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Silver Damsen
grief
Grief is arguably life’s greatest source of stress and
turmoil. Our relationships with others play impor-
tant roles in the development of our identities,
and when those people are lost, we can feel as if we,
too, are lost, unsure of who we are and how we will
continue to function in a world that seems to have
changed irrevocably. Grief, in short, is the mourning
of a loss, usually the loss of a loved one but easily
expanded to cover any loss that represents a core part
of our lives. The loss of careers, mental or physical
health, and pets can also trigger the difficult grieving
process. This process is often disorderly and confus-
ing, throwing the mourner into a whirlwind of emo-
tion over which he or she has little control. Unlike
other stressful emotions, grief carries such power
because it calls into question how the mourner finds
meaning in life. An important loss can induce us to
feel that life has no meaning, because every facet of
our lives—every memory, every sound, every ges-
ture—reminds us of what we have lost.
One of the difficult parts of the grieving process
is putting what we are feeling into words, not just
to explain our thoughts to others but also to under-
stand what we are feeling ourselves. Literature, then,
is an invaluable tool for expressing grief. Literature
can employ figurative language to go deeper and to
convey indescribable emotions in a way that plain
language cannot. Art is one of our most valuable
tools in life for expressing that which we cannot find
the words to explain.
In fact, literature, especially poetry, has his-
torically helped people to work through their grief.
Elegies, poems written to commemorate a person’s
death, can be great sources of solace and under-
standing to those in mourning. That we might need
the help of poets in understanding our grief process
has been long understood in the psychiatric com-
munity. Grief, by its very nature, disrupts us, places
us at a loss for words. In fact, early on grief was
thought of as a “psychiatric disorder,” and indeed
there is evidence that grief can induce physical
illness in mourners (Gilbert 255). The standard
symptoms of grief are bodily distress, guilt, hostility,
a preoccupation with the image of the deceased, and
the alteration or loss of normal patterns of conduct
(Kamerman 66). It is these last two that make grief
so disruptive to the functioning mind. Because we
are preoccupied with the image of the lost loved
one, we find it very difficult to imagine life ever
returning to normal. C. S. Lewis, in his chronicle of
the loss of his wife, says, “Her absence is like the sky,
spread over everything” (13). Lewis points out here
that there is not one time of day or one activity or
one occasion that reminds him of his loss, but that
the loss pervades his every waking moment. W. H.
Auden, in his poem “Funeral Blues,” explains this
well, saying of his lost loved one, “he was my North,
my South, my East, and my West / my working
week and my Sunday rest” (ll. 9–10).
Moving through grief requires a great deal of
hard work on the part of the mourner. The Aus-
trian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud noted in his
influential 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancho-
lia” that mourning takes time and mental labor to
“revive, relive, and release” (quoted in MacKenzie
131). Although Freud himself did not propose the
theory that the process of grief moves in stages, this
essay laid the groundwork for that now commonly
accepted theory.
The most famous theory involving “stages of
grief ” is that of the Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth
Kübler-Ross. Her theory actually deals with termi-
nally ill patients dealing with their own deaths, a
process that might be called anticipatory grief, but
she and others later realized it could apply to those
mourning for others as well. Although different
theorists have different ideas about the stages, ingrief 43