In her book Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, author Mary McCarthy writes of losing both parents to the flu epidemic of 1918. She was just 6 years old. Perhaps because of the prevailing attitudes toward children at the time, or towards death, no one spoke truthfully to her about her parents’ sudden absence. Her grandparents in particular, she surmises looking back, viewed the deaths as “a scandal of the gravest nature”; they told her Mama and Daddy had gone to get well in the hospital.
When she was able to rise from her own sick bed, McCarthy describes feeling as though in a fog. She remembers “… the dark well of the staircase, where I seem to have been endlessly loitering, waiting to see Mama when she would come home from the hospital, and then simply loitering with no purpose.” Slowly she came to understand that her parents were not coming home, and that everything had changed.
McCarthy may be right about her grandparents’ motivation for lying; the deaths were too grave a loss for even them to face. But then there was a child “loitering with no purpose” alone in a dark stairwell, a kind of liminal no-place, disconnected from past or future, a place of confusion and unarticulated grief.
Students have been speaking to me lately of grief. The sudden transition away from campus, and the initial sense of loss is for some giving way to waiting and wondering, and a deep sense of disorientation and loneliness. Who am I anymore? And why are people telling me to be optimistic, when actually everything is changed, when it’s not clear where we will all end up – physically, socially, financially, spiritually?
McCarthy’s grandparents did not help her by lying. Nor is it helpful to preach optimism to someone who is grieving. Loss is real, and the attendant grief needs to be recognized, named, accepted, experienced. Grief is not a once-and-done thing. Like coronavirus it can come in waves. But the experience needn’t be of a no-exit stairwell. Maybe more like a pool in which we periodically immerse. It’s OK to swim around, loiter a bit, for a while stop fighting and just feel. And notice when your skin starts to get water logged, or you get the shivers. Then it’s time to step out, dry off, get some lunch or an ice cream bar – you get the metaphor. Loss is unavoidable, and the attendant grief is so much a part of life. It deserves full recognition. And its tears cleanse, heal, give new life. Sometimes they are life itself.
Shosh Dworsky
Associate Chaplain for Jewish and Interfaith Life
May 14, 2020