Reading Sorrow
Six books on loss and grief.
1: The Death of the Child Valerio Marcello
“In a palace on the Grand Canal in Venice, surrounded by family, friends, and doctors, the eight-year-old Valerio Marcello died on the first day of January, 1461.” So begins Margaret L. King’s eloquent research into the life and death of a little boy, scion of a family of privilege in Venice’s time of greatness, and what that childhood reveals about the culture that nurtured it. Desperate, obdurate in his grief, Valerio’s father gathered up a number of the works addressed to him in his bereavement — letters, a poem, consolatory treatises, history, eulogy — and had them copied and bound into a book, one of the largest and most richly textured of the funerary collections of the Renaissance. He gave the book to an artist to illustrate in gilt and brilliant color. The project was never completed. “We are left,” writes King, “with an unfinished book, telling of an unfinished life, and his father’s unfinished sorrow.” In a narrative of power, scholarly acumen, and rare tenderness, King — “a stranger locked in another century” — completes the grieving father’s task, revealing the contents and contexts of that unfinished book and the life that it commemorates.
2: The Leper’s Companions: A Novel
What journeys we venture when we’re lost in thought, especially if it’s loss we’re thinking of. For our thoughts are anxious guides, pursuing what is gone — time, love, calm — with relentless vigor and invention. If we could chart our steps through melancholy, what visions and monsters, what life-enhancing fears and faiths we might discover. That’s precisely what Julia Blackburn does in this mesmerizing novel, an artful fable in which a modern woman follows her sadness to a medieval English village as a prelude to a pilgrimage to the Holy Land; the outer reaches of her mind’s wanderings take on the costume of a time and place both marvelous and bleak, terrible and mystical, inhabited by characters cursed and blessed by the inseparable forces of nature, spirit, and superstition. Blackburn’s conception is daring, her writing gravid with grace (“The sky on that day was without color and so empty you could not believe it contained the sun, the moon and all the stars hidden somewhere within its blank immensity”). With the spirit of a poet, she returns to words their magical power to make sense of the world by offering sanctuary to restless thoughts, transporting the reader to an imaginative landscape whose vistas are unsuspected and exhilarating. It’s strange and original, spellbinding.
3. A Very Easy Death
Simone de Beauvoir’s memoir is the intensely rendered, moving account of her 78-year-old mother’s final illness and death from cancer. Describing events that transpired in 1963, it anticipates the wrenching quandary which results when new medical technologies can prolong but not restore a life. What further distinguishes this story is Beauvoir’s candid portrait of a troubled mother-daughter relationship: as her world shrinks, for six weeks, to the size of her mother’s hospital room, Beauvoir ponders her mother’s life and her own rejection of that life’s values, creating a double portrait that strikes the reader as scrupulously true-to-life.
4: The Year of Magical Thinking
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” begins the title piece in Joan Didion’s famous 1979 collection of essays, The White Album. What exactly, an older Didion asks in The Year of Magical Thinking, do we tell ourselves when death sits down at our dinner table?
On December 30, 2003, Didion and her husband, the novelist John Gregory Dunne, went to a hospital to visit their daughter, Quintana, who was in an induced coma as part of a severe course of treatment for a mysterious illness and septic shock. Later that evening, they returned to their Manhattan apartment and sat down to dinner. They talked about their day. In the middle of their conversation, John slumped in his chair, raised his hand, and died.
“John was talking, then he wasn’t,” Didion writes in this spare and deeply affecting mourning diary, one of the most significant books of recent times to reckon with the weight and obligations imposed by death, and by the untethering from normalcy grief brings. “This is my attempt,” Didion tells her readers, and herself, “to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.”
In the months after her husband’s death (her year of “magical thinking,” or imagining that circumstances can change if only she wishes hard enough), Didion falls prey to crippling bereavement, her grief a state of strange, unstinting siege. She turns to science in search of impossible answers, and speaks to friends only to discover that their friendship provides no succor. All she can do — slowly, uncertainly — is start to make sentences, erecting, to steal her own words from another context, “a barricade against some deep apprehension of meaninglessness.” The author’s keen discernment, with which she had previously illuminated America’s cultural anxieties and political fictions through four decades of essays and novels, must now describe the most elusive of phenomena: absence.
