I’m not convinced that when we say that ‘we mourn the life that could have been’ that that is anything more than a selfish thought. What we are saying is that we mourn our interaction with the life that could have been.

If there is any truth in that idea at all, then the way we respond to a death might be influenced by how much we understand that point.

Everything that I see tells me that we are hopeless about seeing the world from the perspective of another. Responding emotionally to another person’s thoughts or experiences is nigh on impossible. Even when those thoughts are as obvious as those that somebody must go through near death.

Not wanting to derail this at all, but can I clarify what you mean by:

“For most of human history, life expectancy has been between 20 and 35 years.”

Is that life-expectancy-at-birth? I think people will interpret your statement to mean you wouldn’t expect to see many people over 35. But I think the life-expectancy-at-birth means something quite different. The high infant mortality rate is what brings the numbers down. Once (if) you get out of childhood, you would have expected to live a lot longer than 35.

(Please correct me if I’m wrong.)

Is it selfish (in a bad way) for one’s mourning to be sadness at one’s own loss? Is it not a compliment to the deceased that you weep for the lack of their company? I don’t think we really can be sad for the dead themselves- they are unaware of their death.

I note the possible relation between “life expectancy” and human expectations. I suppose if we all could only reasonably expect to live to 20-35 years — if such struck us as the natural course of things — then we’d probably just get used to it. As it is, we expect to live longer, and we therefore lament those passings that fall short of the mark as premature.

Owen, I think you’re right - these figures are for at birth, generally. Even so, if we took, say, life expectancy at 10 throughout most of human history, it would still have been very low by modern standards, no?
As Q says, I’m sure we do adjust our expectations according to the norms of our time.
But to return to the question that interests me here: how much can our feelings when when someone close to us dies be affected by whatever believe about death? Colin has suggested one way they might.

Yes, I suppose I decided to answer the easy question. As for the hard question…

You’d think that dealing with the death of a loved one would be a lot easier if you believed you’ll be meeting up with that loved one in the ever after. And yet in my experience, the grief you’ll find at a Christian burial is at least as intense as that you’ll find at a secular one. So maybe our rational beliefs about death might have little purchase on our affective response to it.

Here’s a personal reflection. Sometimes the knowledge of certain limiting scientific facts (viz., those that spell the certain annihilation of all life and order in our cosmos) fills me with a fierce existential dread. Other times, it exhilarates me, charging me with an intense sense of purpose; life’s scarcity, it seems in these moments, makes life more intensely valuable. Yet in both cases I’m drawing on the same stock of factual beliefs and rational inferences about those factual beliefs. Counterintuitively, then, perhaps my rational beliefs about our cosmological End Times really are affectively inert, or at least heavily modulated by…well, by I don’t know what.

On the other hand, maybe it’s only my rational beliefs about cosmological nihilism that allow me (however intermittently) to stand equal to life’s tragic dimension. Or (back on the previous hand) maybe it’s only my rationality that allowed nihilism to gain a foothold in the first place. Or…

Always, look on, the briiiight side of death. whee-whoo-dee-doo-dee-doo-dee-doo… Just, before, you, draw your terrrminal-breath!

I’m only 18, and I hope by the time it’s my time I still maintain enough character to ask for a cheery funeral.

Julian, I think the expression “it’s too young” is just an expression of the hurt people feel when they hear someone has died. To put it blandly, for many people it’s an excuse to say something despairing for people that didn’t really know the man. For the people that did really know him, “it’s too young” is surely an expression of regret at not being able to spend more time with him, or being able to say goodbye.

Perhaps it is a little presumptuous to interpret it literally?

In terms of historic life expectancy, the average includes very high perinatal mortality and deaths from childhood diseases. My feeling is that his lifespan may not have been too far from average.

I think there is a distinction between a tragedy and a death from old age. This is based on human nature, our sense of “the ages of life”, etc.

My son, Pablo, died at age 15, a bit over 6 years ago. That is dying too young. I’ve never gotten over the loss. I’m a atheist, but from time to time I visit the cementery, sit on the grass and converse with him. Before Pablo’s death, I never imagined myself visiting cementeries and considered those who did visit them as slightly ridiculous. Just last Sunday I went for a long walk, let’s say, a Proustian walk, past Pablo’s school and a house where he once lived. His death left a hole in my world, made my world a poorer place. From the person I was or imagined myself to be before Pablo’s death, rationalistic, practical and emotionally cold, I could never have anticipated how I have reacted since his death. Thank you.

