Reflections on a Dreaded Emotion

    I had every intention to try and write something light tonight. Something with a little less gravitas...maybe even funny! However, that must wait a few more days. My first mistake was to put Keith Jarrett on the Bose. Mr. Jarrett's light jazz piano, especially the album playing right now, The Melody At Night, With You, is not for light, funny writing or reading. I attempt to emulate Mr. Jarrett's wonderfully intricate chord structures and melodies whenever I sit down at a keyboard. More often than not I come up frustratingly short…but it's the journey, isn't it? And of all the emotions that welled up this time while listening to this wonderful music as I sat down to type, I was surprised to hear the voice in my head echo Judge Abe Petrovsky in the frighteningly underrated movie Rounders, when he said..."And for that, I owe." Indeed, I do owe. And it's time to pay up...

    It was not long ago that my mother and I were honored to be part of a "Celebration of Life" service for a dear family friend who had recently died; Mr. Paul Wesley Erbe. The Erbe's and my family have known each other since 1965. The first church my father, David Hall, was assigned to pastor after graduating from seminary was a relatively new church in New Egypt, New Jersey. They called these churches "Home Mission Churches" back in the day. They are small, almost what you would call starter churches. Anyway, as the story goes, the Erbe family - led by the aforementioned Paul Erbe and his saintly wife, Sally - were there from Day 1 to help a young pastoral couple and their incredibly cute 3-year-old! The church wasn't much bigger than a breadbox, and the parsonage was a trailer...that wasn't much bigger than a breadbox. Long story short, the church grew, and even though we were only there for about a year, the relationship between the Erbe family and my family also grew...to this very day. So here we were, all these decades later, my mother and I on this sunny and chilly mid-November morning honoring our friend and grieving with Mr. Erbe's family and friends. 

   Grief. It's a strange word. For people my age, Charlie Brown made it a term of failure and frustration. As we got older we realized it was something much more. The great essayist Joseph Epstein writes, "Fortunate is the person who has reached the age of 50 without having had to grieve." Well, like some of you who are reading this, I didn't make it to 50. As friends of mine from high school and college left my life much too soon, and as older family friends and members of my family shuffled off this mortal coil, I learned that the grieving process was not only unavoidable but could be varied. And I started to ask myself, paraphrasing the wise and knowledgeable Charlie Brown...can there be good grief? 

    Montaigne wrote an essay called "To Philosophize is to Learn How To Die." The gist of which is rather than not thinking about death, we should keep it foremost in our minds to encourage us to lead better lives. While I might argue a tad and say that deep poetry is a better avenue than philosophy, these are two abundant and insightful ways to deal with one's own mortality. Ironically, there aren't many resources that help us deal with the deaths of those we love or were important to our lives...at least not convincingly.

    If I remember correctly, the Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, back in 1969, set out what we know as the 5 stages of grieving; denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. I have to admit, these have never been much help to me, nor have I ever experienced more than two...which leads me to siding with Hamlet when he tells his friend Horatio, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophies." That said, the philosopher Michael Cholbi attempts to make the positive case for grief: "The good in grief is self-knowledge." He also says grief is an emotionally-driven process revolving around one's relationship to the dead and how we may be transformed by it, especially if that person was close and was part of our identity. "Grief, in essence, can culminate in knowing better what we are doing with our lives."

    All that's pretty deep for a dope like me...but I sort of get it. But as I often do, I turn to the great literary critic Dr. Samuel Johnson to keep things simple for me. He wrote, “Happiness is not found in self-contemplation; it is perceived only when it is reflected from another." Amen, to that. And when that other is gone, there is a huge void and a profound sense of loss.

    So where does this leave us? In our secular age, more and more people believe that you go into the ground, up in flames, or into the heads of others. I hope the Buddhists are right so I can repeat this life, and correct some haunting mistakes! Then there are the normative Christian believers, who are most of my family, many of my friends, and no doubt all of the people who were at Mr. Erbe's celebration that day...who await a paradise in the afterlife. More than one conversation has sometimes led me, a little too loudly, to ask how they reconcile this belief in a joyous eternity with "bad" or "heart-breaking" grief...but we'll get back to that. (Here's a late New Year's Resolution - I resolve to try and not be so loud.) One person told me not long ago that she had no fear of death. She just hoped to avoid a messy, bells and whistles in a hospital bed type of passing - but she was confident about her destination. I admit to having had a little stab of faith envy! 

