Sunday, I had two different kinds of encounters with grief. The first came at the new Northshire Bookstore opening in Saratoga Springs when a woman asked me to sign two copies of “Going Home: Finding Peace When Pets Die,” my book on grieving for animals.
Some time ago, this woman said, she had lost a cat who had lived to be 14. Something about her put me off, I sensed she wanted something personal from me, after all these years of signings, I can tell. And I understood what she wanted, as she pulled a photo album out of her purse and began to tell me the story of the cat, how much she loved her, how much the animal meant to her, how sick she was, how sad she was every single day, and she began showing me her photos of the cat’s life and death.
There was a line behind her, and the store representatives were getting anxious, and I understood what she was asking me, I have experienced this so many times before when some people want so much more than a book signed, they don’t care if others are waiting, it is a common occurrence in bookstore lines, every writer knows it. She wanted me to know her grief, to listen to it and share it.
After four or five minutes, she seemed to me to be getting less coherent, and pulled out more writings, diary entries and photos, and I very courteously told her there were people behind her, and I wished her good luck. Later, she came over to Maria and complained that I was not sympathetic enough to her, she guessed it was because I am more of a dog person than a cat person. Maria talked to her for a while longer, and then she drifted off, and came back in the line one more time.
Maria and I talked about it later, and I told her I simply could not give this woman what she wanted, she seemed so lost in this cloud of grief, she seemed unable to let it go, she seemed to me to have lost all perspective, andI felt as if she was pulling me inside of this black space and I just could not go there. When this happens to me, I tell myself to put it in the cup, there is a cup between me and people who want to dump their stuff on me, and I put it in the cup rather than take it inside of me.
Maria understood – she has seen this so many times – but I sensed she was more sympathetic to the poor woman than I was, she has never lost the precious gift of empathy. I have not learned this new idea of sharing my grief with other people, with strangers, not in bookstore lines, not on Facebook. This woman felt inappropriate, stuck in an awful place – this kind of prolonged and intense grieving is rarely about a dog or cat. I was thinking she needed professional help, not a writer in a bookstore line. it had just gone on for too long.
I was not yet done with grief on Sunday. At the store, I bought a book by Julian Barnes called “Levels Of Life,” (Knopf) and the book is a surprising, beautifully written and poignant work on ballooning, photography, love and loss – the last third is about the sudden death of his wife after 30 years of marriage. The book is wonderful, it combines fiction, history and memoir in one compact and wonderfully rendered volume. In the last part, I was literally blindsided by Barne’s very quiet and piercing devastation.
Barnes essentially is writing about what it means to be alive in the world, what it means to live, love and die and to suffer profound loss. This is one of the very few universal human experiences. Barnes is “griefstruck” and he captures the experience of grief with great feeling, detail, and command of language. It is a wonderful book for anyone who has dealt or will deal with grief – this is all of us. I thought of Barnes last night and of the woman in the bookstore – two different ends of the grieving experience, and it seemed to me they were both feeling much of the same thing, for very different reasons and coming from very different places. This woman was still devastated by the loss of her cat, and even though I had gotten impatient with her, her sense of grief was just as powerful as Barnes.
It was perhaps more comfortable for me to read about the grief Barnes experienced in my favorite living room reading chair, Barnes was offering his story for me to read, he wasn’t pushing a photo album of his dead wife at me. Was the distance the difference for me? At home, Red and Lenore were at my feet, my was wife asleep up in the bedroom, I cannot really even imagine how I might deal with the loss of her, but “Levels Of Life” got me to thinking about it, imagining it, picturing my reactions. I got me to crying downstairs in the dark just thinking about it – these tears brought Frieda, Lenore and Red all to my side at the same time, they seemed so concerned they quickly turned my tears to laughter.
I know in my hospice work that grief goes it’s own way, takes it’s own path, no two people grieve in the same way. No one ever knows how they will react to such loss, how painful it might be, how long it might last. I could never tell anyone to grieve, yet I felt very close to Barnes’s struggle with loss and understanding and acceptance of what it means to be alive in the world. He was observant, not complaining, he was sharing insight, not seeking sympathy. “We did not make the clouds come in the first place,” he writes, “we have no power to disperse them.”
The gift of the writer is that he or she can often find the words to pull them through the darkest clouds of life – my words have often pulled me through the deepest darkness – and the elderly woman in the bookstore could not. I could not give her what she wanted from me, I cannot take someone else’s grief nor give them mine. I keep the cup with me at all times. In the animal world and the human one, we did not creature the nature of life and death, we have no power to alter one or the other, to make one appear and the other go away.
