Authors: Lynne Segal
And early this morning you whispered
as if you were lying softly at my side:
Are you still angry with me?
And spoke my
name with so much tenderness, I cried.
39
She tells us that actually she was rarely angry with this man, even when he gave her cause to be – which, as we shall see, probably helps in coming to terms with absence. Feinstein’s poems evoke loss with loving clarity, skilfully portraying both the ghostly presence and the painful absence of her husband:
Last night I wondered where you had found to sleep.
You weren’t in bed. There was no-one in your chair.
… I called out miserably:
You will catch cold
Waking, I let the daytime facts unfold.
40
The facts, of loss, unfold.
These poems are clearly about coming to terms with sorrow, as in the opening poem, ‘Winter’, in which Feinstein writes: ‘My thoughts are bleak’, before continuing with an imagined conversation in which the husband teases her in his old way, and she pictures him, lying ‘peaceful and curled / like an embryo under the squelchy ground’.
41
He knew her so well, she recalls in her poem, ‘A Match’, that even, ‘All our worst faults we shared: / disorder, absentmindedness, neglect’.
42
Feinstein makes one final point in her poems that I’ll return to:
It’s easy to love the dead.
Their voices are mild
they don’t argue.
Once in the earth, they belong to us faithfully.
43
Feinstein appears to be giving us lessons in how to mourn. Here, Freud’s classic essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, written in 1917, has remained unusually influential, with almost everyone interested in mourning returning to it again and again. This is despite Freud himself, characteristically, later shifting his analysis a little. In the original essay Freud introduced the notion of ‘the work of mourning’, believing it took between one and two years. Without going into too much detail, he argued that in normal mourning we deal with grief by psychically prolonging the existence of lost objects, step by step going through all the memories that we have of them, loving, hostile, ambivalent – above all ambivalent – until we eventually manage to accept that they are no longer there in the world for us.
44
Loosening our attachment to the dead, or just as bad, perhaps worse, to people or beliefs we have loved and lost, means being able to find words or images to register the loss, to mark it, and move on, however strongly we may have internalized our memories of what we have lost.
As Freud again pointed out, those attachments will always have included levels of narcissistic identification, with the loss of self-love, as we all probably know, one of the main injuries of losing in love. Sometimes, however, we may not be able to find ways of mourning or dealing with loss or abandonment. In extreme states of melancholia, Freud suggested, a person cannot come to terms with absence but instead incorporates the lost person in ways that can, in a sense, cause part of the person who feels abandoned also to die, crushing whatever sense of self, or ego, they once had. Moreover, in these cases, a sense of anger at being abandoned is turned inwards into a relentless sense of unworthiness and self-rejection, a depression that can lead to suicidal thoughts and deeds. Summarizing
his distinction between mourning and melancholia, Freud concluded: ‘In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself’ (246).
Ironically, the more ambivalence and hostility one has felt towards the lost object of desire, or perhaps the stronger the sense that the lost object was something we never truly possessed and hence never really lost, the less one is able to mourn and the greater the self-laceration and inability to recover. Thus Freud wrote: ‘If one listens patiently to the melancholic’s many and various self-accusations, one cannot in the end avoid the impression that often the most violent of them are hardly at all applicable to the patient himself, but that with insignificant modifications they do fit someone else, someone whom the patient loves or has loved or should love’ (248).
Feinstein’s poetry seems to exemplify successful mourning, repeatedly registering the loss, and then noting one’s own survival. C. S. Lewis’ classic reflections on the extreme anguish he felt following the death of his wife in his late middle age, after a short but extremely happy marriage, was similar.
A Grief Observed
, first published under a pseudonym a year after his wife’s death in 1961, began with an account of his immediate total disorientation. He became, he said, an embarrassment to everyone he met, and Lewis recorded his sense that his life, even his body, had become totally empty, a ‘miserable phantom’.
45
Yet he hoped that somehow writing down his grief, and his memories of all he had lost, might help him ‘get a little outside it’ (12). By the end of this short memoir he had managed to do this, at least some of the time, again seeming to confirm Freud’s idea that successful mourning is a process that enables grievers to struggle through their memories of the dead or lost person, to ensure that they are no longer colonized by their absence.
Thus Lewis wrote: ‘It is just at those moments when I feel least sorrow … that [my wife] rushed upon my mind in her full reality, her otherness … The less I mourn her, the nearer I seem to her’ (44–6).
However, other clinicians turning their attention to loss and grieving have argued that mourning and melancholia are more interwoven than Freud had suggested in his first account.
46
Indeed, in his later text,
The Ego and the Id
(1923), Freud himself agreed that the process of identification remains an enduring aspect of mourning, and is indeed intrinsic to the formation and strengthening of the ego, which can be seen as ‘a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes’.
47
Almost a century later, the Lacanian psychoanalyst Darian Leader returned to mourning and melancholia in his overview,
The New Black
, finding from his research that, surprisingly, analysts themselves have written comparatively little on the psychology of mourning since Freud. In Leader’s view this is because unhappiness in general has been swallowed up by the all-encompassing talk of ‘depression’ and accompanying popular discourses of its supposed opposite, social wellbeing, and by extension, the desire to live agelessly.
Underpinning both of these hopes is the idea of everybody’s ‘right’ to remain ‘productive and happy’ throughout their lives, indeed their social obligation to do so, as a form of ‘mental hygiene’.
