Saying the Unsayable: A Short Discussion on Grief

In a world where life can so often involve many contradictory emotions and experiences, historian Maggie Mackellar left her academic post to recover from two deaths. Taking her two small children, she marooned herself in her grandparents’ empty house on a farm in the Australian countryside. Over time, she found not only a natural healing but a new life. On the 9 November 2010, Dr Maggie MacKellar addressed The Sydney Institute to examine love, grief and recovery while introducing her memoir When It Rains.

SAYING THE UNSAYABLE: A SHORT DISCUSSION ON GRIEF

MAGGIE MACKELLAR

I was having a coffee with a friend yesterday, this friend is an academic and has recently published a book on manners in Australia, and when I told her the topic of this evening’s paper she most rudely spluttered through her mouthful of coffee that I may as well stand here before you and say nothing – for that – in her opinion was the typical Australian response to expressions of grief. And on the one hand she was right and on the other she was wrong. She was right because we do have trouble talking about grief, as a society we want public expressions of private grief to be neatly packaged within the rituals of funerals, memorial services and appropriate lengths of time of remembrance, and this time should neither be too short nor too long. To generalize for a moment, we don’t cope well with public displays of emotions. We would prefer the stoic to the hysterical.

In Australia grief plays a different and perhaps absurdly significant role in shaping our cultural understanding of ourselves. For Australian history is a history dominated by grief.

But, my friend was also wrong because in Australia grief plays a different and perhaps absurdly significant role in shaping our cultural understanding of ourselves. For Australian history is a history dominated by grief. Unlike other new world nations whose foundation myths celebrate triumphant moments, Australia’s national myths are marked as moments of failure, sacrifice and death – such as the futile expedition of Burke and Wills, the swagman’s suicide celebrated in “Waltzing Matilda” and the senseless sacrifice at Gallipoli. Beyond these moments stretches a history of the earliest literary accounts of forced convict migration and the very real grief of unforced migration. Literary hero Henry Lawson died tragically and wrote with a dark realism of drought and despair and death and Dorothea MacKellar’s much recited “My Country” is strung through with images of drought and fire, famine and flood. From painting to fiction to films the image of the lost child is a powerful signifier of loss and disconnection with land and place.

Grief, like its component part love, is amenable to cliché.

This paper begins with the premise that grief is an emotional experience and process that is at once universal, and culturally and historically specific. In the context of modernity, one increasingly common response to loss has been to write about it. What I want to examine tonight is the affect of writing about grief for both the writer and the reader? More generally, I am interested in understanding the benefits and limitations of reading and writing about grief both on an individual level and on a national stage. Grief, like its component part love, is amenable to cliché. “The sorrow that knows no words”. “The labour of loss”. If grief makes us speechless, yet demands all of our energy, what solace can the written word provide? I first asked that question as a reader. Then I asked it as a writer, and the question shifted somewhat: in writing about grief, could I produce literature that transcends the delineated limits of grief-writing?

Grief has been defined in a variety of ways. In general terms, I will work with the Oxford English Dictionary definition: mental anguish or deep sorrow caused especially by bereavement, or bitter regret or remorse. It is also important to note that beginning with Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia (1917) and further advanced in the 1960s with the publication of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s On Death and Dying,(1969) (a small but profoundly important book which identified stages of grief), there are now a variety of contested clinical definitions, such as complicated grief, pathological grief and normal grief: (see Stroebe (2000) for an exploration of the helpfulness of pathological definitions in understanding grief.) Grief has also been identified as a fundamental component of being human, while others have challenged the idea that grief is universal.

History over the last fifteen years has turned its attention to death and bereavement through wartime and more generally the history of emotion.

Given its central place within the human experience, grief has been of interest to scholars working in a range of fields. These include psychology, which has increasingly tested hypotheses about the benefits of life-writing to the grieving process (Stroebe (2005), Bosticco, (2005); and anthropology, which has identified a plethora of grieving processes across many cultures and societies. Milton & Svasek, (2005), Irish (1993), Brison & Leavitt, (1995) and perhaps most famously Rosaldo’s 1984 study of a headhunter’s grief).  The emergence of interest in grief in these fields, parallels a development in literary studies, which in recent times has taken up the challenge of identify a genre called “grief writing” (Fowler 2007), (Dennis 2008).  Similarly history over the last fifteen years has turned its attention to death and bereavement through wartime and more generally the history of emotion. (Hawksley, (2009) demonstrates the increasing of awareness of grief to understanding the human condition.)