The fact that Amos has shared something so close and personal, makes me bold to tell some of my own story.

I’m 66, so I suppose I’ve beaten some odds anyway. My mother and father died last year. He was 91, she was 90. My wife died last year too. She was 38. Go figure. Too young to die. Yes, she was. She lived with a brilliance and intensity that I have never seen equalled. She was stricken with an aggressive form of MS a few days after her 30th birthday. And then, just before she was completely paralysed, and still able to use her arms, we went to Zurich, where she hastened her dying with the help of Dignitas. She was as calm and as brave as it is possible for anyone to be. No hesitation of voice or action. And she told us to rejoice, because at last she would be free.

I was an Anglican priest for years, and I retired at the end of 2005 to care for her. She would not want me to have mourned for long. It’s been nine months, and the mourning goes on, relentlessly. I have very little idea how to go on from here. I remember her saying to me a short time before she died, “You know, I’m really only a little girl, afraid to die.” In the end she died with great courage and dignity. She did not expect to live again. That was only a story we told for years. She had left faith behind a long time before I did. For both of us the story had worn too thin, after so many years of suffering.

And so I am left now with the wonder of our lives together, the things that we had seen and done, the ideas that we had shared, the love that we had known. These were wondrous things, and so I treasure them, but it is hard very often hold back the tears. The memories are sweet, but they burn. Does religion make a difference? To some people it does. They really do believe they are ‘going to a better place’. Does philosophy help? Not much. Unless perhaps you are a Stoic, and can calm your mind, and convince yourself that they do not affect the real you. But the loss is real, so much promise unfulfilled, so much joy never to be shared. She really was too young to die.

I share Amos’ sense of loss, the loss also of a cool and rational world that supposes that death will not touch us if we say it won’t. — So, Amos, I share your sorrow. The world is a poorer place.

Thanks a lot, Eric. Compared to what we’re sharing now, today’s debate on another thread seems terribly sophomoric. In fact, in memory of Pablo and of your wife, I’m going to drop out of the other discussion. There are things that matter more. All my best, Amos

Thanks Amos. I’ll drop out too.

Eric and Amos, I’m so moved by your stories. I’ve deleted several false starts trying to author a fitting response here. No go. All I can say is: I’m moved.

If others similarly refrain from comment, then, at least you’ll know why.

Eric,
I think it was a pity that she did not live through to the end allowing her death to take its own course. I believe that the manner and quality of our death is important.

There is an excellent book written by a hospice doctor: ‘Mortally Wounded’ (studies of soul pain, Death and Healing) by Michael Kearney pub.’96 by Marino in pb.

Amos,
There will be a Spring.

I believe that the manner and quality of our death is important.

Michael, so do I, and so did she. That’s why she died that way.

How callous to criticize the choices made by one still in the throws of such grief and to throw-out platitudes by way of assuaging it. Unconscionable whatever the motivation..

I’d second Q’s sentiments.

Michael, I agree with Brian that now’s hardly the time to make your point, as entitled to it as you are. Can I suggest that we drop the hospice v assisted dying debate for another time?

Eric and Amos - thanks.

“how much can our feelings when someone close to us dies be affected by whatever we believe about death?”

In as far as our beliefs about our own deaths influences our beliefs regarding the passing of those we love, the following may quote from Rorty’s ‘The Fire of Life’ may be interesting:

“Shortly after finishing “Pragmatism and Romanticism,” I was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer. Some months after I learned the bad news, I was sitting around having coffee with my elder son and a visiting cousin. My cousin (who is a Baptist minister) asked me whether I had found my thoughts turning toward religious topics, and I said no. “Well, what about philosophy?” my son asked. “No,” I replied, neither the philosophy I had written nor that which I had read seemed to have any particular bearing on my situation. 
I had no quarrel with Epicurus’s argument that it is irrational to fear death, nor with Heidegger’s suggestion that ontotheology originates in an attempt to evade our mortality. But neither ataraxia (freedom from disturbance) nor Sein zum Tode (being toward death) seemed in point.

