On Getting Over It
You may have noticed that this blog and that my other blog at analogoffice.net have been fairly quiet for the last few months. Just as I started a new job last summer, my father became sick with cancer. A few months ago, it killed him. He had survived three different types of cancer before, with prompt and excellent medical treatment, and he was also, as my mother and one of his doctors put it, "a tough old bird," so we had some hope that we might at least have a little more time with him. (In the ‘80s a doctor had said to him, "Well, except for the cancer, you're very healthy." We still laugh about that one.)
We got far more time with him than we imagined, when the first of his cancers roared in, in the 1980s. Because of a brilliant British woman oncologist’s willingness to try a new treatment, his life was saved, although the colon cancer ate out enough of his bowel that he had to be innovative to fulfill his dreams of hiking the Appalachian trail from Georgia to Maine (he ended his trek in New Hampshire due to a knee injury), or do bicycle rides that were hundreds of miles long. (Which he completed.)
But we had forty more years with him than we thought we would. He got to see his children grow up, get married, have children of their own. He got to see his grandchildren grow up. Forty more years, far more than we expected, but still, not enough. We wanted more time with him, with us, all together in this world, in the present moment.
But yesterday I realized that in my memory he is slipping into the Past. When the loss was so immediate, it felt in a paradoxical way that he was still with us. My thoughts were dominated by his presence, and the incredulity I felt at his loss. I hardly stopped thinking about him. And now I am beginning to feel a sense of my own life energies beginning to move again, around the hard shell of this loss.
Here's my illustration of the grieving process, from an idea that someone shared with me years ago.
At first the grief is your whole world, you can't think of anything else. As time passes you gradually add more experiences and memories around the periphery of the loss, and the proportion of grief and life growing around the grief changes over time.
Notice that the size of the grief remains the same; it is only as time adds on more life After, after the thing that ripped through your psyche like a cannonball, that the grief seems eventually not to be all there is.
Here is the part where some might say that now you start to "get over it."
No.
I wonder if it is a peculiarly American expectation that when we survive a great loss, that we will eventually get over it. Get past it. Move on.
Whether it is a death in the family, or the loss of your sense of safety and trust in the world after an assault, or a diagnosis that tells you your life, or your child's life, will never be the same; whether it's the loss of a career that you drew the sense of your own identity from, or the loss of a relationship that mattered enough to turn your dreams from "me" to "we" — I don't think we "get over" or "get past" these losses that shatter our previous sense of our selves; losses of conditions and people by which we once oriented ourselves.
Here is my functioning body, here is my father, here is my career, here is my child, here is my spouse, here is who I am, and what I am doing, and where I am going, and who I am with — and the loss says, "BOOM: gone. Now, who are you, without this?"
We have abandoned in America once common rituals of public mourning, except for the candlelight vigils and bouquets and therapists that zoom in immediately after a mass shooting at a school. Or, do we do those vigils any more? I stopped following the news a few years ago, so I don't know.
No one anymore wears a black armband for several months, to let others know that one has lost something foundational; and that one is now in the tender and halting process of growing some new life around the hard exterior shell of the gaping emptiness. But perhaps it would be a good idea to bring them back.
So much of the language used in America about what happens after a loss, is language of restoration: When things Feel Normal Again. When we Get Past It. When we Get Over It. When we Move On. When we Recover. The yearning, the prayer, of please, oh please, let me Get Past This... right?
A wonderful writer who addressed grief whose name I do not now remember (but when I do, I will update this post to credit her) said something like, "We don't truly ever recover from a great loss. We return from it."
We return. We return at some point but we will never be the same as we were, before. Before the death; the layoff; the diagnosis; the rape; the house fire; the divorce.
I don't believe that we get over, get past, move on, recover from things that alter our sense of self. What we do, eventually, and often only after a fair amount of time and emotion has passed, is to return.
We don't recover. We return.
We don't move on from it, we don't move past it, whatever it may be that cannonballed through you.
It's still there, the loss. You will never be the same if you've had cancer, or a death in the family. You will never be the same after combat. You will never be the same after you are no longer a couple. You will never be the same after a doctor summons you into a private room to tell you something about your child.
We don't move past it, move on from it. We couldn't get rid of it , undo it, erase it, forget it, get a do-over, if we tried.
We move forward, with it. We move ahead, with it.
My father was not a starfish; he could not regrow the parts that had been cut out of him after the cancers, and that caused him difficulties all the rest of his life.
But he still hiked the Appalachian trail, solo.
He did not recover the body he had had before, but he returned from his ordeal a different person, a person who was still — perhaps more — faithful to his dreams of great cross-country adventure treks on foot and on bicycles.
I have never "moved on" from some of the losses in my life. I have never "gotten over" them.
But I am returning.
And slowly, moving forward.
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References
Dobelli, R. and Waight, C. (2021) Stop reading the news: a manifesto for a happier, calmer and wiser life. London: Sceptre.