other|matters

The Art of Grief 9 April 2008

Before my father passed away many years ago, he lived in an hospital connected to a respirator for five months. Fully conscious, aware, and fatherly, it was difficult for him to accept the fact that he couldn’t breathe on his own.

Nearly every day of my father’s hospital stay, I visited him for several hours, usually in the evenings, while my mother took the longer day shift. He was never alone except when he slept at night. It’s still hard for me to imagine the startled thoughts he may have had when awakening alone in the dark to the sounds of an unaffectionate machine pushing and pulling air, effectively taking over a human’s first obligation in the post-womb existence. At times we thought he’d be weaned off the device, but after weeks of respiratory therapy that really didn’t work and when we saw “signs,” we knew the inevitable was approaching. It was a hard edge in time, a sharp turn in the narrative of his life. He himself felt the sensation of imminence; I saw it in his face. The meaning of our visits changed.

Sadness is ultimately a personal course that we each take, but there’s hardly anything more conducive to “community.” The grief-stricken, without deliberate thought, expand their sense of identity to a wider swathe of humanity. Commiseration and external comfort are part of the deal, but there’s something more, something revelatory to think about as the ship of human relations in the world continues to sink.

Our community was founded on an agreement so fundamental that none of us spoke about it in direct terms. We would pass one another in the hallway and ask how things were going, and we would either whisper the truth or communicate vague optimism. No one would ever challenge the false hopes of another. We all understood that someone important in each our lives was dying. This was a hospital floor with very ill patients joined together by the common disability of not being able to breathe. In this context and condition, the only thing we saw and acknowledged was our common humanity. Illness and death have the wonderful puissance of pulling us out of our cliques and things that divide.

We would each visit others families in their rooms, and we’d hear and see the same machines. One man, whose wife was connected—a young woman, compared to the others — often visited my father’s room asking about him and whether or not my mother needed some coffee or food. My mother’s scarf, common Muslim attire, never made him feel awkward or separate. And when my mother made her rounds to visit, the families invariably would ask her for prayers of well-being. It’s possible that they associated her dress with spirituality or, we’d often joke, they thought she was a nun.

Our sense of community ruled above all lesser concerns. What informs “community” and keeps it alive becomes apparent at certain points, however contained and temporary these contexts often are. It comes down to an agreement, a shared understanding of emphasis, a pattern of meaning that needs communication but usually not overtly stated, something set in symbolism, like art, no matter its form, even the art of grief. I realize that a hospital setting is temporary and confined to a few principles, but in that environment—however small and self-contained—we human beings need metaphor (something connected to a higher truth not containable in the material of this world) and usually find in the connections we make.

When someone is near death, someone whom we love and whose absence we painfully anticipate and, shortly, invite sorrow, spiritual effulgence pours forth and is profound, and, because of that, we are especially drawn to “community” and we seek it. It is natural—among the best of all natural things. There is comfort. Warmth. Love. But most of all, there is Godliness—the very stuff that the sent-down Books stress—which is drawn out in times of sadness and frustration, which apparently have appointed purpose.

We don’t really need a lot to understand important principles, like “community.” Nice-talk aside, to grasp a sense of the whole, we only need to see a “part.” It’s a merciful path to learning. But the postmodern world and ethos, which seemingly flow in our veins, discount the possibility of a common and unalterable human narrative.

From the tradition of prophetic learning: Look for wisdom, and wherever you find it, it’s yours. In other words, you own it. Truths do not need heraldic processions, and often they come unannounced and unadorned. While we wait for the trumpets and tabernacles to usher in the truths that will save our lives, we pass them up and count them as unimportant.