Lost & Found (25 page)

an article by brooke davis

T
he first dead body I saw was my mother’s. This wasn’t as dramatic as it sounds—I was at the place where you expected to see dead bodies, and I knew it was going to happen—but it was dramatic enough for me. It was a small room, her coffin propped up in the middle, flowers strategically placed in all corners of the room. Her eyes were closed, white satin framing her body and climbing her skin. I remember thinking her wrinkles were missing. Someone else’s makeup and her shirt buttoned right up to her neck and her downturned lips (I’d never seen her lips do that). Her body devoid of all the lumps and folds and lines I’d known. The mood lighting too; how it all formed some sort of grotesque retail display.

That word:
grief
. It is a word I never needed, until I did, and
then it wasn’t enough. Like Millie, and a lot of Western children I suspect, my Very First Dead Thing was Bree, our family dog. I was away at the time and never saw her body. I have never felt connected to that undulation in the ground beyond Nan’s lemon tree. There was Francesca, a loud and toothy friend I had when we lived in America. We were back in Australia when my parents led me into my room and closed the door behind them. “Her heart stopped,” Mum said, and cried. I waited till they left the room and cried too. I don’t know where I learned to be ashamed to cry. In my journal, I wrote, “When someone dies, it feels like you have pins and needles.” I have no idea what this means, and I doubt I did then either, but I do remember trying to manufacture sadness; I do remember the guilt for not feeling enough. I was nine, I already had a new best friend, and Francesca had become this vague blob in my head that didn’t mean anything anymore.

I read Katherine Paterson’s
Bridge to Terabithia
over and over again, and cried every time Leslie died. I’m not sure why I so enthusiastically subjected myself to this feeling. As I grew older, I cried watching the news of people dying in faraway places. Three of my grandparents died, in that inevitable way the elderly must. I cried at their funerals, and at other times, behind doors and under covers, but I was crying for them, and not for me; crying at old age, at the way life is, at how things don’t stay the same.

There was distance, always, between me and all this grief:
by species, geography, age, comprehension; by medium of representation.

But then, on January 27, 2006, my mum on the front page of the newspaper for all the wrong reasons: “Freak Gate Crush Death” in capitals. Letters so thick, so black; death so close it could have been me.

Grief
is a word that has been forced on me, but one that I have chosen to bring closer to me. Professor Robert Neimeyer, with a nod to Freud, says that, for most of the twentieth century in Western culture, bereavement was understood “as a process of ‘letting go’ of one’s attachment to the deceased person, ‘moving on’ with one’s life, and gradually ‘recovering’ from the depression occasioned by the loss so as to permit a return to ‘normal’ behavior.” Here, grief is an experience that you endure, and then it ends. As the literature on loss grew, he says, “this modern conceptualization of grief was gradually expanded to detail . . . both ‘complicated’ and ‘uncomplicated’ bereavement, and the presumed stages through which it would be ‘resolved.’” These stages, or stage models as they are commonly referred to in the literature—this idea that grief could be universally experienced as unfolding in a specific sequence of phases—was popularized in the 1970s by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s work on death and dying. She described Denial and Isolation, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance as the emotions one experienced when diagnosed with a terminal illness. Models like this “began to dominate the Western
cultural perspective on bereavement” because, Neimeyer says, they were “associated with recovery” from grief, or closure on grief, offering “an apparently authoritative road map through the turbulent emotional terrain” of grief.

It makes sense to me, to want to classify grief in this neat way, because don’t we like order? Isn’t that why we get so much pleasure out of narrative? But as we move further into the twenty-first century, we start to see a backlash against this neat compartmentalization of the experience of grief; the emergence of a “new wave,” one that embraces the disorder of grief. Pat Jalland, author of
Australian Ways of Death: Changing Ways of Grieving in Twentieth-Century Australia
, says that psychologists have “modified this early theoretical ‘stage’ model,” arguing that “the final stage of ‘acceptance’ of death had often been interpreted too rigidly to mean ‘closure’ or detachment from the dead person.” The philosopher Thomas Attig, another contributor to this “new wave,” says, “Grieving is nearly always complicated—‘nearly’ because sometimes we grieve moderately for someone who was not particularly close . . . nearly ‘always’ because, ordinarily, grieving involves nothing less than relearning the world of our experience.”

“Relearning the world” began for me at the Ho Chi Minh City Airport in Vietnam, when my dad’s voice said over the phone, “Now, you’re going to get some very bad news here, so you have to prepare yourself.” And then the blur that followed: the lady at the check-in counter who said, so very bluntly,
“What is the matter with you?” And my discovery that, despite all my best efforts and expectations, I couldn’t say, “I just found out my mum died,” without crying. The man sitting next to me on the plane who said, “Have a cold, do you?” The CNN ad that kept appearing on the screen: “By the time this plane lands, the world will be a different place.” The little boy who gave his mum hell on the plane ride, and how much it startled me to realize that from now on I would notice mothers and their children. The circle of family that I fell into when I arrived at Melbourne Airport; how seeing them made it suddenly very real. The front page of the newspaper with a picture of my mum’s car and that horrifying white sheet next to it. Waking up that first morning without Mum and having to remember, again. The physicality of it, how my body was very much involved in this, how it was not just something of the mind. Having breakfast every morning with my brothers on the verandah of my mother’s house, taking time to share our dreams or nightmares, to cry, to laugh, to be silent together; I believe this is what saved me. Writing messages to Mum in the sand at the beach with my brothers on her birthday. We wrote them in really big letters, out of some sort of hope or instinct. How I constantly felt like someone else was speaking out of my mouth. How we didn’t know who to ask about getting rid of the pollen stains on the carpet. Finding a loving, adjective-heavy letter from me in among Mum’s things; the great, sobbing relief and the words I said: “She knew.” How the funeral came and went,
and the flowers stopped coming, the casseroles stopped appearing, and no one visited anymore, and the quietness of it all was so loud.

