We will all suffer loss in this world, and will eventually become the source of loss to others We lose parents, friends, colleagues, neighbors, dogs, cats, jobs, dreams, beloved spouses, even children. We look at the news and see the loss in others everywhere, some of it brutal and unexpected.
To a certain extent, how we grieve affects how we live, whether we can move forward, whether, some psychologists say, we can be creative and fulfilled. Armand D’angour, a classicist and psychotherapist, believes that the ability to process grief actually helps explain the great outburst of creativity that marked ancient Greece and other places.
“The inability to acknowledge and mourn loss is apt to lead to a shutdown of vital creative impulses…only the resolution of loss allows for a fresh start and renewed access to sources of creativity,” he writes in his book The Greeks And The New.
It’s a striking statement. D’angour suggests that mourning, the fully conscious and authentic encounter and processing of loss, is not only essential to mental health but for our creative selves as well. The Greeks knew how to accept and process grief.
It isn’t so much that people suffered – we all do and will – it’s how we suffer, and whether or not we are able to give rebirth to ourselves and move forward.
Some suffering – the loss of a spouse or parent or child- is all too real and authentic. Some suffering is what psychiatrists call neurotic, that it is, it is based on anxiety and fear that is not justified or is not considered legitimate.
The famed psychologist Carl Yung defined neurosis as a “substitute for legitimate suffering.” The Greeks were not neurotic. They suffered legitimately and repeatedly, and in many ways. Perhaps they knew what John Adams meant when he wrote two thousand years later that “genius is sorrow’s child.”
I first encountered the term “legitimate suffering” when I wrote my book Going Home: Finding Peace When Pets Die, and spent two years talking to social workers, vets, psychiatrists and psychologists about the epidemic growth of intensive and sometimes extremely long periods of grieving that follows the death of dogs and cats. They used the term often to define the difference between grief that is healthy and appropriate and grief that suggests emotional issues beyond the loss of a pet.
Psychologists like Jung defined “legitimate suffering” as grieving that was acknowledged, processed and treated, and that permitted the sufferers to move on and resume their lives, creative and otherwise. The people I talked to for my book research – animal lovers and vets and psychologists especially – believed that in the case of animal grieving, this was historically a loss that permitted people to grieve and move on.
Dogs and cats, unlike people, do not live very long and can be replaced. In modern times, as our love and need for pets has grown, moving on has become much more difficult for many people.
The people who live and work with animals seem to me to have accepted the death of animals, the people who live with pets have a more difficult time.
Some people, I was told again and a gain, may need help to let go of their grief. It is very difficult for people to accept that extreme grieving for animals may not only be about them, but also about other losses in their lives. The death of a beloved pet can trigger those feelings, even obscure their source.
Once, animals lived on the periphery of our lives, now they are at the center of our emotional beings, they sleep on our beds, we call them our furbabies, we seek to follow them across that Bridge for all eternity.
When people cannot process their grief and eventually find a way to let go, this can, in fact, sometimes be a symptom of neuroses that are not related to the animals. I learned in my hospice work that this can also happen with the loss of people, or jobs, or other traumas. But the death of humans tends to be acknowledged and processed, there is simply more awareness of it and more help and treatment available.
The University of Ohio Veterinary School found grief over pet loss so acute now that they created a program of veterinary social work to train social workers to join veterinary practices to counsel bereaved pet owners. Vets say they are overwhelmed trying to deal with grief, something they are not trained or really qualified to do.
I was surprised to find that many of the families I met in my hospice work were able to process their grief and move beyond it more quickly than many of the people I spoke with who lost pet animals. This observation was affirmed and reinforced by vet after vet, they had seen the same thing in their practices.
I began my book tour for Going Home in a midwestern city with 200 people in the audience. As I began to speak, I noticed that many of the people in the audience had tissues out in their laps and in boxes on their seats. They had come to cry. I opened my talk by saying I was not about to go all the across the country to speak to weeping people. We all have lost animals, I said, dogs and cats and others, and it was something we all shared.
Let’s be conscious of one another, I pleaded, not just ourselves. Everyone in this auditorium, the person on either side of you, has almost certainly lost a pet or even a person. We can all be crying tonight. If you need to cry, please do, I said, but I’d prefer you put the tissues away, you may not need them. I didn’t see many tissues during the talk, we actually laughed together quite frequently.
The Greeks and the Buddhists seemed to understand what many Americans seem to have forgotten. Grief is a part of life, it is inevitable, it goes everywhere life goes, and we will all face it, and more than once, and we will all almost surely be the source of it.
Because death is a taboo and heresy in our culture and political life, we sometimes forget how close it always is and we sometimes have no idea how to handle it.
Although it always seems to be a surprise to us, nothing is more natural and inevitable.
It is one of the very few things we all share with one another. The experts say that the more we acknowledge it, process it, and learn to let go – in our own time and way – the sooner we can heal and move on with our lives.
I have to say I believe there is no such thing as illegitimate suffering, suffering is painful, for anyone who feels it, and is real, whatever the cause or source.
Two years ago, I changed the way I looked at the world. I became more and more conscious of the fact that we all suffer, we all know loss, we all have felt the awful wrench of grief. In my mind, I tell myself everyone has it worse than me, and everyone is united with me.
When I had my open heart surgery, I brushed against death and came to understand it in a differently. Perspective is fright’s child, too.
We lost two dogs a couple of years ago – Lenore and Frieda, and also Simon the donkey – and I was startled by the volume of messages I got from people telling me in great detail all about the loss of their dogs and cats, not even mentioning or acknowledging my losses. Some spoke of pets that had died years earlier, and this did not seem healthy to me. I learned not to respond to the news of someone else’s loss with the news of my loss. I don’t want to steal anyone else’s grief.
For me, grief is private, not something I care to share on Facebook, or even much on my blog. Hospice work taught me a lot about grieving, it was good to learn.
I do acknowledge the grief I have felt, I did process it, and I have been able mostly to let it go, except for occasional moments that hurt. My grief for the people I have lost is very different to me than the grief I have felt for animals. Animals are not people, and I don’t see them in the same way, I hope I never do. And I admit openly that I have often loved the animals in my life more than many of the people.
I have learned to respect grief and take it seriously, I have also come to embrace the Quaker idea of celebrating life rather than mourning death. That has worked for me. We all have to find our own way. Suffering is, in fact, a part of life. Grace for me is defined by how we respond to that truth.