The AfterGrief by Hope Edelman

Author:Hope Edelman [Edelman, Hope]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

A Story Takes Shape

THIS WAS my original story of mother loss, which began forming in my mind soon after my mother died. I have a different story about losing my father in my fortieth year, and other stories for subsequent losses small and large. But the story of my first major loss is the one that’s always held the most weight. Once you’ve carried your mother to and from the bathroom or kissed her cool, gray forehead goodbye, you can’t ever not have done those things. Once you’ve discovered that human existence is a time-limited arrangement and for some that time will be short, you can’t not know this ever again.

My mother’s early death saturated my worldview moving forward, set my early expectations for what others were likely to offer at times of distress, and became the narrative I returned to most frequently for reflection and revision as the years passed. That first death was the one that taught me how stories of loss develop and, later, how they change.

I don’t remember sitting down after my mother died and thinking, “This is the part where I create the story.” The process was much more involuntary than that. The human mind naturally gravitates toward the familiar comfort of narrative. Story, after all, is the vehicle through which we think, imagine, build relationships, make sense of our experiences, and form our identities. “Narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society,” philosopher Roland Barthes has said. “It begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative.”

A hunger for story echoes throughout every day. “How did work go?” “What did you do at school?” “What symptoms did you notice and when?” “What happened to your car?” Birth stories, war stories, relationship stories: all narratives. Stories of setbacks, achievements, triumphs, surprises, and loss: more narratives. We’re surrounded by story all the time.

Almost as soon as an experience ends—and sometimes even as it’s unfolding—the mind gets busy arranging selected facts, memories, and events into sequences across time to create stories with identifiable beginnings, middles, and ends. We cast our gaze backwards, seeking out cause-and-effect relationships, blazing a retroactive path to logically track movement from there to here. This happened, and then that happened, which—oh, yeah—led to that, which made me feel this, which now I see helped me realize that.

Creating a coherent story in the aftermath of a death offers a sense of control over what may otherwise feel like a set of unmanageable events. “I was trying to gather information, that was my big thing,” says Evie, whose best friend died by suicide four years ago. “Because I felt powerless. I wanted to piece together the what and why. Who knew? Why didn’t anybody do anything? Was there a way we could have stopped it?”

Especially after a violent or random death, survivors often comb through memories and facts and details in their minds, looking for a point of entry where

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