“Hasn’t anything you’ve read been of any use?” my son persisted. “Yes,” I found myself blurting out, “poetry.” “Which poems?” he asked. I quoted two old chestnuts that I had recently dredged up from memory and been oddly cheered by, the most quoted lines of Swinburne’s “Garden of  Proserpine”:

We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.

and Landor’s “On His Seventy-Fifth Birthday”:

Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art;
I warmed both hands before the fire of life,
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.”

From Richard Rorty’s “The Fire of Life”

http://www.poetrymagazine.org/magazine/1107/comment_180185.html

Thank you Paul, for that reference, and such a beautiful essay. It reminds me that over the past year my greatest comfort has been from poetry, not necessarily poetry that consoles, sometimes poetry that burns, like Wordsworth’s Desideria or Speak!, Larkins’ Aubade, and there are some wondrous ones in the Rationalist Press Association’s “Seasons of Life.” And I would affirm Rorty’s suggestion that ‘individual men and women are more fully human when their memories are amply stocked with verses.’ My mind was filled with Bible verses. It’s not the same.

‘The moving finger writes, and having writ,
moves on; nor all thy piety nor wit
shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.’
(The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam)

It is strange, however, that things I spent a good part of a lifetime toying with, theology and philosophy, have not provided a moment of comfort — though philosophy has provided hours of distraction.

I’ve not tried to seek consolation. It seems that I owe Pablo something, that he merits grief or at least remembrance, since I’ve noticed that most people have very short memories about the dead. Besides, I was a cold bastard who never cried and maybe I’m a better man now that I can cry, not only about Pablo, but about the deaths of others, memories, anything that moves me. There’s a country-western song, sung by Willie Nelson, that makes me think of Pablo: “you were always on my mind”. I also recall the nurse who told me as he was dying, too drugged to understand anything, to take his hand and to tell him everything that I had never told him about how much I cared. Sorry to be so sentimental. I definitively do not have the attitude of Epictetus. A psychologist once suggested that I take anti-depressive pills and I refused indignantly. My grief is me: it’s not virus or a bacteria that I should take a pill for me. Paul, I’ll read your link.

As my mother neared the end of her long life, my brother was spoken of a little more often. He was 7 when he died of leukemia, before I was born. I began to understand that she lived with his memory daily for 75 years. She was no longer able to keep her grief so much a secret. It never goes away.

I didn’t mean 75 years. She was 27 when he died. She lived with her grief for another 55 years.

Grief is a strange thing, as I find, and as time goes on, it becomes almost a friend. It’s almost as though it would be a betrayal if it were not there. I don’t mean the sweet, sticky, cloying kind of grief, but the remembrance through occasional tears of what has been lost. Perhaps the kind of grief expressed in Amos’ ‘It seems that I owe Pablo something.’ Yes, he does. Sometimes, I manage a day or two of good, solid, study and reflection. But there are still more days of a struggling, fighting, despairing sort of grief. I wish the time would come when it would be just a quiet friend, and that I could go on, and do things that would have made my wife proud, if she could have known.

My father’s sister died of leukemia, a long while ago, shortly before I was born, I think. She was in her twenties. My father almost never spoke of her, though she was his teacher in the one room schoolhouse that he spent ten years in. (He was always first or second in his class. There were only two!) I don’t think he ever, in my presence, expressed grief over his sister’s death. Nor did his mother and father. Strict Presbyterians, in their way. ‘God knows best.’ It has a very unique quality of assurance. In the bazaar of ideas today, it’s only one amongst many. You’d have to be pretty insulated from the world around you to believe it, in your heart.

Excuse a bit of levity at this point, but this memory came to mind when Eric mentioned God knows best. My father was only 47 when he died. My mother and aunts murmured repeatedly God takes the good first. I was almost 8 and had been assured most of my life that I was verrrry baaaaaad. I was genuinely grateful. I thought I was now guaranteed a long life.

Thanks rtk. At my wife’s funeral I said. “They say, ‘God picks only the fairest flowers.’ Not true, he picks them all.” Don’t be too sure!

