Confessions of a Psychologist Who Had Never Known Grief

What can I tell you?

I am a psychologist.

Yes, a psychologist! A woman who spent years studying the human soul, who believed she understood its suffering, its contradictions, its desperate attempts to survive what it could not bear.

How many lectures I gave! How confidently I spoke! How patiently I explained to grieving people what was happening inside them, as though sorrow were some obedient creature that could be examined, classified, and finally put in its proper place.

I knew everything about grief.

Or so I believed.

I knew its manifestations, its unpredictable course, the strange ways in which the mind tries to protect itself from unbearable loss. I could explain why people wept, why they became angry, why they withdrew from the world.

And people listened to me.

They listened with that terrible attention which only the suffering give to those whom they believe capable of helping them.

Sometimes they thanked me.

And I accepted their gratitude.

That is what troubles me now. Not that I spoke from books, what else could I have spoken from? but that I accepted their gratitude with such satisfaction, such quiet professional pride, as though I had accompanied them into the darkness and returned with something worth telling.

What did I know of darkness?

I had read about it in a well-lit room.

Until then, my life had been happy. Not perfect, certainly. There had been disappointments, anxieties, petty humiliations all those little misfortunes we sometimes mistake for great suffering because we have not yet encountered the real thing.

But I had never known that particular horror in which the world remains standing while the very reason for one’s happiness has disappeared.

I had never buried the person around whom my ordinary life was built.

And yet I spoke.

Good God, how I spoke!

I remember a woman at one of my lectures. She sat in the last row, dressed in black, her hands clasped so tightly that I could see the whiteness of her knuckles.

At some point she began to cry.

Not quietly, but violently, uncontrollably, as though something inside her were being torn apart.

People turned to look.

I paused.

I looked at her with compassion and continued.

But do you know what I thought?

I thought I understood her.

I recognised her pain. I knew its symptoms, its causes, its manifestations. I felt genuine compassion for her.

And yet, I wondered what it must be like to suffer so deeply that even tears were no longer enough.

I mistook my knowledge of suffering for an understanding of what it meant to endure it.

Only later would I discover the difference.

And only then would I remember that woman.

Then my husband died.

How easily those three words can be written.

My husband died.

Three ordinary words which together destroyed the entire structure of my existence.

The telephone rang at four in the morning.

A stranger was speaking. I remember his voice, or rather the peculiar caution with which he pronounced each word, as though by speaking gently enough he might somehow make the truth less terrible.

I looked at my husband’s slippers beside the bed.

One was turned over.

And I thought, quite distinctly:

I must straighten that slipper. He doesn’t like it when his things are left untidy.

Imagine that!

A man was telling me my husband was dead, and I was worrying about his slipper.

For years afterward I returned to that thought. Why the slipper? Why not some grand memory of our life together, some last declaration of love, some noble thought worthy of the moment?

No.

A slipper.

Perhaps the mind, when faced with something unbearable, clings to the smallest possible thing, to whatever still belongs to the world in which the dead are alive.

Because if his slipper still needed straightening, perhaps he still existed somewhere to complain about it.

But then the stranger finished speaking.

And something in me broke.

I have searched for another word, a more precise word, a word worthy of my profession.

There is none.

I broke.

I fell to the floor. I remember striking my knees, but I did not feel them. My chest tightened so violently that I thought my ribs might split. My hands shook. My teeth chattered. There was a sound coming from my throat, a horrible, animal sound, and for several seconds I did not understand that I was making it.

I screamed.

I screamed with a force that seemed to rise not from my lungs, but from my bones, from my skin, from every miserable cell that still insisted on being alive.

And what was I screaming?

His name.

Only his name.

As if repeating it loudly enough might force the universe to correct its mistake.

Where were my lectures then?

Where were my carefully constructed explanations, my elegant theories, my beautiful words about acceptance?

I had explained grief to hundreds of people, and now I could not explain to myself how to survive the next five minutes.

And here is the most dreadful thing.

Even then, even while I lay on the floor like a wounded animal, some small, rational part of my mind remained awake.

So this is acute grief, it observed.

So this is what they mean by physical pain.

So this is what happens when attachment is violently severed.

I wanted to silence that voice.

I wanted to seize that psychologist inside me, that educated, articulate, reasonable woman, and shake her by the shoulders.

Be quiet!

For once in your life, be quiet!

My husband is dead!

And still, somewhere inside me, she continued to observe.

What a terrible division of the human soul, one part bleeding, the other naming the wound.

Days passed.

I cannot tell you how many.

People came to the house. They spoke in lowered voices. They embraced me, brought food, assured me that time would help.

Time!

How I hated that word.

They spoke of time as though it were a physician standing patiently outside my door.

But time was not healing me.

Time was merely moving me farther away from the last moment in which he had been alive.

Every passing hour seemed like another betrayal.

I did not want to move forward.

Forward meant away from him.

And there was something else, something ugly that I hesitate even now to confess.

I began to resent the living.

I resented their laughter, their ordinary conversations, their insignificant worries. I resented the neighbour who complained about the weather.

How dared they speak of such things?

My husband was dead!

Did they not understand that the world should have stopped?

But of course it had not stopped.

That was the insult.

The buses continued running. Children went to school. People bought bread, argued about money, made plans for next summer.

And somewhere among all those ordinary activities, my husband had ceased to exist.

