Photo by Jonas Bendiksen/Magnum Photos I have been grieving my mother for years, even though she is still alive. Sometimes before falling asleep – in that liminal space between waking and sleeping where the self becomes porous – I’d see the image of the sweet and caring woman who would come to say goodnight, her cheeks covered in thick layers of night cream. Then, out of nowhere, the image would flip into the raging woman who was so entangled in her own suffering that she turned her frustration on us.
Over the years, that second woman slowly swallowed the first, as she got pulled into my brother’s addiction. It’s hard to say where her own unhappiness ended and my brother’s suffering began, but together they drifted into a parallel reality, cut off from the world beyond their heads. There was no funeral for this.
What was I supposed to mourn? And yet what I felt for them, what I still feel, has the unmistakable gravity of mourning. Can there be grief without death?
I have come to think that we grieve much more often than we realise, and that death is grief’s most visible occasion rather than its essence. If that doesn’t match your experience, it may be because we rarely call these other losses by their name. Most of our losses arrive without a funeral.
That is the human predicament: we are creatures built to attach, living in a world where nothing stays. Sooner or later, we lose the things we care about. And since we are complex beings with a body, a mind, a community and an environment – beings who love many different things – there is a great deal we can lose, from our physical health to our sense of who we are, from relationships to homelands to the natural world we share with other species.
For creatures like us, there is no way around heartbreak: to live is to lose. Grief is what love does when its object is gone. It is love with nowhere to go.
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