Eric: In my experience grief does tend to become, as you say, more of a quiet friend, although waves of despair come from time to time. The passage of time doesn’t heal things, so much as integrate them into one’s life. Be well, Amos

Sean, I agree with you, cheeriness is desirable and appropriate at a funeral if that is part of how a person is remembered. At a recent service I attended, the speaker was crying while making us laugh, recalling some experiences the friends shared. It does get complicated.

rtk, very complicated.

Thank you Amos, that’s good to know. It’s early times yet. Very little quite, not much integration. Go well yourself.

Eric: I don’t want to be presumptious and everyone’s experience is different, but maybe if one welcomes grief, invites it into one’s life, as a sign of one’s love for the person who one misses, the grief becomes part of oneself, obviously, a changed self.

Amos, you raise a point I’d been thinking about your own case, when you said you didn’t have an “Epictetian attitude.” In a way, you really do: In “inviting” grief into your life, you’ve taken responsibility for your grief, rather than claiming that it is due only to outside events or other people.

I think this is a profound difference. It’s fair (I think) to say that Epictetus was not opposed to grief per se, but rather to giving into grief that is pointless (the many forms of which must be even more clear to you know than they were before Pablo’s passing). We can, and perhaps ought to, hold our personal (or even the world’s) tragedies close enough to grieve over them, but with just enough distance so that we do not perish of them.

God, I hope that’s not glib.

Q the Enchanter: I hadn’t given it much thought, but
as far as I know, the Stoics consider that grief about what they call externals, for example, the loss of a child or a wife, are mistaken judgments, since the only thing that has value is virtue. I don’t consider what you say to be glib, but it just doesn’t seem to be Epictetus’s point of view. The idea of taking responsibility for one’s grief or choosing grief reminds me more of someone like Sartre.

Amos, right, well Epictetus himself characterized grief as unnatural, and my use of the word ‘responsibility’ wasn’t very helpful. And I certainly don’t want to push the analogy too hard. What I had (rather inchoately) in mind is that you made a reflective choice actively to embrace grief (rather than merely being passively overcome by it). It’s this active welcoming of grief and emotional pain that seemed to me to have something of the Stoic spirit about it. FWIW.

Well, no Epicurean or Stoic I. Grief is like a force of nature. It comes bidden or unbidden. Sometimes it comes in waves of uncontrollable sorrow. At other times it comes quietly and gently, as though to soothe, but always it holds the loved and lost in a kind of suspension, as though, if one could only do or say the right thing, the show would go on as before.

I don’t want to be a Stoic. Much as I admire Seneca, I still feel that it’s strangely lacking in humanity, although what the Stoics most admired about humanity, of course, was reason.

I think, by the way, that this is what most religionists have against people like Dawkins or Hitchens or Grayling (all of whom I admire greatly). They feel there’s something not quite human about them, that they’re missing an important dimension of what it is to be human.

As to Q’s idea of ‘pointless grief’. What would that look like, I wonder? When people are bonded very closely, and one is gone, as with my wife, a long time before her ‘time’, given the odds, one part of what was ‘me’ is gone too. It hollows you out inside, somehow. It’s not something you ask for or expect. To tell the truth, we had spoken about it so often, I thought I could carry on in the same rational spirit. (Our daughter says now, “You were both so rational about it. It was scary.”) This is what life is all about, living and dying, coming and going. What’s so special about that? Why should that upset the rhythm of things? Here the Stoic, even the Epicurean, who sought ataraxia too. But if the bond was real, and steady and true, then something is lost, something that affects the ‘being’, if you like, of the person who is left.

I had a dicsussion on the Theos blog with David Hay, author of “Something There.” He calls it relational consciousness, and he relates it to religion. I think there’s something here worth exploring, not because I think it will show the veracity of relgious beliefs, but because it may show us something deeper about human relationship, and how loss affects those in relationship. I think this is probably worth studying scientifically, because there may be something here that can actually help those who have been separated by the death of someone close to them, to resolve the problem of broken relationship, of a lost unity. That’s just a guess for now, but it seems to me we have to go beyond Epictetus or Plato or Seneca or Lucretius if we’re going to understand these things.

Hi Eric

Do you have a link to your discussion with David Hay? I’ve just read some reviews of his book and it seems very interesting.

