A Study in Grief

Good people are prone to grief. To feel a loss so deeply as to grieve is the lot of anyone whose worldview comes from a place of empathy, intellect, and imagination. We are students of grief, grief of various hues and hefts: loss of a loved one, loss of a friend, loss of a beloved place, loss of an ideal.

Last night I listened as colleagues and students said thank you and good-bye to four retiring professors from my already-bereft institution. We have known only loss for what seems years now, and our grief has all too often been partnered with anger at the incompetence and pettiness and coldness that precipitated some of those losses. Last night was more of a celebration of the ways these colleagues have enhanced countless lives, and there was laughter, but there were also tears. I know my tears were tears of grief.

I think of Elizabeth Bishop's sublime poem "One Art." She uses the word "disaster" to describe the loss that precipitates grief. For more than a year now, my country has been in the grip of political disaster. Each new disaster leaves us wondering, when will this end? That grief is inextricable from the personal. It is personal. To see and hear it plotted and planned and shrugged away every day by people whose capacity for empathy, intellect, and imagination has somehow been excised—to watch what seem like fully-functioning human beings design and facilitate and celebrate disaster...well, we grieve.

Ah, I had such big plans for this post. I was going to praise grief as a reminder that what was lost has transcended any verb tense. What was lost is lost and will always be lost and yet is, in memory, in imagination, in intellect, still very much present. But I can't do it. I can't quite believe that, as Wallace Stevens wrote, death is the mother of beauty. Beauty is the mother of beauty. We celebrate it despite knowing that we will also grieve its loss one day. And now, we live in times when to breathe is to grieve. At least that means one is still capable of empathy, intellect, imagination. At least.