Love Learned Through Pain: On Why We Need to Record and Respect Grief

October 25, 2024

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I have never accomplished anything of greater dignity in my life than seeing my mother properly buried and formally mourned.

She swallowed a bottle of pills and her head hit the floor. It was November 2022. She had left a note.

When her soul left this world I somehow felt it: suddenly I was filled with an unaccountable levity, a pervading sense of love, and oneness with the powers that organize the universe and the realities of this world.

I felt lifted out of chaos, into a godly sense of trust.

The morning of the day she would die I awoke in deep, ragey grief, of the kind I didn’t remember having felt since I was in my early twenties. It was a bodily sense of injustice, as though the world were devouring me and every person and thing I had ever loved, swallowing us whole—as though my very breathing were actually a mechanism by which I was being digested and pulverized by times that cared absolutely nothing for me.

The morning of the day she would die I awoke in deep, ragey grief, of the kind I didn’t remember having felt since I was in my early twenties.

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Pablum, bad songs repeated over and over, the nasal voices of pundits on TV, meaningless weather reports, the vicious self-trivializing language imposed on my generation, or was that the language we chose, the sense of my love being smothered and obliterated with every breath I took.

When I was younger, before I had found my way in language, a little ways deeper into poetry, I used to feel a choking feeling—every day.

In the first years of my mother’s homelessness, this was how it felt to watch my mother–through whose body I had learned the world–be abandoned by every person who had ever loved her.

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Except my brother and me.

But also me.

To watch her turn, day by day, into the monster of her own mind and body. To watch her even turn against me.

To watch her become the walking symptom of what had happened to her parents. To watch her be hurt, but also, destroy herself.

Whatever I might manage to say on her behalf, whatever I may ever have said has been too easily said and too much of a cliche, at this point, to do justice to: my mother’s parents had survived genocide and my mother, unlike the other children of Holocaust survivors she had grown up around, had not gotten over it.

We are witnessing a genocide now.

Well, we are not exactly witnessing it. We are also trying to hide from it.

And nothing “we” say has been worthy of its magnitude, or accomplished much beyond the symbolic, to stop it.

It.

It is moving through our nervous systems as images we avoid, as images we cannot escape, and as a torrent of rage and loathing, helplessness and cruelty, in the form of language that—the language too—runs through our minds and flows through our veins.

And we are paying for it. And we don’t know what to do about it. We claim to but we don’t.

I am using what I call “the despicable we” I always warn my students against:

The we of forced collectivity, the we of complicity. This “we” is not literary.

This “we” is an expression of political dismay. Of spiritual decay.

I should speak for myself.

All I could do, morally speaking, in this time, the time between my mother’s death and the war, has been to write and study.

To witness without witnessing, to pay without consenting, to be at war without strictly being at war, to “enjoy” relative safety while being devoured inwardly, to move through a torrent of pieties and syllogisms devoid of strategy—

Those of us not burned alive in our tents, those of us who want nothing to do with politics in the first place, those of us in love with the aesthetics of revolution, those of us whose mothers weren’t schizophrenic and homeless, those of us whose grandparents weren’t gassed and burned in ovens—

Something, I feel, is happening to “our” soul: wherever it is touched by this onslaught of death, no matter how we may react. It is doing something to all of us, including and especially as we repress it, disagree with the stories told about it, disagree with the agendas and platforms oscillating around it.

“IT” is something “we” are swallowing, but we can’t.

We are living “with” it—and we can’t.

It is something we are seeing, but also must repress in order to live our lives.

People are leaving and entering this planet every minute. Every second, I remember thinking, on the day my mother died.

People are coming into this world and leaving it every minute, every second. I think this thought thousands of times a day these days.

And we want robot helpers and robot beauty. People cannot stand too much reality, wrote T. S. Eliot.

I would prefer clinical language, but allow me the privileges of intimacy: my mother lost her mind.

And because she lost it, or rather, because she would not give it up—because she preferred to be swallowed by her mind than this world– it made me a little different from my peers. It kept me closer to a catastrophe we had otherwise begun to think of as historical.

There’s that “we” again.

Perhaps every author is in some sense a dissenter to “we.”

Genocide takes generations to heal from, and we are watching one, right now.

At times I feel my soul coming and going while my body stays alive. At times I feel myself dying, and then I come back to life.

I didn’t intend to write Wave of Blood. But I was terrified that what is happening to us all, somehow running through social media into our bodies–a strange, cultural numbing—I was terrified to let this happen without leaving some record of what “it” all is also doing to me.

But this will hardly make you want to read my book. Except—

That the feeling of dying while alive is the feeling of going numb.

And I wrote this book to keep from going numb.

I am tempted to tell you something about grief, which is something of a taboo in our culture, but even the word grief is incommensurate, because it implies that the thing one is grieving has stopped. One can mourn and grieve the death of a parent: a process that can be magnificent, and actually, life-giving.

But to grieve an ongoing catastrophe is not easily done. It can devour and overwhelm you. It can make you crazy.

But not to grieve is worse.

I had no place to go with what I felt, when my mother died, and for that matter while she was alive, except to write.

No temple, no garden, no city, no friend—except all of them. I went to all of them.

I went to all of them, and all of them helped, but nothing helped enough.

Because what was happening to me was also happening to us, and we don’t only live on the foods of this earth and its buildings. We live in and through the minds of those who came before us.

And increasingly, also, through the minds of those around us, filtering our being through the absorption of performance, algorithms and the will to appear in any and every way better, more healthy, and more moral than we are.

For all I know there may be good in this, more than I can see.

Marguerite Duras had kept a record of World War Two and published it, and it was through her capacity to write through a singularly tormented time that I was able to breathe a little before I could begin to write myself.

Our life is visible—but it is also invisible. Pain and rage, the way they grip the throat, the organs in the guts: these, it often seems to me, are our real legislators.

Somebody should make a record of it!

Because we are not data points, nor are we merely our races and the stories our races tell about themselves and others.

Because life, also, to quote Madonna, is a mystery. Of terrible, trivial, majesty.

“Science must not replace pain,” writes Etel Adnan in a line I chose for the epigraph of my book, “because when that kind of a catastrophe happens, it has no mercy.”

I feel I am watching us abdicate our humanity and I feel the temptation to robotic numbness all the time, in my own body.