Another grief observed

Flannery O’Connor once compared her chronic illness with a visit to a foreign country. It’s like no place you’ve been before, maps don’t help, and postcards can’t do it justice.

The same might be said of grieving. Everything you thought you knew about depression, anger, guilt, and self-deception doesn’t quite fit the category of grief, which in the wisdom of Freud and the shifting conclusions of modern psychiatry hovers perilously between normal and medically deviant, depending on how long it takes you to return to the land of the living.

Contemporary culture’s formulas for recovery—get over it, move on, turn the page—reflect our impatience with the unresolvable or the chronic. We are uncomfortable with anything that must be endured rather than deleted. The word closure, for example, gives to grief a tidiness usually associated with a tweet, a deal, or a game. The real purpose of the formulas, of course, is not to aid the bereaved but to allow the rest of the world to get on with its business. The famous “stages of grief,” made popular by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s book On Death and Dying, inadvertently put the dying and their survivors on a schedule. What originated as a schematic description quickly escalated into a prescription for dealing with death.