What is most moving in Didion’s anatomy of grief is that it offers no false comfort. In the wake of tragedy, we may hope to find in books some testament that the worst will pass if only we “work through” our pain. Nothing doing. Coming to terms with death, Didion shows us, means coming to the only terms it allows, which are the same as life’s, but lonelier: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” And there’s something so true and nourishing in the telling here that The Year of Magical Thinking seems — paradoxically — a necessary, life-enhancing miracle, and a boon to those whose grief is boundless.
5: A Grief Observed
Although not as widely popular as The Chronicles of Narnia, C. S. Lewis’s many works of Christian reflection, such as The Problem of Pain and Mere Christianity have proven enduringly valuable to people of faith (and even to those possessed by doubt). Yet no book Lewis wrote in any vein has likely provided as much practical and spiritual consolation as A Grief Observed, his searching meditation on the anguish he suffered upon the death of his wife after a brief, intensely happy marriage.
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear,” he begins, and it is a fitting initiation to the strange education he undergoes.
I look up at the night sky. Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch? She died. She is dead. Is the word so difficult to learn?
As he turns over and over through the memory of his love, his religious faith — heretofore so sure — seems frail in the face of his disconsolateness:
You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn’t you then first discover how much you really trusted it?
Yet it is the strength of his faith that, ultimately, returns Lewis to the land of the living. A Grief Observed is a moving testament to one man’s Christianity, and an eloquent witness to the depth of emotion that surrounds our ends.
6: The Birds of the Air
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. Genesis 1:2
Count the days of creation and you’ll find no death; the first flush of Genesis ignores its sting. Inventory the divine inventions of that fundamental week — light summoned to separate Day from Night; and Heaven and Earth called into being; and then grass and herb yielding seed, trees yielding fruit invited into the world; and the sun and moon and stars evoked for signs and seasons, to measure time; and fish and fowl and the birds of the air conjured, and earthly beasts, cattle and creeping things; man imagined in the likeness of God — and you’ll find no trace of the force that will haunt the life so tellingly aroused. Although the shadow of mortality is soon cast over the bright new world of Genesis, death itself seems to arrive as an afterthought, sneaking into creation as it still steals upon us. Was death inherent in the formless void, independent of the living creatures it would later stalk, a mere reflection of the primordial darkness upon the face of the deep? A small dark born of that greater one, perhaps, but dark enough, sooner or later, for you and me.
And for Mary Marsh, the protagonist of Alice Thomas Ellis’s novel The Birds of the Air; her existence lost its light — and so lies shrouded, without form, and void — in the calamity of her child’s death.
What’s true of the great world’s genesis is true of our own (with all due respect for proportion). Our first hours dawn from a night every bit as black and long as that which we fear falling into when our time runs out, and yet the first of our eternities of darkness seldom worries us as much as the second. “Although the two are identical twins,” writes Vladimir Nabokov at the outset (aptly enough) of his autobiography, “man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for….” Nonetheless, the joy with which we celebrate a birth is a tacit acknowledgement of the depth of the darkness a newborn illuminates, for every first breath is animated with creation’s original inspiration: let there be light to breach the dark (if only until our flame expires, closing the luminous parenthesis that is our living sentence).
Our somber final fate gets none of the glory lavished on birth’s enlightenment, although death deserves its own wonder, as Mary Marsh considers with lucid bitterness:
Robin’s death, the sudden absolute cessation of vaulting, joyful life, seemed to her quite as astonishing and worthy of remark as that other more widely acclaimed and admired miracle, birth. Despite her anger, she thought that God deserved more notice for this extraordinary trick.
Well, notice He gets, but no acclaim: the magic of death never earns our admiration. We’re scared of it, plain and simple, frightened at the prospect of our own demise and chastened by the passing of others; and, if the deceased is younger than our actuarial intuition deems just, we’re outraged at the violation of life’s implied order.
