences war or genocide while another loses a beloved family pet. No, these situations cannot be equated. Yet anyone who has experienced heartache of any kind, from a first break-up to the death of a parent, has a share in human suffering. Such heartaches are soul-crushing, and yet they contain within them a gift: human empathy. All grief is different, and yet those who have experienced any grief can understand the depth of human emotion and therefore feel for others who suffer. Not everyone can accept this gift. Some turn inward and never look back out. Nor does this gift bring any final answers. But there's a beauty in caring for others. There's a beauty in bringing our own human vulnerabilities and offering them up to others and accepting their vulnerabilities in return. There's a beauty in caring about one's work enough to let it be emotional, imperfect, human.

The Poetics of Grief: Considering Pearl and Wm. Paul Young's The Shack.

Grief has a funny way of choking out your perspective and balance. It's so easy to let that creeping vine take hold, and once you do, it's so very hard to wrench yourself free.  Grief can become, during our darker moments, a trickster-friend. You get so used to its presence that you forget how to live without it, insidious though the relationship might be.

Having spent the better part of this Fall attempting to journey forward after an intensely personal and awful loss (I miscarried right before the start of the term), I've found myself thinking a lot about how humans grieve, and on the literature that has been born out of these moments of agony. So much has been written on this topic, but for me, poetic works and their explorations of how we suffer and grapple with loss have always moved me the most and have helped to transport me (or at least begin the journey) out of those dark spaces.  The journey to a place of peace and balance after experiencing a profound loss is always a difficult one, and I have grown fascinated with, and taken considerable comfort from, those who have written about their own journeys through grief as a result.

Given that most of what I study these days is medieval, I have found myself thinking a lot about Pearl of late. The poem has been one of my favorites ever since I first encountered it as an undergraduate.  Nearly a decade later and particularly in light of my most recent loss, I have returned to the poem with a fuller awareness of the grief that gives Pearl its initial fuel and momentum.

Simultaneously, I've found myself thinking as well about a far more recent work: The Shack. The novel is, at its core, a framed dream vision. The first eighty pages or so chronicle the protagonist's (Mac's) loss of his youngest daughter, Missy. This portion of the novel is agonizing, and it ends in the very place where the authorities find clear evidence of Missy's murder – a dilapidated shack in the wilds of Oregon. Mac returns to the shack after receiving a cryptic invitation from "Papa" – the name that his wife, Nan, uses for God.  He falls asleep in the shack after a fit of rage and an ensuing mental breakdown, and when he "wakes" he enters into a dream vision in which he finds the comfort he's been searching for and his release from grief and anger.   

What strikes me the most about both of these works is the candor with which they recount the deeply personal and awful grief that comes with the loss of a child (or any loved one). Both Mac and the narrator of Pearl are angry, lost, and utterly encased in their grief at the outset of these works.  As I returned to them both over the past few weeks, I immediately identified with these characters because of that. Their questions, their hurt, but most of all, their journeys through grief to a place of balance felt so deeply familiar and so strangely comforting.

As I kept thinking about these two works (largely in isolation at first), I began to realize just how much they actually share. Granted, there are NUMEROUS differences (cultural, structural, and theological) that separate them, but I found certain aspects profoundly intertwined nonetheless. For starters, both the Pearl narrator and Mac have — as I mentioned earlier — allowed their grief to consume all aspects of their lives by the time that we're introduced to them. Take, for instance, stanza five of Pearl:

Bifore that spot my honde I spenned
For care ful colde that to me caght.
A deuely dele in my hert denned
Thagh resoun sette myselven saght.
I playned my perle that ther was penned
Wyth fyrce skylles that faste faght.
Thagh kynde of Kryst me comfort kenned,
My wreched wylle in wo ay wraghte.
I felle upon that floury flaght -
Suche odour to my hernes schot,
I slode upon a slepyng-slaghte
On that precios perle wythouten spot. (49-56)

Before that spot my hands I clasped / For care full cold that seized upon me / A desolating grief in my heart lay deep / Though reason would have reconciled me. / I mourned my pearl that there was trapped / With fierce arguments that fast contended, / My wretched will in woe nature wrought . . .

The speaker here kneels over the very spot where he "lost" his pearl — which is often interpreted as a young daughter — and laments that the awareness of this loss "does nothing but pierce my heart sharply, / Swell and burn my breast painfully" (17-18).

Mac's grief after Missy's abduction and and murder is similarly all-consuming:

Little distractions like the ice storm were a welcome although brief respite from the haunting presence of his constant companion: The Great Sadness, as he referred to it. Shortly after the summer that Missy vanished, The Great Sadness had draped itself around Mack's shoulders like some invisible but almost tangibly heavy quilt.  The weight of its presence dulled his eyes and stooped his shoulders. Even his efforts to shake it off were exhausting, as if his arms were sewn into its bleak folds of despair, and he had somehow become part of it. He ate, worked, loved, dreamed, and played in this garment of heaviness, weighed down as if he were wearing a leaden bathrobe – trudging daily through the murky despondency that sucked the color out of everything.

At times he could feel The Great Sadness slowly tightening around his chest and heart like the crushing coils of a constructor, squeezing liquid from his eyes until he thought there no longer remained a reservoir. Other times he would dream that his feet were stuck in cloying mud as he caught brief glimpses of Missy running down the wooded path ahead of him, her red cotton summer dress gilded with wildflowers flashing through the trees. She was completely oblivious to the dark shadow tracking her from behind. Although he frantically tried to scream warnings to her, no sound emerged and he was always too late and too impotent to save her. He would bolt upright in bed, sweat dripping from his tortured body, while waves of nausea and guilt and regret rolled over him like some surreal tidal flood.  (27)

Both protagonists find themselves utterly consumed by their awareness of what they have lost. It dominates their thoughts and oppresses any capacity for joy.  Seeking (whether they realize it or not) an end to their suffering, both journey to origin point of their pain: to the places where they lost their beloved children.  The Pearl narrator moves into a garden (often interpreted as a graveyard) where his pearl "sprang away" from him, while Mac journeys to the shack where they found Missy's dress and an awful blood-stain, clear evidence of her murder.