Later, I would come across a line from Yeats in an Irish museum that would remind me of these early moments: “All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.”

In the beginning, my grief made the world a television screen. It came upon me suddenly, this feeling that I was outside of everything and looking in; that I was somehow invisible to the people in the television. It gave me the most curious feeling of infallibility, and utter vulnerability. The glass eventually—shattered? Smashed? Broke? There was nothing that dramatic, that clear; nothing that metaphorically neat. It was more like a fading away; a barely perceptible slinking back onto the other side of the screen.

There were other things to notice: things I could do, and couldn’t do. There wasn’t anyone who specifically informed me of these social limitations, it was just instinct. I wasn’t supposed to cry in the middle of the supermarket. I wasn’t supposed to say that my mum had
died
or was
dead
; I had to use phrases like
passed away
or
gone
. It seemed incredibly at odds with the way my mum’s death was so brutally and succinctly worded in the newspaper—“Freak Gate Crush Death”—as if there were different rules for the words you say and the words you write. I wasn’t supposed to enjoy driving around in the car Mum died in. I love, and still love, how close she was when I
drove it. I wasn’t supposed to request a copy of the autopsy report and pore over it. I wasn’t supposed to ask to talk to the police about what happened. When the police officer showed me the statement from the man who had tried to save my mum, and photos of the scene of the accident, he said, with a kind of wide-eyed breathlessness, “I haven’t included the other photos.” I realized two things at this point: that photos of my mum, dead, existed somewhere; and that this man was frightened I would ask to see them. I could see all these Not-Supposed-Tos on the faces of people around me; people who were overwhelmingly kind and supportive, but who told me with a flicker of their eyes that there were things I simply could not do.

Part of my own process of “relearning the world” was writing my own grief. Tammy Clewell, in “Consolation Refused: Virginia Woolf, the Great War, and Modernist Mourning,” says this is something that Virginia Woolf did in much of her writing. “Her textual practice of endless mourning,” Clewell writes, “compels us to refuse consolation, sustain grief, and accept the responsibility of the difficult task of remembering.” Clewell also posits that it is precisely this “persistent attachment to the lost object” that represents this approach to grief “not as a debilitating form of melancholia, but as a creative and productive engagement with the past.” Woolf, Clewell says, recognized that her “novels might step in and provide a kind of shared mourning practice . . . for a culture bereft of viable expressions of grief . . . by creating a social space and shared language for grief.”

What does this all mean for me, as a grieving person, writing a novel about grief? That I am “allowed” to keep my mum close and “sustain grief”? That this may even help my creative practice? (Is this the “terrible beauty” that Yeats was talking about?) That I can use the writing of a novel as a space to grieve at a time when social expectations make these spaces difficult to find? Perhaps, but there is something more to this than just my own grief. Louise DeSalvo says:

Woolf needed an audience to listen to the testimony she made about her life, to witness and validate the meaning she had made of her experience, to let her know that she was not alone. Only with an audience, Woolf believed, can we transcend the limits of the self, can we understand our life’s true meaning. As Maya Angelou has said, through writing, the “I” becomes “we.”

As I wrote
Lost & Found
, I became increasingly aware that it was, like Clewell says, “creating a social space and shared language for grief.” Not, of course, in the way Clewell intends when referring to Woolf—as a revolutionary figure in the field of grief in Western culture—but in a much smaller way that is about me, and the connections I am able to make with other people. In social settings, a person will begin a conversation with the ritual question, “What is your novel about?” and end up relaying long, sometimes teary, stories about their own
experiences of grief. We begin as two “I’s,” and then become “we.” It seems we want to speak grief, but we don’t know how. Or perhaps we don’t know when. In writing this novel, I’ve come to realize how speakable grief really is; that, perhaps, all I needed to do was speak it in the first place.

Nearing the end of his memoir,
A Grief Observed
, C. S. Lewis talks about the endlessness of the grief he felt at the death of his wife:

I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process. It needs not a map but a history, and if I don’t stop writing that history at some quite arbitrary point, there’s no reason why I should ever stop. There is something new to be chronicled every day.

Grief is not neat like a narrative arc. It does not end; it is not “resolved.” It does not follow a checklist of emotions from beginning to end. It is not one thing, or the other thing; it is lots of things. And to say that binaries and stage models are reductive approaches to the grief process is not new; there is, in fact, an entire body of theory devoted to this way of thinking. But the process of grief is new to me, and it is new to me every day. Every day I learn something about grief, from myself, from my writing, from others, from everything around me.

As I drive my mum’s car around Perth, “relearning the world
of [my] experience,” I will move back and forth and up and down and over and sideways through different stages of grief for as long as I’m allowed to be here. I am beginning to understand that grief is now, simply, a part of everything I do, everything I say, everything I write. Everything I am.

This is a shortened version of a longer article by the author published in 2012 by
TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses.
The article in its entirety—as well as more comprehensive bibliographic information—can be found here: www.textjournal.com.au/oct12/davis.htm