That sense of violation reveals the true nature of our quarrel with death — the human value of both our coming and going. We invest all creation stories (large and small, universal and individual) with our sense of time, so that every birth is a beginning rather than a revelation, every death an ending rather than a return to the dark waters from which life sprang. For, despite the solemn invocations of our preaching and our prayers, we ignore eternity because our minds do not comprehend it, our hearts cannot hold it; we’re dizzied by its lack of definition. We cast our lot with time because it is our worthiest tool: time alone gives shape to things, makes a human landscape — however invisible its borders may seem — within whatever’s everlasting. Time is the human factor in the divine formula of creation (and so the idol we are most in danger of worshiping too dearly). A birth fosters the illusion that we exert some control over time, and the cruelty of death is its irrefutable denial of that power. We’re left with life’s remains (which, it must be said, are no less noble or significant for their futility): love, memory, and the light our children (if we’re fortunate enough to have and hold them) shine into the obscure future. Death leaves a residue on the living that is tantalizing in its sensibility, that is, in a word — one of the most beautiful of words — haunting.
To be haunted by the death of a child, as Mary Marsh is haunted by the death of Robin, is perhaps the most poignant and terrible of human conditions. Pulled out of time entirely by her loss, Mary broods within a crepuscular limbo, caught between the light of the living and the darkness of the dead. The business of time, the busy-ness of days, swirls around her with little or no effect except to suggest the senselessness of its resolves. “Housework should be done in secret or not at all,” she asserts to herself, provoked by her poor mother’s reasonable devotion to tasks at hand:
A busy woman was a reproach, insistent and disturbing, a reprimand to the silent scholar or the idle dead, announcing, with each flourish that life was to be lived, and there was no room in the habitations of the living for the grey peace of dust and decay, that the virtuous must polish and wash and sweep and scrub — scouring and mopping, relentless as time.
Longing for communion with her lost Robin, Mary denies time’s demands — and the niceties of human relations that depend, ultimately, upon them — and confronts the abyss with hapless, helpless temerity. She sits and waits, and even her dithering mother detects the portentousness of her inaction:
She had begun to understand, with real fear, that Mary was waiting — such terrible, greedy waiting as she had never contemplated. The woman who had been her pretty, merry little daughter was waiting for the dead to return and, failing that, was waiting, as a lover waits, for death to come and get her.
Mary Marsh’s mourning demands a new dimension, for her sorrow has led her far beyond the timebound concerns — holidays and dinner times, the disappointments of lost youth and the implacable otherness of adolescence, the seductions and betrayals with which broken hearts attempt to mend their years — of the increasingly exasperated ring of family that surrounds her. Stripped of its strength, her soul lacks the resourcefulness to fashion a faith to fathom the abyss she now inhabits. She floats through a spirit world in which she can be nothing more than a vessel bewitched by the emanations that move across the face of the deep. “She supposed she must be dying,” we read on the novel’s first page, “and wondered whether, if she touched the window pane with her cold finger, the cold would seep in from outside as though by osmosis.”
We are familiar with the state of grace (or at least with the idea of it), but that other states — of despair, for instance, or melancholy, or even bewilderment and anxiety — might be conditions of the soul, a possession by divine or cosmological promise of our inmost intelligence, seldom occurs to us. In the novels of Alice Thomas Ellis, such states of mind are portrayed with subtle, singular attention to their spiritual content and context; cunningly, Ellis pays her respects to the otherworldly without ever leaving the familiar world. Like Mary Marsh, the author has learned that time cannot be the only order of our lives, for its marking is not magnanimous enough to comprehend the beauty and cruelty of the love that animates us, or the death that is our destiny. The order that encompasses such a joyful and sorrowful creation surely passes all understanding, but it is undeniably present in the weather of our days, a summoning of power and loveliness that is endless in its invention, something like the Spirit of God that moved upon the face of those first waters, before light and darkness were charged with their labors and set to work.
She could see the snow falling through the small rounded light from the downstairs lavatory window, a light as pure as from any cathedral clerestory. It fell with such soft determination of the still silence — soundless, weightless: gentle alien blossom that would melt, if she waited long enough, into familiar wetness, tears on the face: bathetic melting, mud in the garden, slush on the roads, useless tears.
She lifted her face to the angelic descent in the muted darkness, to the movement compelled by something other than desire, the lifeless idle movement of the drowned, to the veil, grave cloths, the floating sinking cerements, untroubled by blood, by colour: the discrete, undeniable, intractable softness of the slow snow in the night and the silence . . .
‘Robin . . . ?’ she said.
