Recently, our daughter Lorraine fell in love: with Middle English. “Where can I learn more of this? It’s amazing!” she exclaimed, after reading along with a recording of Genesis 1: “1 In the bigynnyng God made of nouyt heuene and erthe. 2 Forsothe the erthe was idel and voide, and derknessis weren on the face of depthe; and the Spiryt of the Lord was borun on the watris. 3 And God seide, Liyt be maad, and liyt was maad.”
It paired so nicely with her studies of John 1 in the Latin vulgate that soon, we will have to take a look at John 1:
“In the bigynnyng was the word, and the word was at God, and God was the word. This was in the bigynnyng at God. Alle thingis weren maad bi hym, and withouten hym was maad no thing, that thing that was maad.”
This variation catches me off guard: Wycliffe’s “the word was at God,” versus the translation I am accustomed to hearing,”the word was with God.” It reminds me of the preposition a in Spanish, meaning “at or toward,” but not necessarily with, which is “con.” Language clearly struggles to express what it means to be together, in the deepest and most precise aspects of both time and space. That is oddly comforting, because it is just that slippery to grasp being “with” our daughter Gwyn, who died of glioblastoma brain cancer last summer, while at the same time “with” our living children, friends, and other family. At times, it feels like I am “with” her, while merely being “at” this present reality. While I am bodily present, I am in fact somewhere else. Then, within moments, the reverse will be true: I am “with those here,” and I sense that she was just “at” my side a moment ago, but is now gone.
Dry every tear
At the moment that Lorraine fell in love with what some have called the “bogginess of English,” two things became instantly true. First: she had finally had a personal encounter with the reality itself, which invited a visceral response. (In her case, surprise and joy!) Every other time I had tried to tell her about this reality had fallen short of that experience. I had explained that Old English and Germanic languages, Danish, Norse, French, Latin and Greek, as well as a few others, had melded together to create our mother tongue. This interested her in the abstract, but failed to comfort her when confronted with new English spelling rules each week. Second, her encounter with Middle English removed many afternoons of tears caused by spelling frustrations. Rather than feeling persecuted any longer, she began to feel more at home, to enjoy the puzzle of her native tongue’s odd syntax and orthography.
I recently had this same experience, reading British philosopher Roger Scruton’s The Work of Mourning, recommended by our priest. Scruton cautions against the “Disneyfycation” of grief: that is, reducing it to saccharine sentimentality, which causes many to avoid the dignified work it actually represents. Instead, he argues from the likes of Sophocles’ Antigone and Virgil’s Aeneas that:
Mourning is a ritual, and also, in certain circumstances, a duty, and these features illustrate the claims that the dead have on us. Mourning is something that we owe to the dead, since the process of mutual forgiveness must be pursued until our dead no longer haunt us.
“The Work of Mourning,” by Roger Scruton, published in First Things, October 2022
While it takes a bit of cultural context to understand the specifics of these ancient works, we find this need for the rituals of mourning is a common currency between all times and places. That is precisely how the British National Theatre can set Antigone in the modern era. I have witnessed it captivate many an 8th grade student here in Kentucky, as well. When I taught public school, I used to collaborate with the history teacher to frame it in the context of Reconstruction after the American Civil War. Suddenly, students who were incomprehensible to one another a week before, were able to hear each others’ best arguments about such controversial topics as Confederate war memorials, the Southern battle flag, and much more. They did not need to agree with each other, or be on a particular “right” side of history in those moments, as ad hominem attacks and black-or-white thinking took a hiatus. They simply understood that there was something much older than they were which must be saisfied: the need to bury one’s dead, neither making too much nor too little of it. They could see then, as if we’d gone to a gravesite built poorly, that one can err by either burying grief alive, or to letting it rot and stink on the surface. I cannot know whether they will retain that experience, when the adults in their lives understand this so poorly. I include myself in that tribe of the still-learning.
Tend the inner grave
Not content to leave the work of mourning to the ancients, Scruton also synthesizes the best of modern psychology, too, and joins past and present in the timeless, practical mystery of grief work, by saying:
[We also need to] tend the grave within, to revisit what we have lost and to rehearse an attachment rooted in things that cannot be changed. It requires us to come to terms with the loss, incorporating it into our future, so that what we are and what we were belong to a single continuum. By mourning we take responsibility for our loss, acknowledge it as ours, a debt to be redeemed. Not to mourn is to live at a lower level, detached from our real attachments, denying the past and the identity that grew in it.
