Good Grief
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
(Sailing to Byzantium: W.B. Yeats)
Grieving comes in all shades. The most obvious experience of grief is the loss of a loved one. There’s no escaping the experience of death. Sooner or later, we become aware of our mortality. Death is not deferential to our feelings.
As Emily Dickinson puts it, ‘Because I could not stop for death/he kindly stopped for me.’ While the narrator portrays death as a kind, considerate entity, the stark reality is unmasked in the final stanza. Death waits for no woman or man.
Its finality is one of those harsh truths that cuts deeply when a loved one passes. Knowing that death is inevitable doesn’t prepare us for the experience itself, and it certainly doesn’t make the loss easier to endure.
Our first experience of death is probably the most harrowing. For me, I was 8 or 9 years old when my baby sister died. It was my mother’s ninth child. Cathy was her name.
She was born with Down syndrome, and her health was severely compromised from the very beginning. For the brief 4 months she lived, she was in constant pain. She had little or no respite from suffering. And even though the prospects for her survival were slight, we hoped and prayed for a miracle. When her heart gave out, it was difficult to imagine our home without her. The crying had stopped, her suffering had ended, and all that was left was an empty shell. I still remember her lifeless body lying on a glass table.
The sad part of it all was that her short life made less of a mark on me than her demise. It was the finality of death that made a more lasting impression on my mind. A body that once housed a troubled life was now empty.
It was this fact of life and death that would repeat itself throughout the rest of my life. Parents, siblings, and friends, all of them disappearing into that unseen land from which there is no return, leaving behind an empty form of who they once were.
The Five Stages of Grief
If we go through the five stages of grief, we always end up with the same inevitable conclusion, acceptance. Resign yourself to the fact your loved one is gone, and there’s no coming back.
I’m not saying anything new, and I’ve been through this experience enough to feel that I should see it coming, but I don’t. My father was diagnosed with cancer and given 18 months to live. He exceeded that time limit by 2 years.
I should’ve been prepared for his passing, but I wasn’t. My mother’s passing wasn’t fast either, and still I couldn’t conceive of what it would be like without her.
Our minds protect us from this inevitability. It’s impossible for us to think of the permanency of a person’s absence while they are still alive. Life continues, and we continue to exist with only the memory of what they meant to us.
A colleague of mine once said something that stayed with me since. When her parents died, and their siblings died, she said ‘we’re moving to the front line’.
The battle metaphor was not lost on me.
Throughout our lives, we battle with the aging process. We go from being spry young bodies ready to take on the world, to becoming fragile bodies unable to cope with the demands of the world.
Yeats, in his poem, faces this dilemma square on. Age reduces our bodies to a paltry thing. Our war against death is futile.
Our bodies become the clock to remind us that our time is running out. One milestone after another contributes to the feeling that we’re in a countdown to finality.
Getting older, forces us to deal with our own morality. And each physical limitation age thrusts on us involves a different kind of grieving. We grieve the loss of our capabilities, youthful looks, and possible cognitive impairments. We stand alongside the poet and lament what was with what is.
Suddenly, the world we inhabit is ‘no country for old men.’ We become displaced. Our productive lives, largely determined by our work life, is gone. We reconfigured the question of purpose accordingly.
What gave us a sense of purpose when we were younger may no longer apply. We are forced to reinvent our purpose. The tatters of our mortal dress must have some purpose to it. Yeats looked inward to his soul.
To that part of us, the essence of who we are, that keeps us our hope alive. It’s the part of us that claps and sings even though there no one listening. Our soul is the creative force that continues the fight against death.
The five stages of grief can equally apply to the aging process. Denial, anger, bargain, depression and acceptance can all be felt when it comes to addressing the tatters of our mortal dress.
We mourn the loss of youth throughout our life cycle. Each time we come to a point of acceptance, life surprises us with another loss, another limitation to accommodate.
Faced with this reality, I find myself, like Yeats, looking inward. An older person’s soul searching is different to that a young person. We seek to leave something in the world that speaks of who we were.
Some people call this a legacy, but I don’t think it has to be so grand. I think it can be as simple as knowing you’ll be remembered fondly by those who love you. It’s enough to know that you will live on in their memories as someone who has made a lasting impression on them.
