On Grief

What, by this stage in the existence of human life and its endless capacity for self analysis, is there left to say about grief?

Quite a considerable amount, it turns out. I've had cause to think about grief lately, in particular how, despite its total ubiquity - we all lose someone and are destined, one day, to ignite our own network of bereavement - grief is something we are not well practiced at talking about as a society.

Maybe this is because grief remains simply difficult to talk about, not just because it contains emotions which are large and mysterious, even to those experiencing them, but also because their largeness and that mystery often seem to exist in the misty terrains which lurk beyond language.

Or perhaps it's because grief is also difficult to listen to, the grieving seeming to hold a strange alien wisdom, one with a transformative quality, which the non-grieving have little ability or mettle to share. Who would choose willingness to step into grief’s depths, so murky and unsavoury? Who could ever be sure of the footing?

Those few opportunities we allow ourselves as a society to discuss grief, and the language we use, often seem to fall far short, lapsing into homily, cliché and angst. Talking openly about it, while we all acknowledge it to be hugely important, also feels impossible in its enormity.

In my experience I've found grief to be a kind of religious experience. I don't mean that I feel the urge to attend church or now believe in God. But that strange alien wisdom, it’s undeniable: there's something revelatory in experiencing grief, particularly, at least for me, in knowing that the feelings it brings with it aren't unusual. In fact grief is one of mankind's most common set of emotions. The realisation of this, the magnitude of it, inspires a profound feeling of connectedness with the rest of the world - I find myself dwelling on all those who have lived, grieved and died in the past and those yet to undergo this process, the untold billions of individuals - and an understanding that we all exist in a state of outrageous vulnerability.

It's this uncanny wisdom which I think separates the grieving and the non-grieving: in the aftermath of the death of a loved one everything becomes suddenly revealed as almost impossibly fragile, the world and its inhabitants so endangered, existing seemingly on a whim, and the fact that we continue about our days - buttering our toast, washing our cars, changing our sheets - feels like a kind of lunacy in the shadow of this terrible, jolting knowledge.

In the days after I lost someone, I found I was in a kind of state of wonder that this is simply how it is, that all those who surround us - infinitely complicated people with their rich myriad thoughts babbling like a fountain through their heads - will terminate, ceasing to exist and taking all of that with them into oblivion. Yes, we leave much behind the stuff that makes up the world - memories, lessons, the things we create, the changes we make - but that babbling existence, the stuff of life, it just stops.

Worse, there is a death waiting out there for all of us. For each of us there is a final day, and not just a final day but a nigh endless list of final things: there will be a final brushing of your teeth, a final eating of a sandwich, a final look through whatever window you're accustomed to gazing out of, a final time spent with those you love, a final song, a final word, a final thought, a final glance, a final breath.

It lurks, your death, somewhere in the darkness of the future, your own personal sniper, its eyes trained solely on you as you inexorably wander, blithe and defenceless, into its crosshairs. When you next make your way down a high street, or are queuing in a supermarket, or are at a sold out concert, think about that, really think about it: that each of those around you, all those individuals, without fail have this final moment drifting magnetically towards them. Each has their own final things lined up, their own network of grief primed to detonate like a minefield.

When dwelled on, the true scale of this induces a kind of delirium, a kind of horror: every office meeting becomes a tragedy, each children's birthday party a massacre. It feels unthinkable, both in the sense of being simply unconscionable - who would allow such a thing? - and in the sense that the mind shorts out when attempting to take in the enormity of what we all live alongside, and live alongside so intimately.

Yet this knowledge brings with it a kind of liberation. The bereaved are given an opportunity to harness the power that death can hand on to the living. In that moment you are up close against the roaring flame, the worst that can happen. Its pure and fearsome heat is unbearable, it threatens to blind and burn, and yet in its light you really do comprehend with a sudden, shocking clarity what is worth the time you have on the planet and what is not.

The amount of energy and emotion which appears to be given over to the unworthy will, for a time, leave you feeling like an outsider. But who cares, really? Grief is an invitation to simply behold that odd, widescreen vision of human connectedness. Your job is to carry back what you have seen to the land of the living.