Experiencing the grief of a pillar person in your life outside of an environment where she lived. I feel her absence even more, people don’t ask about her. If a grandmother dies, it is taken for granted that she played a role and that we will be able to bear her loss.
Elena
— reader of elDiario.es
There is a dimension of grief that is social, in which the narratives of loss are exchanged between different people who say goodbye to someone loved or significant in their lives. In shared grief, the violence of the questions that afflict us after the loss, as part of the process through which we understand the bond, are shared. Thus, the narrative of who the other was for us and who we were for her is no longer the responsibility of a single body-mind in mourning that stirs gestures, phrases, tensions and voids in memory. Trying to understand exactly what is gone, and how to live after it is gone.
If we stop to think about it, we surely know well the collective impulse to fill the absence with language when it takes us away. Sometimes it is comfort, other times it becomes uncomfortable, an obstacle to feeling. The space of the funeral home, when used as a meeting place in the immediate moment of the shock of death, is a place of narrative exchange. The frightened body, shocked by the loss, still has no language, but others to whom the death of that person has not so radically affected the coherence of their lives, or have not yet felt the destructuring, will come to accompany them with stories. . Who was she, what traits characterized her: her qualities extolled in narratives that support how important her presence was in the world, among us. Telling stories calms, because it proposes a certain order in the chaos of those who, having been with another, will now have to begin to imagine life without her.
Far from what we once called home, far from their affections and their shared worlds of meaning, looking for like-minded people, those who are going through a similar moment of passion, gives us back the calm of company.
I believe that under the social dimension of grief, where shared narratives are produced, there is always the subjective psychic process that responds to a unique connection: ours with the absent person. A body honest with the complexity of life and its passions recognizes in itself that loss also activates the memory of conflict. The conflict that is rooted in lived material situations, in ways we had of loving and not loving each other, of being present when we were needed and not being there, can hardly be shared, or at least requires exceptional intimacy to be able to be accompanied.
It is difficult to share perhaps because this subjective experience of the other is accompanied by a modesty that precisely has to do with its radical capacity to scandalize or alter the official narratives about the lost person. By convention, we wish to respect “the honor” of the dead, a kind of narrative stability after death, which can result in a biography that stabilizes and becomes a mausoleum. Such status is susceptible to alteration and transformation through the detail provided by subjective experience. In silence we carry the other stories that we lack, they are stories of passion, which, due to excess or lack of love, due to excess and lack of love, have the power to destabilize any story.
In the grief of loss we sometimes need to be able to speak a longing, disoriented, frustrated and sad language.
I believe that the subjective and intimate elaboration of grief is what has the greatest power to teach and transform one’s life. It is also the most difficult, the one that confronts us with anguish and questions that we will not be able to answer, that we will eventually stop needing to answer urgently. It takes courage to vacate the shared space of grief and move through the densities of what makes our grief different from others.
It is also sad, very sad sometimes, the time of mourning when the bodies around us are very far from going through that state. Sometimes we feel slow, very slow, and looking backwards while the rest of the people around us are busy in the present and projecting themselves into the future. But related bodies are everywhere, going through processes that, although different, give their speech and gestures the mark of a shared sensitivity. Far from what we once called home, far from their affections and their shared worlds of meaning, looking for like-minded people, those who are going through a similar moment of passion, gives us back the calm of company.
Whoever is being a lover longs for a body that passionately speaks the same language with them. In the grief of loss we sometimes need to be able to speak a longing, disoriented, frustrated and sad language. I think that, in grieving, taking care of ourselves is allowing this to happen.
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