I found this almost unforgivable.

His coffee cup remained on the kitchen table.

A brown ring had dried at the bottom.

For weeks I refused to wash it.

I knew perfectly well that a cup was only a cup, that washing it would not erase his existence, that memory did not live in porcelain.

I knew all that.

But one afternoon my sister reached for it.

And I screamed at her.

My own sister, who had come to help me, who had done nothing more terrible than try to wash a dirty cup.

She stepped backward, frightened.

And afterward, when she left the room, I sat beside that cup and wept.

Not only for my husband.

For the person I had become.

Was this what suffering did to us?

Did grief uncover something cruel that had always been hidden within us? Or did it create a stranger where once there had been a familiar self?

I did not know.

For the first time in my professional life, I did not know.

Then came the day at the supermarket.

A man passed me in the aisle.

He wore my husband’s cologne.

That was all.

A scent.

An invisible trace of something that had once belonged to the most ordinary mornings of my life.

And suddenly my body recognised him.

Before reason could intervene, before memory could correct the impossible hope, something inside me cried out:

There he is!

I turned.

Of course it was not him.

Of course!

And yet the disappointment was so violent, so humiliating, that my legs gave way.

I sat down on the floor between the shelves.

People stared.

A woman approached me and asked whether I was all right.

I could not answer.

And then, quite suddenly, I remembered.

The woman in the last row.

Her black clothes. Her clenched hands. Her terrible crying.

I remembered how calmly I had watched her, how confidently I had believed I understood.

And now, sitting on the supermarket floor, I realised something terrible.

I had understood everything about her grief except what it meant to be the one who had to endure it.

Oh, how I remembered her then!

I wanted to find her.

Not to explain anything.

Not to offer another carefully chosen sentence.

I wanted to sit beside her and say:

I did not know.

Forgive me.

But I never found her.

And perhaps that is just as well.

Perhaps my need for forgiveness was only another form of selfishness, another attempt to make someone else’s suffering serve my own peace of mind.

You see how difficult it is to become a better person?

Even remorse can conceal vanity.

For a long time I believed that my grief had exposed something shameful in me.

But slowly, painfully, another thought began to emerge.

Perhaps my knowledge had not been false.

Perhaps it had simply been incomplete.

Books can tell us what happens to the human mind after a loss. They can describe the nervous system, the memories, the desperate search for someone who is no longer there.

But no book can lend us another person’s suffering.

And no amount of suffering grants us ownership of another person’s pain.

I know that now.

When someone sits across from me and tells me that they cannot bear another day, I no longer hurry to explain.

I listen.

Sometimes I say nothing.

And sometimes, when I see their hands trembling, I remember my own.

My husband has been gone for some time now.

There are days when I can speak of him without crying.

There are days when I laugh, genuinely laugh, and afterward feel an obscure shame, as though my happiness were an act of disloyalty.

There are mornings when I forget for one brief second, and evenings when I remember with such force that the years between us disappear.

I still miss him.

Not always with the same violence.

But with a persistence that has become part of me.

And sometimes I wonder whether I would have loved him differently had I known.

Would I have listened more carefully?

Would I have forgiven the small offences more quickly?

Would I have spent less time being right?

Ah, this terrible desire to bargain with the past!

We imagine that if we had been kinder, more attentive, more grateful, death might somehow have been persuaded to wait.

But death does not negotiate.

And love, however great, does not make us masters of time.

There is one thing, however, that I have never regretted.

Loving him.

Not for a moment.

And so, when the house is quiet, I still speak to him.

My dear,

Do you know how angry I was with you?

How terribly, childishly angry?

I know you did not choose to leave me. I know it was not your fault. But there were nights when I accused you anyway.

Why did you leave me here? Why did you make me learn to live in a world in which you no longer existed?

And then I hated myself for accusing you.

Forgive me for that.

I miss you.

I miss you in ways I cannot explain, even now, even with all my education and all the words at my disposal.

And yet, if someone offered me a choice — to erase our life together and never know this suffering, or to live it all again, knowing exactly how it would end — I would choose you.

Every time.

Even with the terrible morning.

Even with the empty bed.

Even with the years that followed.

Because before there was this pain, there was you.

And what a life you gave me!

How many ordinary, blessed days I lived without knowing that they were blessed.

How carelessly happy I was.

So thank you, my love.

Thank you for every morning, every ridiculous quarrel, every tender gesture I failed to appreciate.

And yes — thank you even for this pain.

Not because I wanted it.

Not because I believe suffering makes us noble.

But because I know whose absence I am mourning.

Because I would rather have loved you and lost you than have lived a life in which you had never existed.

I am not angry with you anymore.

I am angry that you are gone.

There is a difference.

And I think, at last, I can live with it.

I used to believe that understanding grief would somehow make it easier to bear.

I no longer believe that.

Understanding does not spare us suffering.

Sometimes it merely gives us words for what we cannot change.

So I continue living.

Not because I have overcome his death.

Not because I have found some grand meaning hidden inside it.

But because, each morning, despite everything, life asks something of me.

And because somewhere inside this wounded, contradictory, often unreasonable heart of mine, the love remains.

I thought I understood the woman in the last row.

I thought I understood grief.

And then I heard my own voice screaming on the kitchen floor.

Only then did I understand how little I had understood.