In Sane Grief

...I wrote very early this morning at the main journal, something I forgot to mention:
    While I was waiting in line at the Post Office, yesterday (always try to avoid the post office on the Friday before Mother's Day), to requisition a U-cart for transporting (Mom's and) my food donations to the managing office, I noticed a display of the two types of Passport applications and, having nothing better to do and being in a line of people who didn't seem particularly amenable to casual chat, decided to peruse a copy of each (application in person and application by mail). Strange but true, although the geographical parameters of my life range over half the globe, including crossing U.S. political borders, I've never needed a passport so I've never had one. As I read the application an alternate mind-track teased me with travels in and out of the U.S. that I've considered since December 8, 2008: Wandering the world to research how elders are incorporated in a variety of societies; Seeking work and residence in a socially democratic country with a decent universal health care system; Learning a new language (several possibilities have arisen since Mom died and I'm continuing to investigate which to pursue first) then visiting the country in which the language is spoken in order to sharpen my skills; acknowledging and taking up the invitations of a few online journaling friends to visit them and their areas; visiting famous high rain areas like Milford Sound, New Zealand, and Mt. Wai'ale'ale, Kauai.
    Once I'd been admitted to the post office office (sorry, I couldn't resist the redundancy) I noticed a camera set-up through an open door into another area. After the impromptu Food Donation Celebration wound down, I asked the office manager about applying for a passport. Aside from reviewing the obvious technical information (hours applications are accepted, who to approach first, etc.) she offered me several helpful tips:

• Don't pay the post office for passport photos. They charge twice as much as the pharmacy across the street. Don't use a particular chain pharmacy, either: Their photos are often too dark to use. Just prior to my visit yesterday, she'd had to send away a family who had solicited photos from this pharmacy.
• If I'm planning any major change to my appearance [coloring or drastically changing my hair; plastic surgery; significant weight gain or loss; a tattoo within portrait range; having an ear amputated (she snickered at this one)], wait until my appearance has stabilized before having a passport photo taken. If I don't, I'll wish I had the first time I use the passport.
• No, I don't have to have a trip in mind in order to apply for a passport; if I don't, leave that section blank.
• Yes, Birth Certificates are returned relatively promptly and in fine shape. She's never had a complaint about this, although she's received anxious calls because "it takes awhile" to get them back. "For god sakes," make sure I copy it before sending it off.
• At this time, if you apply in person, stifle the urge to joke about terrorist activities. "You'd be surprised," she said, "how many people do this. We're obligated to note this on an application and this can slow the process," which, normally, takes four to six weeks.

    Although I'm sure the passport application display has been ubiquitous at our local post office since the USPS became an "agent of application" on behalf of the U.S Department of State, I think it is not incidental that I didn't notice it until five months, to the day, of my mother's death. I think it's also a landmark in my grief process. By chance, the Hospice Grief Counselor called me Thursday. As we chatted, I mentioned to her that between her last call and this one I'd begun to read through selected books on grief, especially pertaining to losing a spouse, since I identified more with this than with losing a mother. I also told her that, around the time I decided to do some in depth reading, I wondered if I might be a candidate for "complicated grief" and wanted to read more about that.
    "You're not," she said, and went on to clarify that people experiencing complicated grief tended toward silence. She didn't find it necessary mention that grief silence is not my problem. It's obvious.
    I told her that I was aware of this because one of the books I'd checked out was what amounted to a text on "Complicated Mourning" by Therese A. Rando, the contents of which clearly indicated that the chief hallmark of complicated mourning, blocked mourning, didn't apply to me, although I was finding the book extremely helpful in understanding my grief process. I asked her if she'd heard of the book. Only cursorily, she mentioned, but as we discussed the book I realized I hadn't absorbed as much from scanning through it as I thought I had. When our conversation ended I opened the book and reviewed its peculiar and distinctive definitions of, among other aspects of loss, mourning. Rando, in Chapter 2, which includes a section of "Definitions", Rando devotes a little over three pages to defining mourning, versus a little over a page defining grief. She distinguishes the definition included in her book from the traditional definition of mourning, "the cultural and/or public display of grief through one's behaviors", thusly: She emphasizes "the psychoanalytic tradition of focusing on intra-psychic work, expanding on it by incuding adaptive behaviors necessitated by the loss..." [all quotes from Treatment of Complicated Mourning copyright 1993 by Therese Rando].
    In addition, she devotes a majority of the chapter to a further, meticulous elucidation of mourning, including "The Six 'R' Processes of Mourning". As I reacquainted myself with these, I realized that my food donation experience, including my writing about it afterward, fell into a variety of categories:

• "Feel, identify, accept, and give some form of expression to all the psychological reactions to the loss"
• "Identify and mourn secondary losses"
• "Review and remember realistically"
• "Revive and reexperience the feelings"
• "Readjust to move adaptively into the new world without forgetting the old" [bolding SIC]
• "Develop a new relationship with the deceased"
• "Adopt new ways of being in the world"
• "Form a new identity"
• "Reinvest" [bolding SIC]