Historians have been especially interested in connections and disconnections between public and private mourning. Within the field of Australian history, war has been an obvious and rich site through which to explore these questions.  (Thus Damousi’s has worked on loss and trauma, (1999, 2001) Darian-Smith & Hamilton on memory (1994), Gammage (1975) and Garton (1996) on the emotional cost of war, Inglis on memorials (1998), Luckins on the interplay between memory and suffering (2004), Jalland (2005, 2006) on death, grief and the death industry). Indeed one could argue that in Australian history some of the most innovative and insightful work has been produced through this focus on the relationship between private and public grief.

There is also now a substantial body of work produced by scholars working within the wider field of the history of emotions. (Notable Australian proponents include both established scholars (Damousi, Russell, Luckins, Jalland, Hammerton & Thomson) and emerging scholars such Larsson (2009), Hawksley (2009), and Kevin (2010).) This is a field, which draws on other disciplines, particularly psychology, to liberate the history of emotions from an essentialist framework. (Scholars such Nussbaum (2001), Butler (2004), Gross (2006), Rosenwein (2002), Lutz & White (1986), Fitzpatrick (2004) have outlined an historiography of emotions in western history.)

When I first started work on this memoir there were very few modern literary texts that had something profound and wise to say on the process of grieving.

In previous work, I have considered themes of loss and grief, initially in scholarly writing such as Core of My Heart my Country (2004), which explored the relationship between a sense of self and a sense of place for women who lived on the frontiers of Australia and Canada.  The work explores the ways nature provides a source of solace and perspective, a theme that has continued to animate my thinking and writing. Strangers in a Foreign Land (2008) touched on these themes as it examined letters written by mothers to their children a world away in England, the words of an Aboriginal man who begged to be allowed back to his homeland, and hardened settlers who sought a connection back to the old world by writing journals to send to friends and relatives.  Most recently, I have written an autobiographical narrative on coming to terms with grief in my life, When it Rains (2010)

When I first started work on this memoir there were very few modern literary texts that had something profound and wise to say on the process of grieving. Simone de Beauvoir’s A Very Easy Death stood out as did C.S Lewis’ A Grief Observed, more recently I had read Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking. Of course there were innumerable self-help books but there seemed to be very few genuinely intellectual explorations of grief.  In the last few years the publishing pendulum has swung the other way and there would appear to be a queue of books about dying friends (Helen Garner), lovers (Virginia Lloyd), mothers (David Rieff), the list goes on. Some have argued this publishing phenomenon is a simple result of the baby boomer generation reaching an age where grief, death and loss have become preoccupying themes.  But I don’t agree. Listen to these words written by the ancient Greek poetess Sappho.

Sappho shows us writing about grief, death and loss has been around as long as words have been written on pieces of parchment.  She also shows us that silence, as a receptacle for grief is not a modern idea.

I simply want to be dead./No grove, no dance, no sound,

Fragments of Sappho, 94.

Sappho shows us writing about grief, death and loss has been around as long as words have been written on pieces of parchment.  She also shows us that silence, as a receptacle for grief is not a modern idea. Likewise nothing has changed for the reading public to be hungry for these stories. At last year’s Sydney Writer’s festival it was the sessions on grief, death and dying, which sold out fastest. But though it’s tempting to see this as arising out of some new public preoccupation with grieving it seems more obvious to say these themes are universal to life.  If these books are being placed in a session entitled ‘grief’ this does not so much signal something new as a new platform from which to talk about something very old.

Of course I’m seduced by these books, I read expecting to find a mirror for my own experiences and I’m eager for someone to have done the hard thinking and made the connections between what they are feeling and a more universal experience of grieving. But so often what these books offer is little more than a recount (often beautifully told) of the pain of losing someone special, of watching a loved one die. They chronicle the minutia of watching someone die and indeed they are often wise and reflective on the emotions, the physical experience of walking to the edge with a loved one.  But what they haven’t given me is anything beyond the descriptive.  What I was looking for was a resonance between the Sappho’s poetry – the bare simplicity of her words – “no grove, no dance, no sound, I simply want to be dead” and my experience of loss a thousand worlds away. In the same way Inga Clendinnnin wrote about illness, or Susan Sontag examined the metaphors we use to explain disease I wanted to approach my own experience of grief and combine the intellectual with the intensely personal.

