Grief, if it doesn’t kill you, can make you wish you were dead. Every grieving person is on life support. Grief walks through the front door uninvited, destroys the house like a drunk on a terror, and walks out the back door only when it is sure the damage can’t be undone. Anthropologists define grief as a change in behavior in living creatures that knew the deceased. That definition is so deficient that it deserves to stay in tidy textbooks. The real thing, unlike its painless definition, punches you in the gut so hard you can’t breathe and grips your chest in a stranglehold so tight that there’s no way your heart can pump life into your veins.
In other words, grief is not a pretty sight. It is ugly, messy, and bloodthirsty. It is not something that can be mopped up by a Walmart employee on Aisle 5. Over the years, I have seen many displays of grief, and each one has put a deep dent in my heart like balls of hail on the hood of a car. I have watched the mother of a 19-year-old man throw herself on his casket at the cemetery, hugging the cold box like it was the body of her little boy many years ago. I have seen a young wife carried in her dad’s arms from the grave of her husband like he did when she was his little girl. I have watched young parents bury a child with so many sobs escaping from the depths of their souls till I swear it felt like the ground beneath me shook with the same sobs.
Yet, among these and many others, one of the most haunting and harrowing and wholly human experiences of grief that I watched with a stunned silence took place many years ago at the close of a service for a young man who had decided to end his own life. The man was twenty-three-years old. He had graduated from college. I did not know him, but I knew his grandparents. I attended the service for them in their time of grief.
There are so many things wrong with a funeral service for a man in his twenties till nothing ends up being right. The air in the chapel was so thick with sadness till you couldn’t inhale a full breath no matter how you tried. The words spoken that day tried and failed to offer hope for a better day to a family that knew the worst day of their lives would replay in their heads like a terrible tune that you can’t get rid of. And any and every attempt to give solace was drowned out by sounds that simply could not have come from humans, so filled were they with torture and with desperation.
As the service closed and those who had gathered to support the family in their sadness slowly made their way from the chapel to resume their lives–something this family never would do again–the relatives remained in their front pew for their final goodbye. The funeral director solemnly stepped to the casket and began the step-by-step ritual for closing the casket for the last time, bringing the burial cloth over the young man’s face, and lowering the lid, and then securing it with a crank that locked it.
There was movement in the front pew, but it was not the expected exit of family members. The funeral director was called to the huddle and was handed an item by the mother of the young man. With a nod of his head, he returned to the casket, retrieved the crank, and unlocked the lid to deposit the item. I was not near enough to see what the item was, but I gave it little thought because I assumed it was something that the mom wanted her son to take with him, something significant for sure.
The item was placed beside the body and the director repeated the process of closing the casket a second time. Again, there was a movement in the front pew and again the director was summoned. He listened attentively, returned to the casket, reopened it, and retrieved the item, and, with trained dignity, brought it to the family. He walked to the casket and lowered the lid and locked it in place.
But it did not stay locked. Again, there was a commotion in the front pew and the family asked that the item now be placed in the casket as it had been moments before. So, the director did as he had been told, knowing better than most that grief does strange things. He recognized it as that uninvited guest that sits down at the dining room table with a family and within minutes has everything turn into a food fight. So, he showed no surprise when–within seconds–he was asked to open the casket and take out the item.
I was standing nearby and I was becoming more confused with each trip the director took to the family in the front pew. I knew that tension was building in the family like a slow boil of water on the stove. Even from my position, which was outside hearing range, I detected the drama was developing towards an undecipherable but dangerous denouement.
Honestly, I lost count of the number of times that the casket was reopened and resealed. A casual observer oblivious to the circumstances might think it was a Laurel and Hardy comedy, but anybody standing in that lifeless room where laughter was the last thing imaginable knew it was total tragedy playing out. And each time the item was either put in the casket or taken out again, it was clear as day that no rational decision could be made as to which was the right thing to do, which is cruelest of grief’s bag of tricks. It steals your sanity and sends you into a insane ward where everything and nothing are considered strange simultaneously.
Finally, a decision was made. The item went into the casket. It was closed and the family followed the casket out of the chapel to the cemetery where the young man was laid to rest. I remember it was a country cemetery some distance from town. It had rained the night before and our feet bogged into the mud as we made our way to the grave site. As I watched my shoes sink into the wet mud, I felt again that nothing was right about this day, as if earth and sky had conspired to produce nothing but darkness, dampness, and dread.
Some days later, I had the opportunity to ask the director about the unusual drama that had occurred in the chapel. I was both curious and confounded. Even with my years of experience, it was something I had not seen in any similar situation of grief. When the director explained to me what the contested item was, I better understood why it had caused such distress on an already disheartening day.
He explained to me that the item was a videotape of the young man’s wedding. The man had been married for just a short while when his wife decided she wanted to divorce him so she could be with someone else. The divorce sent the man to a deep and dark place, a place of despair and despondency. His family was sure that the divorce had been the reason he decided it was less painful to die than it was to live. Grief over the loss of his ex-wife literally had killed him.
As to the indecisiveness about the videotape going to the grave with the young man, the director explained that the mother argued that her son’s wedding had proved to be the saddest day of his life and she never wanted to see the tape again. She wanted it gone forever and put in the ground beside the man it had killed. The man’s dad, on the other hand, while agreeing the videotape of the wedding was an ugly reminder of the pain his son had suffered from the divorce and was the reason for his son’s suicide, said he did not want such a painful reminder buried alongside his son–especially since their son had wanted to escape that very pain. Mother and Dad could not agree on whether or not to bury the tape. Both, it seems, were right.
So, it was with that battle of wills that the funeral service had ended. As I said, the videotape was buried with the young man. The mother’s desire never to see it again prevailed, although it was a Pyrrhic victory where there are no winners. I suspect the father finally gave in to his wife’s demand because he already had lost too much. He did not want to lose his wife as well.
I remember that young man’s death. I remember that awful day of his burial. And I remember the soul-searing grief that found its expression in a videotape of a young man on his wedding day, a videotape that showed him–I am sure–with a big smile on his face, with the love of his life on his arms, and with a future full of promise. I understand why no one would want to see it again. There have been times since then that I have thought about this man’s dream that became a nightmare, and I ask myself–if the decision had been mine–would I have put the videotape with him in his final resting place. I still don’t have the right answer.
Psychologists who study grief have learned that the emotional pain of loss triggers the same part of the brain that physical pain does. A scan of brain activity cannot distinguish between the two types of pain. So, when a person who has suffered a horrible loss tells you that it feels like his or her heart is breaking, it is absolutely true. We may want to remember that truth the next time grief comes knocking at our door.
As I watched the grief of those parents, I saw physical pain. And I am just as sure that their son felt a real break in his heart when his wife divorced him. The lesson, I suppose, is that love should be wrapped in yellow caution tape.
— Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 