Living with Grief

Last week I watched the critically-acclaimed and Oscar-favourite Manchester by the Sea. It’s definitely the best movie I’ve seen this year and I think it should win Best Picture. The reason is that it takes a real look at grief. It doesn’t shy away from fully exploring the gritty, messy, uncomfortable aspects of grief.

Without giving any big spoilers, Manchester by the Sea is about a man named Lee (Casey Affleck) who works as a custodian in Boston. Near the beginning of the movie, he finds out his brother has passed away of heart disease. Lee discovers that his brother has named Lee as guardian of his son. This forces a reluctant Lee to move back to his hometown to care for his nephew. Through flashbacks, we learn more and more about Lee – why he’s reluctant to move back to his hometown, why he is a quirky loner, and why he has bursts of anger. He’s grieving his brother’s death, but he’s also grieving something more.

Those who have seen it will understand that Lee’s situation in the movie is much more complicated than my situation. The reason I bring up this movie is that it does a masterful job of portraying the less commonly portrayed aspects of grief. These are the same aspects that I have been surprised to encounter in my own experience of grief, so despite the dissimilar circumstances I was able to identify quite a bit with Lee. \

Most other on-screen portrayals focus on the intense sadness and heartbreak of characters after experiencing tragedy. This definitely is part of it – I cried more in the first few days after my wife’s death than I had in my whole life up to that point. But much of what I have experienced since then is the opposite of intense emotion. Numbness. Fog. Wandering. Wandering around, grasping for thoughts and feelings that always seem to slip away just as you grope for them. This quote about grief from C.S. Lewis (who also lost his wife of a few years to cancer) in A Grief Observed is spot on:

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting.

Watching Manchester by the Sea made me realize how lazy grief must look to those around the griever. I suppose it is somewhat lazy in the sense that you feel like any activity won’t significantly add to your happiness, so it’s hard to see the point in that activity. But in another sense, it’s very hard work. You give every ounce of your energy to try to think, feel, remember, converse, live. You spend so much wattage on the basics that anything else is beyond doing.

I think this “aimlessness” aspect of grief is largely because when your close loved one dies, it immediately eliminates one of your main purposes in life. You spent so much of your focus caring for and thinking about the well-being of your loved one, and now there is a huge hole where that purpose was. I know that as a Christian my primary purpose is glorifying God. But it is still very disorienting to eliminate the other major purpose in my life.

Another observation I’ve had is that this “losing purpose” is one of four main types or experiences of grief (sidebar: I haven’t looked up any academic theories of grief yet, but I’m interested to know whether I’m totally off-base here or not). Each one leads to a distinct kind of feeling, although it’s all feelings of loss.

Along with losing purpose, there is the experience of missing the activities you did together. There is the experience of losing out on hopes and dreams you had for your future together (e.g. raising a family, travelling to new places, etc). And there is the experience of a piece of you being gone. The first three have certain clear triggers, so the painful feelings peak and valley. The last one is much more constant – it’s hard to describe but the best analogy is that of a limb amputation. You’re unlikely to fully forget that you don’t have a hand – the loss is always right there in front of you.

Lee also struggles with anger. Anger for me has manifested much more subtly than for Lee, and I wouldn’t call it a big struggle – but it’s there nonetheless. Thankfully, I’ve been able to deal with it pretty well by talking/yelling things out with God, exercising, listening to loud music, etc. The anger isn’t necessarily at anything or anyone in particular, it’s just there.

Near the end of the movie, Lee answers the question of whether or not he can “beat it”. “It” meaning the grief, the sadness, the burden, the horror, the guilt, the what-ifs, all of it. To find out his answer you’ll have to watch the film, but in my experience so far, you can’t beat “it” – at least not fully.

Of course, there are things that help: prayer, reading God’s Word, meditation, music, looking at photos, reading letters, talking with friends and family. But just as I was against thinking of Julia’s experience as a “fight” with cancer, I don’t want think of it as a “fight” with grief. Just as you don’t “beat” cancer, you don’t “beat” grief. You live with it – with help from God, friends, family, professionals, of course. But once you learn you can’t beat it, you can learn to live with it. And over time it begins to feel more and more like living again.

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