It is through this return to a place of complete pain that their dream visions occur. The dreamer in Pearl "awakens" to find himself in a transcendent and beautiful landscape, where he soon encounters the Pearl Maiden — a figure who both represents the child he lost and the Divine Wisdom he so desperately needs. Mac, in turn, wakes from his despair-induced slumber inside the shack and exits in complete frustration, only to find the landscape slowly transform itself from Winter to Spring and the desolate shack reshape itself into a warm and inviting log cabin, with clear signs of life inside. Mac is soon greeted by three humans, each of whom is revealed as an aspect of the Trinitarian God. 

From here, The Shack diverges markedly from Pearl in a number manner of ways, but a pivotal moment in the second half of the novel shares much with the medieval dream vision as well.  In this particular episode, Mac finds himself and his outlook — overshadowed as it is by The Great Sadness — challenged and questioned by Sophia.  Just as the Pearl Maiden challenges the narrator's misguided, grief-stricken perceptions, chiding him at one point for having misinterpreted and incorrectly contextualized his loss (5.265-76), Sophia forces Mac to face his destructive worldview in a similarly blunt and masterful way.  At the end of their dialogue — which proves as cathartic and transformative as the dialogue between the Pearl narrator and the Pearl Maiden — Mac is given a glimpse of Missy in the afterlife. He sees her playing with his other children (who are, themselves, experiencing dream visions of their own), and she eventually runs directly towards him. An invisible force (represented by a waterfall) separates them, but Mac is told that she knows that he is there "on the other side of the waterfall." Mac tries desperately to get to her, but the invisible force won't let him move. Once he stops, however, and simply gazes on her, taking in "every detail of her expression and hair and hands" she smiles at him and mouths "It's okay, I . . . love you." Sophia tells him at this point that while Missy cannot see him, she knows that he is there, and that she herself chose for their meeting to be this way. Eventually "the water roared down from above, directly in front of him, and obliterated all the sights and sounds of his children" and he finds himself in a grotto behind a waterfall (exactly where he had entered to talk with Sophia). Like the Pearl narrator, then, Mac is challenged in this portion of the narrative by a female counselor who speaks with Divine authority.  His resulting vision of his daughter, in turn, challenges his attachment to The Great Sadness and affirms what he has learned from Sophia. Just as the Pearl Maiden chides the narrator for becoming too attached to his limited perception of the world, Mac learns that he cannot – in the end – be the world's, or God's, judge, and that the more he accepts the limitations of his perception, the more free and more joyful he will become. The Great Sadness, then, loses its power because it can only hang over him so long as he convinces himself that his perceptions are wholly accurate. 

The water imagery in this scene, I should add, also parallels Pearl, because in both the protagonists meet their lost children but are separated from them by an impassable body of water. The water prevents the dreamer from completely accessing the afterlife and those within it.  Both Mac and the Pearl narrator try frantically to cross these bodies of water at certain points and rejoin their beloved children, only to realize that their reunion cannot come to pass while they are both alive. Both find their attempts to ford the barrier to be in vain — the Pearl narrator is held back initially by the maiden's words, and eventually wakes up because he tries to ford the stream. Mac, in turn, tries repeatedly to force his way through the invisible barrier, but to no avail, and Sophia eventually explains that the barrier is truly impenetrable. The fact that they want so desperately to experience the physical presence of their lost ones speaks, rather poignantly, to their reliance upon their limited sensory perceptions.  What they learn — in no small part through these vain attempts — is that true vision and wisdom lie in a state beyond the senses. They learn, as a little prince once said, that "One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye."

As Pearl winds its way to a close, as the narrator comes to discover a world and a worldview much larger than his grief, the word "delyt" appears frequently, suggesting that the narrator has begun to move forward from the place of grief that brought him into the dream vision. Mac too finds a way to reclaim his life from The Great Sadness and to live in joy not in spite of his loss, but because of it. Both works, in their own way, explore the ways in which we can locate a sense of purpose in the midst of these awful losses. And this isn't to say, as Mac mistakenly observes, that these events come to pass for the benefit of our souls and psyches, but rather that "grace doesn't depend on suffering to exist, but where there is suffering you will find grace in many facets and colors" (The Shack, 188).

Ultimately, I'm not seeking to argue here that the author of The Shack drew inspiration from Pearl. Rather, my point in drawing out this comparison is to suggest that both of these works — separated as they are by centuries, by theological nuance, by culture — tap into the same mysteries of loss in uncannily similar ways, and that these similarities can — if we let them — remind us that we are never truly alone in our grief, deeply and intensely personal as those experiences always are. Considering these works alongside each other can offer us the deep and abiding comfort of knowing that when we experience the intensity of loss and grief, that we are entering into a strange and beautiful communion with all who have (and all who will) endure the same. This may seem terribly bleak at first, but it's actually — in my mind at least — quite beautiful to know that even with full knowledge of the pain that will come with the loss of our beloved "pearles," that we can never quite keep ourselves away from love. That we are always invited and drawn back into relationship with others and with ourselves because of these risks. Pearls of great price, indeed.