Thanks

Paul, I’m sorry, I though they archived all discussions, but apparently they archive only the original essays. Here’s the one I was referring to.

http://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/search-results/search-articles.aspx?ArticleID=1744

I believe that there are serious problems with identifying what Hay calls ‘relational consicousness’ with what he wants to call ‘transcendental experience’. But I haven’t read his book, and, as I told him that’s a bit of a liability. However, in time I will get to it. If you look around on the Theos site you may find the discussion. I couldn’t see it, but you never know.

Thanks - will have a look. Reminds me a bit of the sensus divinitatus arguments but interesting just to think about the prevalence of these experiences!

Oh, hey! I don’t know about prevalence. I only know that the religious research unit at Oxford did some research regarding them I have no idea of the frequency, basis or outcome. No doubt, with the new Templeton Foundation grant (2 or 3 million pounds), they should be able to nail the bugger, and keep it from shimmering away!

Eric: I think you put it very well when you say that grief is not something you can expect or anticipate. It transforms one completely. There is no former self to bounce back to. As to Stoicism, I imagine that the goal of ataraxia or apathy (in the Stoic sense) could help some people get through limit experiences. On the other hand, there’s Nietzsche idea that great suffering is a precondition to a life worth living.

“I think you put it very well when you say that grief is not something you can expect or anticipate. It transforms one completely. There is no former self to bounce back to.”

Sounds like an equally compelling description of love.

Hi Paul. Yes, it is, and, to tell the truth, Nietzsche really slipped off the end of the ladder before he was able to say. If great suffering is necessary to a life worth living, I should be in for riches. Or my wife should have been. But she’s gone, and I’m still grieving. Nietzsche, like most philosophers, spoke of that which they still did not know.

Surely it’s love and loss that provide the best arguments against Stoic apathy or ataraxia? Both appear to be an inescapable source of meaning, good and ‘bad’.

It’s easy to see through much of what is meant to be meaningful in this life and these are debated endlessly. But conversely we find ourselves unable to debate away suffering in relation to loss and joy in relation to love.

When it becomes overwhelming we may, of course, wish otherwise. But it’s not really on the table is it? And neither should it be.

The Stoic position always struck me as inhuman and unrealistic. I can’t, for example, imagine M. Aurelius not grieving the loss of a child.

The Epicurean I view a little differently in that Epicurus seems to allow for some feeling of grief but counsels life-long cultivation of a sense of ephemerality regarding all things to the end that the severity of grief may finally give way to the balm of memory. It appears from this discussion that neither Eric nor Amos have found this practice to be unforced or helpful and there’s the rub: when memory itself persists as sting. I note, however, the dynamic and extraordinarily nuanced quality of both their ongoing expressions of grief which gives me some pause and hope of eventual peace for them and all who grieve - however ephemeral and wavering that peace itself may prove .

I don’t know what a life-long practice of Epicureanism might accomplish, or Stoicism for that matter. Both of these philosophies were to be practiced as diligently as any religion. Most modern philosophy certainly offers nothing in the way of praxis so I have no doubt of its easily being superceded in consolation by poetry. Religion could only help if one truly believed in it. As an article in SLATE on the evolution of the religious impulse suggested today, the unbeliever denies himself the positive aspects of religion (such as they are) in the same way the skeptic of homeopathy denies himself the reality of the placebo effect.

My grandmother lost her five-year old son in a hit and run accident on Memorial Day 1935. I don’t know that she ever “got over it”. I do recall her drinking too much beer at family gatherings on that particular holiday. She would discuss David and reminisce about him but one always had the sense the there remained a rawness to her wound and a kind of permission necessary to press her further concerning him.

I’m not sure this way-too-long comment adds anything to the discussion. Let is stand, however, as honoring the grief of the two men here and that of every human being who ever has or will ever grieve. I am grateful for the courageous candor of both men in cracking-open for us the very heart of this matter.

Brian: Thank you for your kind words.

Eric: I was merely contrasting Nietzsche’s position to that of the Stoics. Now, Nietzsche, for all his faults, was no armchair sufferer. He was completely alone and misunderstood. Unlike today’s militant atheists, who even sell tee-shirts on their websites and are well-paid media stars, Nietzsche preached the death of God before it was fashionable to do so and sold no books at all. He suffered from constant migraine headaches, stomach pains, and insomnia. He was going blind. Nietzsche position is that only after great suffering could one affirm life totally: say “yes” to it all. That’s what his theory of the eternal return is about. Comparing Nietzsche to Dawkins is like comparing Beethoven to Elton John.

