At my mother’s funeral, my sister began to sob uncontrollably. I put my arm around her and whispered, “You know, Mom would really hate you taking the attention away from her.” It didn’t help.
After my father died, my mother noted that I did not grieve the same way as my sister. “You’re more like Dad,” she said. “He’d say that life is for the living.” She was right. (I grieve much harder and longer for the living.)
I don’t really feel like my parents are dead, they’ve just gone somewhere else. But this is the first time I’ve seen someone else talk about it:
Bonanno doesn’t pretend that smiling is a magical elixir or that laughing will cure the hardest-suffering patients. Grief isn’t a single track, he’s found, but a long private journey that splits along three rough paths. Ten percent of us experience “chronic” and relentless grief that demands counseling. Another third or so plunges into deep sadness and gradually begins recovery. But most of us—”between 50 and 60 percent,” Bonanno said—quickly appear to be fine, despite day-to-day fluctuations. Scientists used to consider these patients tragic actors, shoving their feelings into the core of their bodies, where they would only explode with volcanic violence in dreadful ways later in life. But this, Bonanno says, might be the biggest myth of all. “If you think you’re doing okay,” he said, “then you’re doing okay.”
“I’d look to the ancient Asian cultures,” he said, pouring me a tiny glass of green tea from a copper pot in his office. “They have the idea that the person isn’t really gone, that the afterlife is porous, and that you can still have a relationship with that person.”