48
Others, including the feminist cultural theorist, Sara Ahmed, have similarly criticized the rhetoric of the burgeoning ‘happiness industry’, with its bizarrely labeled ‘hedometers’, telling us, for instance, that those who conform most to normative expectations, usually via marriage, jobs and more, score highest on their happiness scales. Within this framework, people’s self-reporting of happiness is also thought to tie in with
brain mechanisms involving, in particular, serotonin uptake, described as providing ‘the chemistry of well-being’.
49
This science has even come to influence British government policy, as Richard Layard notes in his book
Happiness: Lessons from a New Science
.
50
Reduced to a medical matter, the shortest route to turn around the reported escalating rates of depression globally is therefore seen in terms of the hopefully quick fix of biochemical or behavioural changes, via drugs or cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT). In this diagnosis of depression and its treatment, any details about its background in mourning and loss are largely absent. Another problem with this medical literature on depression is its exclusive focus on the individual. Yet, as others have noticed, mourning was traditionally more of a collective practice, involving extensive rituals that console and comfort the living. These are ceremonies that publicly celebrate the memories of the dead, symbolizing the breaking, and sometimes partial remaking, of the ties between the living and the dead. In one of his late works, the eminent French historian, Philippe Ariès, for instance, argues that Western society has become increasingly afraid and ashamed of death, especially after 1945, since when death has been almost banished from our daily lives, thereby reducing mourning and grief to a personal and specific ‘morbid state’ to be shortened and erased as fast as possible.
51
This elimination of public ritual, evident in both Protestant and secular traditions, can make dealing with grief and loss all the more difficult, perhaps partially accounting for the prevalence of depression today.
Those most critical of the biochemical and cognitive approaches to happiness and depression, such as Leader and Ahmed, would emphasize the need to understand the complexity of emotions, and their background and context. Joining their
number, Stephen Frosh, in his short book,
Feelings
, suggests that happiness scales appear to be measuring primarily forms of complacency and self-satisfaction, in short, the determined refusal to acknowledge that a full life inevitably involves attending to pain and loss.
52
Moreover, exploring actual experiences of loss enables us to see that dealing with the tragic aspects of life has its own forms of creativity and value. ‘Unsettledness and dissent’, Frosh notes, is a way of refusing to evade the inevitability of loss, pain and political conflict in human relations, and of helping us to face up to our own finitude: ‘Perhaps’, he concludes, ‘we should never be able to answer the question “Are you happy now?” in the affirmative, if we really want to use feelings to construct the good life.’
53
The creative side of mourning may be less evident in clinical literature today, but it is certainly everywhere visible in the outpouring of literary narratives from every part of the world. ‘Could the arts’, Leader asks, ‘be a vital tool in allowing us to make sense of the inevitable losses in all our lives?’
54
Well, of course. The American poet, Mark Doty, who became one of the main lyricists of the bereavement gay men in particular endured from HIV/AIDS, writes eloquently on this: ‘Loss brought with it a species of vision, an inwardness which was the gift of a terrible time – nearly unbearable, but bracingly real.’
55
In a climate that prefers to banish death and mourning from the public realm, it has been the flourishing aesthetic rendition of grief that has provided the main outlet to help us understand, or perhaps try to express (if only to ourselves) the anguish of personal sorrow. There are a multiplicity of ways in which we feel undone and dispossessed when those we have loved are no longer there for us, or when our bond with them has unravelled, as in the memorable words of the philosopher Judith Butler:
‘Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire.’
56
Some narratives of mourning, however, lack the sense of process and progress that were evident in the reflections of Feinstein and Lewis, which apparently moved smoothly enough beyond the initial hopeless sense of the world as empty and existence as pointless. No one in my experience has managed to capture the repetitive, disjointed thought patterns of an abiding sense of futility, abandonment and suffering following a loss better than Roland Barthes. ‘The world depresses me’, he noted in a hundred different ways in the two years following the death of his cherished mother. The day after her death, on 25 October 1977, Barthes began making notes, often several times a day, recording his thoughts and feelings on index-sized slips of paper. This mother, Henriette, with whom he had lived for most of his life, was the single, reliably strong presence in his life; the one person who made sense of his existence: ‘Only
maman
was strong, because she was intact against all neurosis, all madness.’
57
For almost two years, in the long days and months following her death, Barthes’ words conveyed what others have often sought to portray as the puzzling patterns of grieving, its discontinuous but, in his case, never-ending nature, the stubborn sense of the emptiness, stupidity, pointlessness of the world one inhabits, even though, as Barthes wrote, he continued to function in it, apparently perfectly normally: ‘Today is a flat, dreary country – virtually without water – and paltry’, he wrote a few weeks after his mother’s death (53).
On the first anniversary of her death, things had not improved: ‘I feel dry, with no supporting inwardness’ (208). Barthes found consolation, not in the company of friends,
however sympathetic, nor in travelling to beautiful places, however exotic, but only when solitary, in the moments when he was writing, at least when he was writing about his mother, or with his mother in mind. Moreover, despite his grief remaining much the same – ‘I am
continually
, all the time, unhappy since
maman’s
death’ (124) – in composing his notes he felt he was transforming the work of mourning into the work of writing. The urge to evoke his mother, he felt, was a compulsion ‘to
make
maman
recognized
’.