Grief: A Reflection and Two Poems

For Mickey (July 7, 1938–December 27, 2021)

Reflections On Grief (written in December 2020):

In the November 22 New York Times, Jill Bialosky, still living with the grief of her sister’s suicide at the age of 21, takes issues with psychologists who say that lasting grief is pathological. The attitude is widespread in our “get on with it” culture. The American Psychiatric Association even classifies “prolonged grief” as a mental disorder. The APA defines the disorder as “intense pain lasting a year after a loss and an inability to resume past activities.” This is not only to shame “prolonged” grievers, but misunderstands the nature of grief.

In my experience, still grieving the death of my sister last December, “intense pain” isn’t a necessary characteristic of grief, and one doesn’t have to suffer a debilitating “inability to resume past activities” in order to be haunted by grief. Intense pain comes and goes with grief—I catch a glimpse of Mickey’s elegant handwriting and am overcome with longing for her—but most days, I experience the loss of her as a transformation—sometimes intense but mostly subtle—of my entire world. I may not still be wandering from room to room, sobbing over the items she left here on her visits, but nothing in my experience, including my perception and feelings about my own body, will ever be the same. A meteor had fallen to earth and created a “before” and “after” that can never be changed. The difference isn’t always blazing in my consciousness, but it is always there. This room that I am typing in is different, the kitchen that we cooked in together is different, my own skin is different. And some warm comfort and reassurance that I never realized I had felt from having a “big sister” is gone. I know it will never return.

Why, under such circumstances, should we think to put a timetable on ability to “resume” anything the way it was? In fact, the very idea that “resuming” means a return to some “before” is so existentially shallow that I cannot even wrap my mind around it. Writing has always a part of my daily life—but even more than that, a place of becoming who I am, of sharing that with others, of immense pleasure in finding words for thought.

This past year it became impossible to write. I suffered from the absence of both the struggle and the pleasure of it and the relationships it kept alive for me; in some ways I felt that absence harder than Mickey’s death itself. But in fact, they were one and the same. I needed not to lose myself in my writing. It felt wrong, not that some inner moral judge declared it a betrayal of my sister’s importance in my life, but viscerally. My mind still swarmed with ideas. But my body simply would not sit down at the desk and put words to them. I’ve come to realize my body, slowed down and reluctant to “move on,” was wiser than my always bubbling-with-stuff mind. It knew it was necessary for me to integrate the changed world—the “after” world—into the ideas and feelings that I give expression to when I write.

Bialosky writes that she considers “grief a forever thing. It returns in different waves of intensity, but it never fully goes away.” Rather, it needs to be given whatever time it wants to “become integrated into my mind and body.” That may be the rest of ones life. That may be what grief teaches us about life itself.

The tiny jar beside my bed

A tiny jar of things.

A few aging double-A batteries.

A safety pin; a tiny hook and eye set.

The shackle of a teensy luggage lock.

A binders clip.

The detritus of my overstuffed, chaotic kitchen drawer, now among some precious things you sent.

“Please, no more! My house is already too cluttered!”

But you couldn’t stop. Every antique store, every yard sale, every closet of your own was too full of meaning to pass by. A horse picture for Cassie. A Jack Russell for me. The little landscape simply for its loveliness.

And then she would come and prune.

“I can’t wait to get my hands on that study of yours.”

I sat amazed at her genius and her energy, as her eyes surveyed my chaos, ruthless in their craving for beauty.

“What you can’t find a good place for, put in a pretty basket.”

“See how different it looks now with that screen there?”

When I was young and chubby and freckled, unfashionably red-haired and “too sensitive,” you stood me in front of a mirror with your slender hands on my shoulders. “Look how beautiful you are. Just hang on.”

Decades later, my younger sister and I tried to do the same for her.

It wasn’t necessary to lie. At 81, her mouth was full and luscious, her eyebrows bird’s-wings still in graceful flight. Beautiful. Everyone saw it but her. She couldn’t look in the mirror and prune away the years of betrayal and neglect.

She came to me, that last visit, to be with me through a time of terrors.

Bizarre symptoms—my specialty—did not frighten or disgust her.

She calmed and stroked and listened and drove me to the doctor and ate lox and eggs with me.

She took small empty boxes and turned them into drawer-dividers.

Put every item in place, uncowed by my endless and unnecessary junk, she labeled and tended and discarded until I could look at my study and breathe.

And she left a tiny jar.

A few aging double-A batteries.

A safety pin; a tiny hook and eye set.

The shackle of a teensy luggage lock.

A binders clip.

A tiny jar, filled with the mystery and preciousness of Mickey.

If I could rewrite the story

If I could rewrite the story

I’d feed you from a dropper like a tiny bird

You’d lick butter off my finger

Fig jam, mashed matzoh brie

Your aching mouth would be filled with honey

Peck and squawk as much as you like

Draw blood from my finger.

I challenge you to make me go away.

If I could rewrite the story

I’d be a fearless mama

Staring down the steel and propellors of modernity

I’d grow my own wings and fly to you

As you flew to me.

If I could rewrite the story

I’d be a fierce mama

Keeping away all invaders with their chattering knowledges

Clearing the space for you

To tell me what you need.

If I could rewrite the story

There would be no sudden fall from the nest

No dark, implacable predator lying in wait

Our nest of three would be intact, covered with purple blossoms

Hiding us inside.

If I could rewrite the story

I’d still be looking at your graceful fingers,

The beautiful arches of your eyebrows.

¹Your lush mouth

Ageless and unpoisoned.

1. Note: I hadn’t intended to publish these here yet. But watching and writing about “The Bear” and reading your responses about grief on Facebook moved me to do so. My piece about that show could easily belong on this page too: