Graveyards for Blossoming Griefs

A merica’s mass culture provides endless road maps for navigating the end of romance. By the time you’re a teenager you’ve probably hummed along to hundreds or thousands of songs about heartbreak. Pick a decade. Maybe one relationship ends in the passionate songs of Fleetwood Mac. Or the lonesome and orchestral country of Beck. The juvenile vengefulness of Ben Folds Five. Or just the sweet soulfulness of The Jarmels singing “A Little Bit of Soap.” There’s the movies, too. Swingers would do for a comic take on it. Or hundreds of others. Any American with access to Spotify and Netflix could be ready for epic romantic disaster by the time they are 14.

We’re not so well prepared for grief. Popular culture shies away from it. And when grief finally peeks through, undisguised, in songs like Tears in Heaven by Eric Clapton, the weight is almost unbearable. You hear it and realize why grief hides from us there. You can’t sell commercials against it.

So what do we do? Even in a culture that is growing radically less religious by the day, religion is called in from offstage to manage the proceedings, at least for the first week or so. People go through prayers they don’t believe in and gestures of worship that they’ve long deemed childish superstition.

I was lucky to be born into a larger extended family in which a lot of people were dying and it couldn’t be hidden from the children. Somber suits were bought and reworn year on year. The moods and smells of funeral homes became familiar rather than totally alien. The best funerals were for those who were old, who lived long and full lives and had a legacy of many grandchildren. People would share stories and laugh as much as cry. The stories — particularly those from my grandparents’ generation and beyond — had a legendary quality to them. Each funeral was a rediscovery that all the elderly people whose highlight of the week recently was driving the Buick to Mass had, in their day, been in stirring battles, epically funny romances, and adventures in the old America that they somehow forgot to preserve for us.

Sometimes a phony religiosity seeps in through the side. Instead of the dread and awe at the Four Last Things (death, purgatory, heaven and hell), which might inspire us to intercessory prayer, acts of penance, or faith itself, our culture produces a lot of the Hallmark version. You know, the talk of a “she’s in a better place” and “she’s looking down on us” – the kind of inert sentimentality that dribbles into the otherwise empty religious gas tank before silently leaking out the other end, when we can be safely distracted again.

I gradually discovered that grief was more mysterious than even love. It didn’t stay confined to those ceremonies. It leapt on you at strange times in the first years after a funeral. I had lived with my grandmother from my birth until her death when I was 15. At age twelve, we switched caregiver roles for good. She couldn’t cook me dinner any longer, but I could for her. Because she had been the center of such a huge network of family life in her day, her death really shook up my mother and my uncles. And as a young man, I tried to be strong for them and for my younger cousins. I put off grieving. And then one day, two years later, I walked into a dark church for the normal spiritual uplift. But I heard a hymn that strangely reminded me of her singing voice — and at once, it all poured out of me.

Ever since then I’ve been mad about church architecture. I now think that the disappearance of shadowed and half-hidden spaces in churches is a crime against the penitent and the grieving.

After the first few years, grief tends to organize its assaults on you to those days marked on the headstones. Birthdays, and the days our loved ones died. It tends to dwell in certain objects — often random ones. A teddy bear. An old clock. A set of wineglasses. Some stupid movie they loved and you hate, but which reminds you of your love for them.

It’s on those days that my family made a habit of visiting the graveyard. It was in the hour or so before these visits that I saw grief served neat, unmixed with laughter. My aunt’s grief for her child, my cousin — and my namesake — who died at three and half months on Mother’s Day. My mother’s grief for her mother. I remember my cousin struggling beautifully to sing “Danny Boy” after she was lowered into the grave. And now my children see it, too. They see it on my face. They ask trivial questions about what my mother liked and hated. And then they ask improbably deep theological questions — about death and heaven — that I know from long study, and prayers met with silence, cannot be answered. I wonder if they can see that grief like this mysteriously grows over time. The longer you outlive those you love, the more times you have that weren’t shared with them.

My grief attacks in the first week of August. I usually meet it in the stone field on our way down to vacation at the Jersey shore. A little solemnity before joy. It’s becoming its own liturgy. Every year I marvel at the Italian, Irish, and Polish names that surround my grandparents’ and my mother’s. We neaten things up, removing and replacing any plants we brought last year. We say an Our Father and a Hail Mary. My kids gather clover and lay it under the name of the grandmother they never knew. My wife waits the perfect amount of time and asks if I’m ready to go. What I want my children to see is that these tears are a gift. That we don’t need false comfort about a better place or pat answers to deep mysteries. It’s enough to know: Great grief is the stone on our heart that marks and honors great love.