    I then asked myself, is my "bad grief" saved for people who die early, as it were? Whose lives are snuffed out much too soon? I'll buy that; but then the corollary must be that my "good grief" is saved for those who have lived a long, well-lived life, and so I prefer to celebrate and honor their lives. Makes sense to me. If all this sounds like a rationalization...I'm probably guilty as charged. It would seem that grief (as opposed to mourning) is a very personal thing and while allowing that it is "perhaps the greatest stressor in life," it is neither a form of madness nor worthy of being medicalized. Maybe it is just a part of the "the human predicament," a part that eludes philosophical, religious, or even a gnostic understanding. 

   Again, the philosopher Cholbi, "We can grieve smarter," he writes. "But ultimately, we cannot outsmart grief. Nor should we want to." I’m guessing we do not ultimately recover from grief; if lucky, we merely at best are able to adjust to it.

    So, here we are, back at the church celebrating the life of Mr. Erbe. It was a wonderful celebration. In a sense, it was "good" grief. I do not doubt the family and close friends experienced the pain of loss that accompanies the death of a loved one, and there were tears that came with the smiles and laughter as family members stood in front of us and related stories and memories and love. But I was wonderfully impressed with the outpouring of laughter and smiles that comes with celebrating a life well-lived. That is my good, grief. A celebration of a life well-lived, while acknowledging the void that is left in its place. 

    All of which brings me to, "I owe." A dear friend of mine whom I've known for 45 years commented on something I wrote right before Christmas. When I responded and asked how she was, she related to me the death of her father (whom I knew and admired), that had occurred during the past year. She said how his death and the first Christmas without him had cast a pall over the holidays, almost to the point where enjoying the holidays was not even an option. Now, I'd like to think that I'm an empathetic person; in fact, I know I am. But for some reason, in this instance, I kind of lost it. Thank the gods this conversation was via messaging and not face to face. In brief, I said to her “since she believes that she will see her father soon (in the grand scheme of things), why grieve?! C'mon! Celebrate his life and enjoy the holidays!” Now, I wrote back almost immediately and apologized, letting her know that she unwittingly got caught up in various discussions/arguments I recently had with believers like her on this very topic. That, of course, was no excuse, and bordered on heartless. And even though I hoped she understood what I was trying to say, I feared the damage had been done. My anger at myself still gnaws at me...

    The fact is, I don't have many "life rules." But one of them is; don't ever, and I mean EVER, tell anyone how to grieve. Gayle, I broke that rule. Not only did I break that rule, but I broke it with someone who is a dear friend, and I just wanted to say publicly, how sorry I am. I trust you have it in your heart to forgive me. That's one of the reasons this piece was written. I do believe there is good grief. I've seen it. But I now have a greater appreciation that both types of grief should and can co-exist. 

                                                                                                                                                      

    

    My daily walk sometimes finds me in a local church graveyard. It's not as creepy as it sounds! It's a very handsome place as graveyards go; well-kept the year-round. There is every type of headstone you can imagine going back many decades, and I feel a strange sense of calm as I follow the paved road from one end to the other. I know a few adults who are buried there, and sadly, even one or two small children of families that I know. I think we all owe a duty to our dead, even if we didn't know them well. As I walk amongst these graves, I recall that the ancient Greeks, Latins, and Hindus all believed the soul was buried with the body and was divine. They left food at the graves and poured wine on their tombs in order to rejoice the dead. Religious sentiment seems to have begun with worship of the dead. "It was, perhaps, while looking upon the dead that man first conceived the idea of the supernatural, and began to have a hope beyond what he saw," wrote Fustel de Coulanges. "Death was the first mystery, and it placed man on the tract of other mysteries... It raised his thoughts from the visible to the invisible, from the transitory to the eternal, from the human to the divine." 

    Keith Jarrett's album has now repeated for the seemingly 20th time as I have attempted to be a better writer than I know I am; and as these last sentences coincide with his hauntingly romantic version of "My Wild Irish Rose," I'm going to look to purchase this particular sheet music tomorrow in the hopes of being a better piano player than I know I am; then I shall take my daily walk, and look for that path that leads from the "visible to the invisible, from the transitory to the eternal, from the human to the divine."

    write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com