A Grief Received by JL Gerhardt

Author:JL Gerhardt [Gerhardt, JL]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-5064-3420-9
Publisher: Fortress Press
Published: 2019-01-09T16:00:00+00:00

Mortality

Martha Whitmore Hickman writes in her book of meditations on grief, “To survive the death of a loved one is no guarantee of greater wisdom. We can also become embittered, reclusive, grasping.” She’s right; I’ve seen it happen, watched friends enter the tunnel of grief and never come out. “But,” Martha writes, “if we can weather the storm, we will have a better sense of who we are and what we want most in life.” I’ve seen that happen, too. Often, the people who are best at living are the people who’ve seen death up close.

In the novel A Happy Marriage, by Rafael Yglesias, a husband watches his wife die of cancer. He changes her soiled underwear. He picks out her burial plot. It’s a beautiful, exhausting book. As the story unfolds, the narrator alternates between past and present, showing us a picture of who Enrique (the husband) was before the cancer and who he is now, having come to terms with his wife’s death. The difference is stark. Sometimes he doesn’t see how much he’s changed. Sometimes it’s all he can see. As Enrique reflects, the narrator observes:

If we can weather the storm, we will have a better sense of who we are and what we want most in life.

Her illness had changed something basic in the mechanism of Enrique’s head and heart. . . . At long last, after decades of fussing, having watched his father die slowly, and now the mother of his children waste away, he was convinced that death was more than the nearest way to resolve a character’s story, that death was, in fact, real. He understood, right into the nucleus of every one of his brain cells, that he and everyone on earth would soon be gone.[4]

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