I realise I’ve come home to stay. I have escaped the city and the pressure and I’ve rescued my children. But I haven’t left behind the grief.

Some context – a little chronology – a touch of clarification perhaps, so this trajectory is laid out. I am pregnant.  My husband gets sick, very sick, very quickly.  He dies.  Ten weeks later I have my second child. A boy. Beautiful.  I have a job as a lecturer in the history department at a university.  I publish my first book.  My mother helps me bring up these two children. Life starts to look possible. She enables me to work by taking over much of the childcare. My son turns two.  My mother is diagnosed with cancer. Ten weeks later she is dead too. I struggle on working full time. Without my mother I can’t keep going. I take some time off from teaching and return to the farm where my mother grew up and where I spent much of my childhood. At the end of my leave I don’t return to my job.  I realise I’ve come home to stay. I have escaped the city and the pressure and I’ve rescued my children. But I haven’t left behind the grief.

Here is a short extract from When it Rains which examines the interconnections between reading and writing about grief and my need for this to happen in a quieter landscape.

After I made the decision to take a break from the university, I carefully chose the reading material I would take with me. Instead of the latest in post-colonial theory, I packed pyramids of words written by those whom I hoped would be fellow travelers. I read outside my comfort zone, turning to the ancients to see if they had any greater sense of surety. Occasionally I tripped over a sentence and would be forced to lie on the floor. ‘I know one thing: all is grief for you.’ The scene is the dramatic climax to Euripides’ Heracles, written at the end of the Peloponnesian War, when Athens was defeated by its overblown ambitions. I had come across it in a recent translation by Anne Carson. Amphitryon is speaking to his son Herakles. Herakles has just slain his wife and children in a fit of insanity. The scene is bloody and desolate and Amphitryon’s words seem to cut through the madness of Herakles’ actions as he defines his son not by the murders he has committed, but by the grief he will forever carry.

In her essay introducing the plays, Carson asks why tragedy is so vital an art form. For her, the tragedy becomes a frame that can be put around our grief. Inside the safety of that frame the violent expression of grief and rage can be played out without “you or your kin having to die”. Nobody, writes Carson, wants to “go down into the pits of yourself all alone”. Instead, we are drawn to stories in which actors sacrifice themselves and dive into our collective darkness.

For me it is the act of writing that unlocks the frame. I pin my tragedy onto the paper and with the precision of an anatomist take a scalpel to separate memory from bone.

Her words strike a chord, but then a quiver runs through me and I’m forced to ask what happens when the players inside that created frame are not actors; what happens when it is you caught between grief and rage, when it is you who must go down to the deepest pit to search for the way to ascend to the light once more. What does Euripdies and his like say for you then?

Walking in the evening light through the heavy scent of grass broken by the heat of the day, the will wagtail sings his lament and the sound carries across the garden and down over the flat. I find I can ask these questions of myself from the safety of this solitude. Though I find comfort in Euripides’ plays, though they signal all I’m grappling with is not unique, they do not show me the path back to myself. The longer I remain trapped in Carson’s frame, the closer I come to erasing myself, and like Herakles, becoming defined by grief itself.

For me it is the act of writing that unlocks the frame. I pin my tragedy onto the paper and with the precision of an anatomist take a scalpel to separate memory from bone. Perhaps if I can peel the layers of skin from its torso, it will stop having the power of a dark shape in the night. By writing, I risk sacrificing my deepest intimacies, but by writing, I control they shape they become.

I’m washing my mother in the shower. She’s so weak. She gropes for the wall and shakes with the effort it takes to stand and let the water stream over her. It’s soon after her diagnosis and we haven’t yet gathered the paraphernalia of the seriously ill to help us through these daily tasks. In fact, her illness is so fast that by the time they arrive – the shower chair, commode, walking frame, the all-white utility anonymously attesting to our entrance into the world of the very sick – my mother is too ill to be at home.

But that day. That day I walked into her bedroom and searched for her. She looked tiny, unrecognizable from the woman I had left only three days before. Then, she was happily settling into her new townhouse, alive to the possibilities of the future. We’d sat in the courtyard and talked of the garden she would put in. We ate Thai food and drank wine. She talked about the colour of the kitchen cupboards, the splashback she would choose for behind the sink. She talked as if there were going to be a tomorrow. The next time I saw her, I watched her as she slept and I knew she was going to die. She seemed to age even as I helped her to the shower and washed her back.

