musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

To weep is to make less the depth of grief


To say that emotions are important for us, is a rather trite observation, I suppose -they all seem to have functions although usually so seamlessly woven into the cultural Zeitgeist they defy easy inspection. Happiness seems to serve a fairly obvious purpose, if only as a contrast to its absence; pain (at least when considered as an emotion) teaches us what to avoid, or at any rate not to keep doing whatever is causing it. There is agency in emotions, however hidden.

And yet, of all of the emotions, the one that I find the most perplexing is grief. It is not that I doubt the necessity of its existence as a reaction to a loss, nor even that, like pain, I would like to wish it away; but at least pain purports to teach me something. What does grief teach me? That I can no longer phone my brother and have long meaningful conversations with him now that he is dead? That a friend that I relied on when I was in need, has moved away? That love, once lost, may be gone forever…?

At first glance, grief seems simply a useless punishment, a grim corollary to Sartre’s ‘existence precedes essence’: there is no longer any need for essence once existence has been extinguished. But one does not only grieve death; grief can also be about foolish decisions one has made, relationships that have gone awry, or any number of other things that could have been different -things that once were, and now are not.

Grief is loss, grief is suffering. And do we not have a moral obligation to alleviate suffering, or is there something about the suffering in grief that serves an important function -something without which, we would be diminished?

It seems to me that one feature common to all grief, is the loss of something important to once’s essence, to one’s identity. Something that teaches us -if we weren’t aware of it from the start- about the value of what was lost, and how eventually to repair its absence. About whether or not there is a need to incorporate its memory into the restoration; about whether or not we have been able to grow over time. Regain an independent identity again…

Perhaps the value of grief lies in its ability to weave a fresh pattern and incorporate a new weft within the existing cloth. Grief does not necessarily require a new garment, merely a novel way of wearing it.

Recently, I was surfing through some saved documents on various computer memory sticks searching for fresh ideas for my essays and I happened upon one I had written over 40 years ago, but then saved in various technologies as they became available. Although saved in whatever form, I had never re-read it; I’d never felt that I could bear the grief. The essay was about a meeting I had with my father, shortly after the stroke that led to his death several months later.

He had always been a self-assured man, full of the wisdom of his time. As a result, I suppose, he was fond of  quoting mysterious little aphorisms to help me process my early years growing up in post-war Winnipeg. Most of them I didn’t understand at the time, or at least missed their deeper significance. Children are literal creatures, and metaphor was probably wasted on me then.

There was one of his sayings, however -one he used to repeat again and again when he saw me, his short young, bespectacled child, upset because I was always the last one chosen for the Saturday morning pick-up baseball teams my friends would organize, or the one who contented himself with laughter rather than risking the lack of applause in classroom competitions. “Remember, G,” he would say, using his childhood nickname for me, “…Remember it’s not the size of the dog in the fight; it’s the size of the fight in the dog!” It seemed a simple reminder that trying harder was what might have a better chance of leading to success, than simply being the loudest, or rudest -not giving up even if it looked as if I didn’t think I had a chance of winning.

I’m not exactly sure why, but in spite of everything else I loved about him, that aphorism came to epitomize my father better than any of my other memories of him. I suppose it’s why I felt I had to write the essay right after his death. It affected me so strongly that I thought I’d save it until I had the strength to revisit the emotions -revisit it when my grief had run its course.

But, he had such a long lasting effect on me and who I had become, that, even the thought of reading the essay made me shy away; grief was still there, enveloping the essay, and clouding my memory of where I had saved it. I could feel the pain, even thinking about it… and so I didn’t. I forgot I’d even written it.

Until, that is, I noticed the familiar title on a memory stick. It was stuffed in an old, creased envelope of photographs I’d taken of the home in Winnipeg where we’d spent so many years. The title was ‘The Size of the Dog’, but the contents were in some ancient format that I had to struggle to convince the current Microsoft Word on my Mac to disentangle. The font was unusual, and it was such an early version that made no serious attempt at grammatical syntactics, or even punctuational correction. It was written so very long ago, I suspect I’d typed it on one of the first Microsoft Word programs in the early 1980ies.

At any rate, when I found the title, and finally converted it into a more usable font and style, I decided to read it again and see if it still had the same effect on me that I remember from when I wrote it. It was the last few paragraphs that made me realize why I could not have read it before now though:

I started to pull my ear away, [when he was struggling to tell me something] but his right hand gestured frantically. His breath now came more evenly and his teeth parted just a bit. I could hear his tongue struggling back there in the dark, like a blind man’s cane, tap-tapping at the roof of his mouth. And then it arrived, the message, almost a sigh and just one word, but I needed no more.

I collapsed on the bed and hugged the half-there man who was my father. Then, ashamed I think, I sat up quickly and wiped my cheeks -a man’s gotta look like what he is [he’d once told me]. But he hadn’t meant that. All these years I’d got it wrong.

His eyes were alert now and they searched my face. A part of his forehead moved, I think.

“Yes,” I whispered, fighting back my sobs again. “I heard you Dad.” He strained to listen to my words. It was so important that I’d understood. “You said ‘dog’ didn’t you?”  My face softened into a smile as he relaxed. My father was still there.

Yes, the grief was still there, but I realized that my father had made me who I am. And yes, the road was a hard one, but he’d been with me all along: my father, the dog who fought until the end…

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gozzter

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