Roger Scruton
An heroic attitude toward grief, then, says Scruton, is one that allows loss to test and build our inner strength, without giving way to hardness of heart:
“This attitude to loss reflects the questioning and self-critical spirit of Western civilization. The Western response to loss is not to remove yourself from the world. It is to bear it as a loss, to mourn it, and to strive to overcome it by seeing it as a form of consecrated suffering. Religion lies at the root of that attitude. Religion enables us to bear our losses not, primarily, because it promises to offset them with some compensating gain, but because it sees them from a transcendental perspective. Judged from that perspective they appear not as meaningless afflictions but as sacrifices.”
Roger Scruton
Loss as sacrifice
Then came my version of Lorraine’s Middle English epiphany: a realization that while my experience of burying a child is less common nowadays, there are still voices who can express what it is like, proving we are not alone in this unspeakable thing. Their fellowship instantly had new weight and reality that eclipsed my previous abstractions, and satisfied the gut-level knowledge that I carried but could not quite put into words. Scruton here recommended three particular works of art that I had either not yet encountered, or studied in depth. This year of my life, I settle for encounter, as this was enough to back up my nasal passages with crying for days, leading to a persistent sinus infection. This unnecessary suffering made me question myself, but I have since concluded that this mourning-with-art exercise was still worth it. A first encounter is enough, giving the sounds and phrase shapes of true mourning. Although the excitement came also with pain, shortly after that came relief: the relief of becoming intelligible.
Loss, conceived as sacrifice, becomes consecrated to something higher than itself: and in this it follows a pattern explored by René Girard in his bold theory of the violent origins of the human disposition to recognize sacred things. I think that is how people can cope with the loss of children—to recognize in this loss a supreme example of the transition to another realm. Your dead child was a sacrificial offering, and is now an angel beckoning from that other sphere, sanctifying the life that you still lead in the material world. This thought is of course very crudely captured by my words. Fortunately, however, three great works of art exist that convey it completely—the medieval poem of Pearl from the Gawain manuscript, Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, and Britten’s church parable Curlew River.
While reading this, I had arrived “at” the crossroads of a Monday afternoon “with” both Gwyn and her sisters. Whether to numb, or not to numb? was the internal question, and I chose to take the path by Curlew River, first. There, I met another parent whose loss of a child is expressed in the same, jarring “at” vs. “with” dilemma of Middle English:
MADWOMAN
(turning away from the tomb)
Hoping, I wandered on,
hoping, hoping to find my son.
I have come alone
to the reedy land of Fens,
where all is strange to me,
only to learn
in all this earth, no road
leads to my living son,
Hoping, hoping I wandered on —
I have come to a grave!
Did I give birth to him
to have him stolen
and carried far, far away,
here to the Eastern Fens
to end as dust… dust…
to end as dust by the road?
O, good people, open up the tomb
that I may see again
the shape of my child,
his face, his well-belovéd face!
(She claws hopelessly at the tomb, then sinks
down weeping)
No road leads to my still-living child.
That is what it feels like: I cannot add a thing to it. For me, this phrase is so complete and nuanced, that is still a welcome trigger for tears. (The whole performance is about an hour, but this recording goes straight to the moment, about 34 minutes in.)
Found in translation
I know what it feels like to be lost (and found) in another culture, so I’m drawn in by the labor undertaken by the artist, British composer Benjamin Britten, across time and space. As he accesses and reimagines the themes of grief as an act sacrifice–is it art imitating life? Life imitating art? Or, like inhaling and exhaling, was it a little bit of both? While traveling to Japan, Britten first saw the 15th century Noh play called Sumidagawa, and in his desire to understand it, he found inspiration for his own Curlew River. According to a friend’s observation in the printed foreword of the hour-long piece, the artist at first felt disoriented and unable to access the full meaning of the play in its Japanese language and theatrical style. When Britten obtained a translation, its strangeness faded, leaving behind the intuitive archetype of the woman weeping by a river for her lost child, which translates across cultures. This is what grief is like: at first, it seems to have its own foreign grammar, strange spellings and a vocabulary coming from outside itself, reconfigured in gestures and rituals which are equally strange to those who have no capacity or tools for translation. Grief is also like that little grit in the proverbial oyster, from which a pearl of wisdom is made.