Brian:
Marcus Aurelius had plenty of practice at dealing with the deaths of his children and wife. He loved his wife but an unfortunate conjunction in the introduction to my edition of the Mediatations gives a different impression.
“On this journey (to the East) his wife, Faustina died. At his return the emperor celebrated a triumph”…. Faustina had borne him several children which he passionately loved and they all died one by one until at the end of his life all there was left was the useless son Commodus who turned out to be a bloodthirsty tyrant.

The sense of restoration which Epictetus enjoined would have been well practiced by him. The idea is that one is going back to the source from whence one came:
“Ever consider and think upon the world as being but one living substance, and having but one soul, and how all things in the world, are terminated into one sensitive power; and are done by one general motion as it were, and deliberation of that one soul; and how all things that are, concur in the cause of one another’s being, and by what manner of connection and concatenation all things happen.” 3.XXXIII

Hi Amos. Well, I’m a bit out of my depth when it comes to Nietzsche. I don’t know whether his suffering amounted to great suffering, or greater suffering or greatest suffering, or not. In the end, it seems, he suffered dementia, from an advanced case of syphilis. When did he stop writing, and how much did he suffer? I don’t know.

If you want migraines, stomach pains and insomnia, I’ve sufferred from these since 1961. How bad does it have to get before you say, ‘Never again’? I don’t know. Did Nietzsche? I don’t know that either. I’m not comparing Nietzsche to Dawkins or Beethoven to Elton John. I’m just saying that Nietzsche (as I said) fell off the ladder before it became as bad as it could have been. He may have done, at least. How do you know when it’s come to the point where you can say: ‘He was no armchair sufferer’? I don’t know that either. I have known suffering greater than mine. I don’t think Nietzsche had any idea, but, you know, I don’t really know. Isn’t this just what Jean Amery says in his book about suicide? We’ll never know. We won’t.

As to selling T-shirts, just go into your neighbourhood catholic store, with all the rosaries and crucifixes and devotional books. They’ve been doing it for years. How long have atheists been selling T-shirts? It’s interesting. Religious people write thousands of books a year selling religion. What, five or six atheists (?) write books in the last year or two, and suddenly it’s the atheists who are militant?! How many shrines, for how many years, have been selling religious artifacts, devotional articles and books? How many retreat houses, how many spiritual centres have been selling religion and sanctity? How many churches have been peddling religion and for how long? How many Christian authors have become wealthy off their writings? And one T-shirt, with an ‘A’, deserves the title ‘militant’? I’m not mocking. I’m just surprised.

Nor do I want to seem down of Nietzsche, whose writings I have treasured for half a century. But I just don’t know. When it comes down to it, even about my beloved wife, I do not know. I don’t know the half of what she suffered, and that was a great deal more than I ever did, though I shared her sufferings every step of the way for nearly nine years. I simply do not know, I could not even begin to encompass what that might mean.

I don’t know about too young to die. I’m starting to feel terribly old.

Amos, I feel the need to aplogise for what I wrote a few minutes ago. I’m sorry. I’m sad, and I’m angry, and it tends, sometimes, to bring out the worst in me. But to be truthful, anything about religion, waved in front of me, is like waving a cape in front of a bull. I hope I haven’t offended you. It was not meant that way. I just do not know how to deal with the suffering that I know. Neither religion nor Nietzsche nor the ancients have the answer. And certainly not Elton John or Dawkins! All I can do is speak out of my humanity and my sorrow.

“As to Q’s idea of ‘pointless grief’. What would that look like, I wonder?”

Clinical depression.

Q. Good point. Don’t know whether I’ve reached that stage or not.

Eric: No offense. There is no meter to measure human suffering. I’ve never read Jean Amery book on suicide, but I do have his books on ageing and his book on Auschwitz. Few people read Amery, so we have something in common. Nietzsche went mad from syphilis, as you say. As you probably know, he embraced a horse who was being beaten in the street, wrote a few “crazy” letters, including one about shooting all antisemites, and the rest is silence.