I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to love her in this way. I wasn’t ready to help her as she died. The warm water sluiced over her skin and washed me too. I was shaken by the exchange between our bodies. In the cold feel of my mother’s flesh I met myself, as if death already stood beside us both.

I write these words and feel small, incredibly selfish, unable to be the person I’d always imagined myself capable of being. That moment in my mother’s bathroom defied the march of seconds and minutes and hours and days and years. Do you see that I met myself and was afraid? I was afraid my daughter would one day meet herself in me, and that there was no point in living, for time had already ordained my end. I stood and washed and wept, for her and for me and for she who follows.

How do we learn to accept that we are all flesh and blood and must die? How do we grow wise enough to realise that nature doesn’t distinguish between the deserving and the undeserving? How do we grow brave to face our own death?

It’s an ingrained habit to reach for words when I circle these unanswerable questions. I write as the memories rise up and then I ask myself, why commit them to paper? Do I write to seek the trace of life; to find the entrance, the moment it became something else? I seek words as I seek reality – in small bursts. Perhaps if I can shape the past, capture it for a moment, it will take a form I recognise.

How do we distinguish between an expression of grief and, a celebration of nationalism?

Now that I’m on the other side of the writing process I have found myself somewhat fascinated with manifestation of grief in public life and what is allowed and what is suppressed. As a nation we have an extraordinary number of public sites of mourning. The many articulations of a national shared grief surrounding Anzac Day began with the publication of Charles Bean’s history of this event almost from its conception (1921), through to representations in popular culture and marches, memorials, and pilgrimages. The complexity of these expressions raises the question: how do we distinguish between an expression of grief and, a celebration of nationalism? In contrast there are far fewer celebrated moments of indigenous articulations of grief. Sorry Day is one attempt to find new public rituals to come to terms with this grief. But these two examples of public grieving serve to raise the question – how do we negotiate these public sites of grieving without them being hijacked as political pawns.

For public grieving is important. I have partially framed my talk around cultures of grief to open a conversation on what public mourning is really about. And in a round about way it brings me to the public/private paradox that exists in writing about grief. So many people have responded to my book. Many people have asked me how I could publish something so personal.  Yet I don’t think of what I have written as personal. Or, perhaps more accurately I didn’t think of it as such when I was writing. This may sound odd given the  – subject matter. And I did have to examine very carefully my reasons behind publishing.

Yes I wrote for me, I wrote to order what had happened to me. But then I edited, read, rewrote, edited, read more, thought more not for me, but for an audience. And what I aimed for was a universal expression of what happens when we suffer loss, experience grief, or try and reclaim our lives from the innumerable large and small tragedies that afflict all of us. But if in this process I allowed myself to think of an audience if I thought of how the ‘I’ that I’d created upon the page would be perceived then I would stop.

What I thought I was revealing was not me, but every grieving mother, wife or daughter, son, husband, father.

My brother, who is a musician, talks to me of that moment of connection between an artist and an audience – when the listener of music, the viewer of photography or the reader of books recognizes themselves in the expression of art.  While I was writing I thought about this exchange.  Though this moment feels unmediated, authentic, natural even, it’s most definitely not.  But it is an exchange and this, when I allowed myself to think about writing for an audience was what I strived toward.

Since the book has come out I have been inundated (most beautifully) with letters, emails, and messages from people who have read and been touched by my story, or perhaps more accurately the way my story resonates with there own. They write and say thank you for baring my soul. And I guess on the one hand I have. But here’s the contradiction because, what I thought I was revealing was not me, but every grieving mother, wife or daughter, son, husband, father.

As a society we need to grieve collectively. But what is harder to acknowledge is that public expressions of grief carry a cultural agenda. There is a smaller quieter space available to mourn someone who dies from a mental illness than the more public outpourings of collective loss when you mourn someone who dies from a heart attack or cancer. Our lack of language to talk about these differences only solidifies these silences.

What talking about grief in public has confirmed for me is that grief is at once specific and universal – people have wanted to thank me for speaking about grief, but they also want to share their specific story. When I first grief stricken I did experience the sensation of having no words to say how I felt, of being separated from society, of knowing people didn’t know what to say to me, that is that my experience at that moment was unspeakable. Now I have shaped my experience into words and this in turn has opened up a conversation, a space in the silence for other to speak of their grief and that I hope is a good thing.

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