This week: We’re talking about grief. It’s not exactly uncommon, but it something we should understand, especially at this moment in time. Here we go.
Anticipatory Grief
Grief is neither a new nor obscure word for me. Nor, I suspect, is it for you, Readers. Rather, I’m guessing we’ve probably all been dealing with a little too much of it for the past couple of years, which makes it a subject worth discussing.
In late March, 2020, an article called, That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief, popped up in my news feeds. I read it. I connected with it. And, because it is the decade that it is, I shared it across my social media channels. And it connected with a bunch of other people.
In the article. author Scott Berinato interviews David Kessler, an expert on grief and loss. Although the entire article was fascinating, what really struck home with me was the idea that we are not just grieving our losses - in March 2020, a lot of the real loss was yet to come - but that we were grieving ahead of the loss, we were grieving in anticipation of worse yet to come.
In 1992, during my junior year of high school, I took a psychology 101 class as an elective. It felt like I had been given x-ray insight into the minds of everyone around me. Every little quirk, twitch, and oddity of my classmates, my teachers, and my parents suddenly had a name and a diagnosis. With all the super-egotistical confidence of every 17-year-old, I pounded the bully pulpit at every opportunity with my newfound knowledge:
Every habit and routine were symptomatic of an underlying neurosis.
The human brain had a map and we knew how to read the coordinates.
If we could just get everyone into therapy, the whole world would change.
Time moved on and, well, the adult world kicked that confidence out of me, but I retained an interest in psychology and the brain. I knew that my understanding would remain rudimentary but I held fast to the idea that map being created by psychologists and researchers attained new byways and waypoints by the day. And so, when I read Berinato’s piece, it struck a chord. One more region of the map had been named and annotated.
One of the more questionable gifts of my particular brain chemistry is that I catastrophize like a damned champ. Give me any scenario and I can have us at a post-apocalyptic hellscape in nothing flat. On a good day, it is a nuisance I have to overcome if I want to get anything done. On a bad day, it leads to decision paralysis and inaction. It is something I am constantly working on.
March 2020 was bad. As the science came in and we all began to grapple with the new reality, my brain went into full panic mode. I had nightmares that my daughter would grow up an orphan because the disease would take her grandparents, her mother, and me…
If I’m being honest, just writing the sentence messes with my head a bit. But that, and other, similar scenarios, went through my mind on endless repeat for days at a time.
I did what we all did. I coped. I went on insanely long walks. I talked to trusted friends and loved ones. I wrote close to 100,000 words in my various journals. And, like you, I imagine, I kept as much as I could private. Even in discussing the situation with people I trusted, I kept my public face on. I kept pretending that enough science and rational discussion would find us a way through even while, inside, and at night, after the lights were out, I struggled with a profound sense of loss. Anticipatory grief.
Over the past two years, grief has become something of a horrible buzzword. We have gotten articles about generational grief, Black grief, gay and trans grief, migrant grief, grief over mass shootings, and, of course, pandemic grief. Hell, The Atlantic, one of my main sources of news has run four major pieces on grief just this year alone. They ran twice as many last year. And, really, who could blame them?
One of the best tools I have against my particular brand of neurosis is to name things. It’s one reason I’m so interested in language. When we can name something, it becomes less scary, less affective. Thus:
a: deep and poignant distress caused by or as if by bereavement
b: a cause of such suffering
And Etymonline:
early 13c., "hardship, suffering, pain, bodily affliction," from Old French grief "wrong, grievance, injustice, misfortune, calamity" (13c.), from grever "afflict, burden, oppress," from Latin gravare "make heavy; cause grief," from gravis "weighty" (from PIE root *gwere- (1) "heavy"). Meaning "mental pain, sorrow" is from c. 1300.
So. Grief1 stems from “oppress.” Grief is oppressive, it is a burden, it weighs us down. It persecutes and maltreats us, and, knowing that, we can be gentler to ourselves and those around us. Because, as ever, we are all walking wounded and all we can ever do is be kind.
Down the Rabbit Hole:
Let’s lighten the mood a bit with a hodgepodge of weirder sciency2 topics this week:
We start with this piece from science magazine Big Think, Homo sapiens is #9. Who Were the Eight Other Human Species? — I just loved this. I mean, I write science-fiction and I had a dozen ideas hit me just by examining the infographic…I wonder what would have happened if those other species had made it. Would we see them as kin or as competition? Depends on when we would have met, I think.
Well, it turns out that the deep thinkers at The Conversation had the same question: Would we still see ourselves as ‘human’ if other hominin species hadn’t gone extinct? — quick answer, we have Neanderthal and Denisovans DNA mixed into ours, so we probably would have gotten along with them pretty well.
Naturally, this begs the question, how close are we to getting a Jurassic Park full of other kinds of humans? Scientific American takes a stab at answering that question, at least partially, in the appallingly named, How close are we to being able to reconstruct the DNA of long-extinct creatures--dinosaurs, for instance? What kinds of technical hurdles do we need to overcome, and do the recent advances in cloning bring us any nearer to the goal?
With that settled, it’s time to ask what comes next? TechCrunch tells us that, whatever it is, it’s getting closer: The coronavirus has hastened the post-human era.
And there you have it — we revive our cousin species just in time for us all to evolve into something new. Only, Deep Learning Is Hitting a Wall, from my other favorite science magazine, Nautilus, says “hmm, maybe not?” Ah well, back to the drawing board.
From the Archives:
Nothing too profound or even all that related this week, but here are the four issues of Learned from March, 2020, most of which are about music:
Just for the record, etymonline also tells us that “Good grief” dates back to 1912. However, for me, personally, it dates back only 1981, when I spent my Sunday mornings reading all the Peanuts strips I could get my hands on.
It’s a word.
Joel, I enjoy reading these pieces. I take my time with them. And this articles resonates a lot with me.
I have been thinking a lot lately about grief from different spectrums. Recently attended a workshop by Susan Cain and Liz Mollie and they were talking about emotional granularity. Like how specific can we be with our emotions. I think when it comes to grief, it hits differently everytime.
I also seem to have read about our body storing grief (from the awesome book our body keeps the score), many mindfulness writers ask to avoid the news due to it.
What intrigues me is the idea of collective grief. (Is there a word for it? )
Overcoming it. (I think accountability and opening up helps a lot)
Also look for something called as Tonkin's theory : Growing around grief.