Eric: I just saw your response to Q. I don’t like to give advice online, to people whose face I can’t see, but what’s happening to you concerns me. I’m going to sign off for tonight, but if you wish to talk more personally, Jean and Ophelia both have my email, as does this blog. I really don’t know what to say. Perhaps you could post some kind of remembrance of your wife in this thread. It need not be philosophical or analytical. I think that we’d all be open to listen to what you have to say. Take care, Amos

Michael, thank you for the brief reprise of history surrounding Aurelius. I think my point (however artlessly made) was to suggest that the humanity and sensitivity exhibited in M.A.’s writings suggests he may not have found the Stoic disposition enjoined upon him regarding death and loss to be easily achieved. I concede, however, that his years of Stoic practice may have served him well in keeping a - more or less - even keel under the circumstances, the ancient idea of philosophy as praxis essential to its practical application when tragedy delivers a sucker-punch.

I think Julian has perhaps partly answered his own question in responding to Michael - philosophical debate somehow seems inappropriate when someone has shared an experience of grief.

But I would like to raise a question, and I hope it won’t seem as crass as Michael’s remark (I’ve already annoyed Jean Kazez this weekend).

Some years ago, I ended a long term relationship - quite abruptly from the perspective of my then partner. A few days after I’d said I was leaving, when we were both in a state of shock and, yes, grief, at the situation (yes, it happens that way), she was in our daughter’s schoolyard and one of the mothers came up to her and opened the conversation with “Oh, I’ve been hearing a lot of gossip about you…”.

Now, objectively, why do we respond to the news of a break-up with such a light tone, compared to the news of a death? Society responds in that way, and in time even the individual does. If I had died that morning she’d probably still be grieving. Instead, within a year she had decided “Screw it - I’m not wasting time feeling sad about HIM”.

I wonder, in that light, how much our response to death is learned, how much is innate, how much is based on the society we live in. Certainly it doesn’t FEEL learned, but then neither does our sense of disgust.

Alan: I think that much of our ourward behavior towards death is learned, which is what makes funerals so uncomfortable, for me at least. Now, of course we can talking of learning in two senses: 1. the conscious learning of roles; 2. the unconscious or subconscious learning of deeper reactions to loss, which have to do with how we have learned or taught ourselves to be ourselves. In the second sense grief may be learned, but I would not confuse genuine grief with the social roles that mourners assume in funerals. My inner reaction to Pablo’s death has no relation with how I behaved in his funeral. As a matter of fact, the gruesome details of dealing with salesmen for various cementeries, the wake, the funeral, the burial rites, dealing with friends I hadn’t seen in years who generously attended the funeral numbed me; grief hit me well after the funeral was over.

Thanks Amos. I was thinking of the unconscious learning of deeper reactions to loss, i.e. the second of your two points, rather than the role-playing element, though I was also trying to suggest there is some interplay between the two.

I mentioned the sense of disgust - there may be a difference in that infants seem to have no sense of disgust whatsoever, whereas they do have an innate anxiety at being detached from mother. Maybe that’s the starting point to the different types of loss we experience as adults, and to which we’ve developed different forms of personal and societal responses.

Although I am not greatly read, I think the best thing I have read about suffering and grief was “De Profundis” by Oscar Wilde, written while imprisoned for homosexuality. I think one of WIlde’s greatest talents was the ability to express the poignant, the beauty of sorrow. Some of the most beautiful posts and shared communications I have ever read on this site have been expressed in sorrow.

The opening two paragraphs of De Profundis:

“. . . Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by
seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return.
With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to
circle round one centre of pain. The paralysing immobility of a
life every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable
pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel
at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron
formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in
the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate
itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence
is ceaseless change. Of seed-time or harvest, of the reapers
bending over the corn, or the grape gatherers threading through the
vines, of the grass in the orchard made white with broken blossoms
or strewn with fallen fruit: of these we know nothing and can know
nothing.

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very
sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled
glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is
grey and niggard. It is always twilight in one’s cell, as it is
always twilight in one’s heart. And in the sphere of thought, no
less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more. The thing that
you personally have long ago forgotten, or can easily forget, is
happening to me now, and will happen to me again to-morrow.
Remember this, and you will be able to understand a little of why I
am writing, and in this manner writing. . . .”

Here is the address for the entire text:

http://infomotions.com/etexts/gutenberg/dirs/etext97/dprof10.htm