At eighty-two years of age one must expect to factor attendance at funerals into one’s monthly (weekly?) schedule. Pray to God none of these will involve beloved family members or very special friends. But, even if one is spared such loss, as time with its sharp scythe inexorably reaps its mortal harvest the number of funerals one is obliged to attend grows as one pays homage to those men and women who have peopled the world in which you have lived and loved for so long and who now are gone.
Funerals in the general run are not so much sad occasions as they are solemn occasions at which we can express sympathy to the truly bereaved, pay respect to the life and contribution of the person who has now passed this way forever and feel regret for the loss of a part of one’s own life. At such funerals one meditates on what it is still to be alive ourselves and to have survived in the shadow of those who have helped in the living of our all-important and soon-to-be-forgotten lives and now again rest tranquil in the forever from which they came not so long ago.
Grief, true grief, grief in all its unalterable, life-changing terror does not enter into one’s attendance at ‘normal’ funerals. Such grief is another story entirely. For real grief there is no consolation. A beloved dies and no words of sympathy make any difference. The Roman statesman Boethius in antiquity wrote a book, The Consolations of Philosophy, seeking to give solace to those stricken by fate. For centuries it was as popular as the Bible – the bereaved and those suffering grievous ills and loss were supposed to take heart from its ministrations. But in our modern times the American poet WS Merwin spoke for all those whom real grief incapacitates beyond all redemption when he replied to Boethius:
Thank you but
not just at the moment
. . . . . . . .
I know the design
of the world is beyond
our comprehension
thank you
but grief is selfish and in
the present when
the stars do not seem to move
I am not listening.
The murder of 6 million Jews in the Nazi death camps in a few short years created inextinguishable grief in a multitude of lives. The Israeli writer David Grossman tries to describe how hard it must be even to go on existing after unimaginable loss.
“My grandfather lost all his family – all his town, all his friends, everything. And you expect him to behave in a normal, friendly way? One has to work very hard on oneself to believe in mankind, in order to trust someone, in order to believe in having a future, in wanting to have children. What a superhuman achievement it is after the Shoab to have children! It’s an act of choosing. Just imagine, when most of your being is immersed under the water of death, when the gravity of grief is so strong, really, it’s a power that I cannot even describe – and yet you manage to uproot yourself, to surface, and not only that but give life to another human being.”
Raymond Carver, a writer of plain and perfect words, who himself died so young, wrote a poem called ‘Grief’ which sums up what I have begun to see too much of in my life as it gets longer and longer.
Woke up early this morning and from my bed
looked far across the Strait to see
a small boat moving through the choppy water,
a single running light on. Remembered
my friend who used to shout
his dead wife’s name from the hilltops
around Perugia. Who set a plate
for her at his simple table long after
she was gone. And opened the windows
so she could have fresh air. Such display
I found embarrassing. So did his other
friends. I couldn’t see it.
Not until this morning.
In the end, it is the death of children before your own death that freezes you in eternal, inconsolable grief until the end of your time, heaven’s time, any time. The inescapable Buddhist truth, “From all that he loves, man must part,” is meant to make Stoics of us all. But there is no use in it for those whose child has gone before oneself. Such a death “has no lessons worth learning” as the writer Aleksandar Hemon wrote in his absolutely harrowing account of his baby’s death entitled ‘Aquarium.’ Hemon wrote, for those locked in by such a death, with devastating precision: his child’s death had become “an organ in our bodies whose sole function is a continuous secretion of sorrow”. Time does not diminish that organ or limit its function or reduce the awful distress it causes. The loss of the life of a child is something parents may gradually mention less and less to themselves even, but he or she never gets over it. The never-healing wound. The deepest, most heartfelt prayer ever uttered is “Please God, do not thus afflict me”.
