Good Grief
January 26th, 2008
So I just finished Ann Hood’s The Knitting Circle, which is one of a handful of books published in the last couple of years with knitting as this theme for recovery and connection between women, and it was a fast read, I got to cry reading it which was a little unusual for me, I think I needed the cathartic cry. As a sidenote, however, I have to mention the importance of proofreading, because when a character is in the hospital waiting anxiously for news of a sick loved one and the nurse offers to send in a ‘chaplin’ the image in my head of consolation with a cane and funny mustache is REALLY distracting.
Still, it was strange reading this right on top of Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking. Am I in a morbid place, needing to consider grieving from multiple angles (I am thinking of pulling C.S. Lewis back off the shelf and then possibly DVD’s that make me cry, Shadowlands and In America) and to be honest, there isn’t a lot of mourning going on in my life right now — I still think of my grandmother frequently, but more with surprise that I cannot write her a letter and rationally expect a response. But it may be thinking about the NPR interview with Eric Weiner, author of The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World, where he mentions this advice he got in Bhutan, that to be happy, one must set aside a few minutes each day to think about death. My own death does not freak me out, much, I think, at least compared with the unthinkable thoughts of the possibility of the death of people I love. Unthinkable, and yet it’s impossible to read a book like the Knitting Circle without thinking of it.
I remember in prenatal yoga someone saying that the work of motherhood is worrying, and certainly part of the job is to be aware of all of the potential dangers you must protect your children from. But that’s not exactly what I am thinking about. I am thinking about the weird taboo of grief, how we pretend it will never happen to us despite its inevitability, about our own loss of words when someone we care about experiences grief. I don’t know whether I worry more about being unable to withstand grief when it comes or about coming through it. But experiencing it in the tiny degree that I do when reading books that detail the experience does seem to deepen my appreciation of the happiness around me right now without extending the illusion that any of this is permanent.
