In Sane Grief

    I conceived of this subsection of my journals at the same time I decided it was time for me to commence some serious reading about grief, as I mention in this post at my regular area, The Mom & Me Journals dot Net. It's just taken me awhile to get going over here.
    My current plan is to write all my grief stuff, from here on out, in this area. That doesn't mean my main journal will stagnate. I continue to have a lot to write about caregiving and other aspects of my mother's and my journey. Those will continue to be posted in my main area. It just seems as though I'm ready to section off my grief, I guess that's the best way to put it, to make a distinction between my grieving and the rest of my life. I can't say what this indicates about my emotional state...for the time being I'll let others, if they are so inclined, speculate on that.
    Currently, these are the books I've either checked out of the library or already have that I intend to read over the next few weeks to months. I'm placing them in the order in which I intend to read them, although I've already begun reading three of them at once and one is already read but is in the stack for rereading:

1. A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis
2. How to Survive the Loss of a Love by Colgrove, Bloomfield & McWilliams
3. Treatment of Complicated Mourning by Therese A. Rando
4. On Grief and Grieving by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross & David Kessler
5. Nothing to Be Frightened of by Julian Barnes [which I own and have already read once]
6. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion [which I own and have placed last, saving it for dessert]

    Once I'd compiled the list and alerted my library to pull the first four from the stacks of libraries throughout my county, I was alerted, through Pallimed, to a series of seven articles on grief by Meghan O'Rourke at Slate. I was astonished to discover that most of the books she mentioned reading are books I'd selected to read, save for the playbook of Shakespeare's Hamlet, although I'm wasn't surprised at how she reinterpreted the play after her mother's death. When I'd studied the play in a college class in the mid-1970s the emphasis of the instructor was placed on a mourning Hamlet. O'Rourke's comment that after a cursory reading of Kubler-Ross' book she "threw it across the room in a fit of frustration at its feel-good emphasis on 'healing'" didn't surprise me, either. My experience with and understanding of Kubler-Ross' work is similar to hers. I checked the book out, though, because I noticed, when leafing through it at the library, that at the end both authors write about their personal experiences with grief. I thought that would be interesting. Also, although O'Rourke doesn't mention Therese A. Rando's book, article 3 in the series suggests that she probably has a familiarity with it.
    As I read through the series of articles I was intrigued by some of the concepts: finding a metaphor for death; mention of the Texas Revised Inventory of Grief, which I looked up and which amused me because it submits grief to an industrial-civilized test; the question of whether The Dying One accepts her or his Death. As well, I was attracted to the series because O'Rourke's mother died just seventeen days after my own. Upon learning this, there was an immediate and uncontrollable urge to "compare" my experiences with hers. As I read the articles, though, I realized that such comparisons are folly. I knew this, but, well, my autonomic brain is also a product of an industrialized civilization.
    Anyway, aside from writing my usual grief stricken posts Here instead of There, my plan is to react, explicitly and in writing, to what I read as I browse the literature. I'm not promising that I'll write any more often than I'm presently writing Over There. Reading and writing about death and grief isn't all I'm doing. But, I thought it would be handy and helpful (for me) to separate this aspect of my journaling from the other aspects. I may be adding books and articles, which I'll catalog here, of course. I may not read every single word of every single book. Primarily, at the moment, I don't expect to read either #3 or #4 in their entirely.
    One last note: The search engine for this section hasn't been set up or linked, yet. It will, soon, but at the moment it's not.

Labels: Grief Literature, Introduction, Slate, TRIG