Dignity lost, regained
Encouraged with the first result of following Scruton’s recommendations, I also listened to Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder with printed lyrics. I plan to reread the Pearl poem from the medieval Gawain manuscript, having only seen excerpts before. Until then, I ponder a final observation made in Scruton’s essay, concerning the role of faith in the dignity of mourning:
In our civilization, therefore, religion is the force that has enabled us to bear our losses and so to face them as truly ours. The loss of religion makes real loss difficult to bear; hence people begin to flee from loss, to make light of it with Disneyfying ornaments, or to expel from themselves the feelings that make it inevitable.
Roger Scruton
Immediately, my mind keyed in on a cinema scene from the 1998 Cohen brothers’ film, The Big Lebowksi. It was probably shot close to where my family used to live in San Pedro, CA, near a promontory that was popular with film crews, so I can stand there in my mind quite easily. Perhaps this film’s vulgarity, in places, compromises its integrity, disqualifying it from conversation with the likes of enduring, great art already mentioned. Then again, the Cohen brothers write and direct it with as men who have read and digested great literature. Their penchant for crime comedy in period vernacular should not automatically keep them (or most of the actors, intelligent souls!) from contributing their wisdom to the work of grieving well. The scene I had in mind was this one, where Walter, embodying the trope of a maladjusted Vietnam veteran, decides to release the ashes of his bowling teammate, Donny, while Jeff “the Dude” Lebowski, watches. The Dude has tried to live and let live as Walter goes flailing around at life, and he’s suffered his friend’s histrionics one too many times. He is not buying this Disneyfied memorial, complete with a coffee can to hold the ashes. Was Donny their friend? Or just a hanger-on? Neither man seems to know, as they persist in the charade. It is fitting, then, that as the Dude tries to just “abide” Walter’s clumsy attempts at religion, his detachment becomes impossible when Donny’s ashes blow back into his face, coating his glasses and beard.
The scene evokes a range of emotions, given its context in the larger, absurd story, and its role as memento mori. Far from making a mockery of life and death, its satirical drift reminds us that we, in fact, are the ones who commoditize life to the point of absurdity, missing the meaning of both life and death. We are all Walter with our hasty coffee can and saccharine words, or the Dude seething behind his sunglasses, seemingly unable to take meaningful action to prevent the desecration. By rushing and showboating, or dragging our feet in cynicism, we miss the moment. What a relief, then, that the reality of “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” should be kicked up into our faces, a merciful invitation to a more authentic catharsis. There are many ways we can fail to mourn with dignity. And, there seem to be many more ways to simply begin it again, even when feeling undignified.
When weeping led to a sinus infection, I was tempted to lose my religion. Not in the larger sense of belief and practice, but in the everyday sense: surely the prayerful engagement of grief just wasn’t working out, after all? The words were much harder to grasp, and the interior movements of the soul, too, with a throbbing headache. I might have thrown in the towel, put prayer and mourning on hold until I could see straight, at least. Disneyfycation was out of the question with Nyquil at my bedside. But while my body kept the grief score by resolving infection, my mind wrestled too, because it now knows what sickness is for: a forced lament. In seasons of mourning, the darkest thoughts and the most difficult emotions surface, mixed together with bouts of poor health and little desire to meet the basic requirements of living. And, with the handrails of prayer, art, and even counseling to help, I haven’t lost my way.
After my days of swollen sinuses from crying at Curlew River subsided, I again ventured into life with the knowledge that some grief is too big for antihistamines and acetaminophen. I was tempted to stop myself from crying, or from going out into the springtime pollen. But the wind kept blowing it back in my face, thankfully. And that crazed, weeping woman by the river and I are beginning to speak the same language. I had thought her inconvenient, not fully part of me. Like the characters of Curlew River, I thought I would rush her to my own conclusions, until she unmasked me with, “there is no road on earth that leads to my still-living child.” Now, I understand that this puzzle of daily life-after-death is her work, too, and she is here to stay.