    Although I've listed these categories in order, my experience of them through this one experience was all over the map, another accepted hallmark of mourning: The processes, as observers of grief and mourning have labeled them for better understanding, don't happen in any particular order, nor do they necessarily end; they evolve, sometimes into another process, sometimes into a regurgitation and/or refinement of the same process.
    The main reason why I wrote the post to which the title above links is that, after yesterday's food donation episode was over and I was reviewing the experience, I noticed a new and distinct difference in the way I am handling my mother's death. It feels like a movement, although not necessarily along a grade like "better/worse", "higher/lower" "more/less competent". The reason I took note is that, previous to yesterday, I've experienced my grief process, for lack of a better analogy (although please assume that this one isn't exactly right, either), as centrifugally closed. Yesterday, I felt as though I'd begun to spiral...not out of anything, but to an area that, hmmm...allows me to reach for more...does that make sense?
    Specifically, yesterday was the first time since Mom's death that I "talked" to her for so long a time and with so much concentration. I didn't feel as though Mom was "there", in the same sense as I took for granted that she was "there" with me when she was alive, at home and I was out doing errands. There was none of the palpable psychic impress that her alive existence engendered in me when she was at home and I was not. She was, however, with me in a way to which the phrase "in memory" does only paltry, demeaning justice. I'm at a loss for words, here, but I suspect that other survivors will understand what I mean.
    It's the first time I can remember, too, that I've taken an "alive" and common episode in our lived together lives and adapted it successfully and joyfully into my present survivor experience. Finally, as I did so, I autonomically leapt from adapting an old experience to considering new experiences that have nothing to do with Mom's and my lived together life. It felt hopeful...not as though I was leaving anything behind but as though the world around me was widening in a way I hadn't expected.
    That's a Survivor's Mother's Day with which I can live. Gladly.

Labels: Celebrations, Complicated Grief, Grief Fantasies, Grief Literature, Grief Self-assessment, Life after Death, Mother's Day, Mourning Processes, Rando

    I conceived of this subsection of my journals at the same time I decided it was time for me to commence some serious reading about grief, as I mention in this post at my regular area, The Mom & Me Journals dot Net. It's just taken me awhile to get going over here.
    My current plan is to write all my grief stuff, from here on out, in this area. That doesn't mean my main journal will stagnate. I continue to have a lot to write about caregiving and other aspects of my mother's and my journey. Those will continue to be posted in my main area. It just seems as though I'm ready to section off my grief, I guess that's the best way to put it, to make a distinction between my grieving and the rest of my life. I can't say what this indicates about my emotional state...for the time being I'll let others, if they are so inclined, speculate on that.
    Currently, these are the books I've either checked out of the library or already have that I intend to read over the next few weeks to months. I'm placing them in the order in which I intend to read them, although I've already begun reading three of them at once and one is already read but is in the stack for rereading:

1. A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis
2. How to Survive the Loss of a Love by Colgrove, Bloomfield & McWilliams
3. Treatment of Complicated Mourning by Therese A. Rando
4. On Grief and Grieving by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross & David Kessler
5. Nothing to Be Frightened of by Julian Barnes [which I own and have already read once]
6. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion [which I own and have placed last, saving it for dessert]

    Once I'd compiled the list and alerted my library to pull the first four from the stacks of libraries throughout my county, I was alerted, through Pallimed, to a series of seven articles on grief by Meghan O'Rourke at Slate. I was astonished to discover that most of the books she mentioned reading are books I'd selected to read, save for the playbook of Shakespeare's Hamlet, although I'm wasn't surprised at how she reinterpreted the play after her mother's death. When I'd studied the play in a college class in the mid-1970s the emphasis of the instructor was placed on a mourning Hamlet. O'Rourke's comment that after a cursory reading of Kubler-Ross' book she "threw it across the room in a fit of frustration at its feel-good emphasis on 'healing'" didn't surprise me, either. My experience with and understanding of Kubler-Ross' work is similar to hers. I checked the book out, though, because I noticed, when leafing through it at the library, that at the end both authors write about their personal experiences with grief. I thought that would be interesting. Also, although O'Rourke doesn't mention Therese A. Rando's book, article 3 in the series suggests that she probably has a familiarity with it.
    As I read through the series of articles I was intrigued by some of the concepts: finding a metaphor for death; mention of the Texas Revised Inventory of Grief, which I looked up and which amused me because it submits grief to an industrial-civilized test; the question of whether The Dying One accepts her or his Death. As well, I was attracted to the series because O'Rourke's mother died just seventeen days after my own. Upon learning this, there was an immediate and uncontrollable urge to "compare" my experiences with hers. As I read the articles, though, I realized that such comparisons are folly. I knew this, but, well, my autonomic brain is also a product of an industrialized civilization.
    Anyway, aside from writing my usual grief stricken posts Here instead of There, my plan is to react, explicitly and in writing, to what I read as I browse the literature. I'm not promising that I'll write any more often than I'm presently writing Over There. Reading and writing about death and grief isn't all I'm doing. But, I thought it would be handy and helpful (for me) to separate this aspect of my journaling from the other aspects. I may be adding books and articles, which I'll catalog here, of course. I may not read every single word of every single book. Primarily, at the moment, I don't expect to read either #3 or #4 in their entirely.
    One last note: The search engine for this section hasn't been set up or linked, yet. It will, soon, but at the moment it's not.

Labels: Grief Literature, Introduction, Slate, TRIG