speak what we feel (not what we ought to say)

The old adage "love is blind" is not adequate enough to express the shortsightedness that can come over us--the hazard we pose to those nearest us--when we dare to fall in love. Perhaps grief is no different. It so consumes us for a time that we can sabotage the best efforts of those who would comfort us. The situation is never more convoluted than when love and grief collide in the context of the family. Everything threatens to tear the fabric into unrecognizable shreds that, even stitched back together, would comprise an utterly different tapestry.

"Tapestry" was one of my mom's favorite five words. Along with such gems as "siphon," "smattering," "instigator," and "regal," she used it frequently and predictably, like an old clock whose hourly chime sounds overworn and comforting at the same time.

My mother passed away last year, followed sharply by my grandmother. Remarriage for my dad was a forgone eventuality, but grief visits each family member uniquely, and he was ready much sooner than were the rest of us. As a family, we were faced with the awkward juxtaposition of deep, howling grief with my father's nascent romance. To go from heaving sobs to excited giggles in the same day requires great elasticity of mind and takes so much energy. When my father fell in love, we held our breaths to see whether he would turn the page on our collective grief abruptly. New love in the face of old grief is like water splashed in a parched throat, just waking up from a bad sleep. The lover feels immense relief, and at once notices an even greater thirst waiting to be quenched. For one who is still grieving to watch this reaction is an icewater slap in the face, at once shocking and temporarily suffocating.

It is, of course, impossible for both the lover and the griever to communicate their two opposite encounters. Just as one shocked by an icewater attack would admit that water, delivered and received differently, would be quite good and refreshing, the one still grieving will acknowledge the pleasure she sees in the face of the one who has moved from old grief to new love. But the tension between her "not-yet" and that "already" is so immense and unwieldy that she will be unsuccessful at communicating her experience to the lover, who she feels is no longer a partner in her grief. The one who is already loving again will resent the one who is still grieving. The two cannot meet without negotiating an emotional chasm that is now between them.

For the one still grieving, the effort to disassociate the newly beloved from the loss of the old beloved requires willful magnanimity, persistent empathy... and time. There is the temptation to gloss over the grief she feels must stifle the new romance, but she is powerless to accelerate or even to hide it. This causes her to be respulsed at times by the new love, which turns to guilt--she feels like a spoilsport--especially if she is reminded that time is ticking and the new love would be given its permanent place in the family life sooner rather than later. It is easier not to rehash this complex emotional cycle, in which the earnest griever alternately recoils from and entertains the new love. So the griever will bely all that is affecting her: "No, I'm fine. I'm happy for you." With a dissembling smile, she tries the Jane Austen technique of self-mastery, rather than let out the ugly, frayed edges of her tattered grief in the presence of new love. (She will, however, be visibly stressed at every seam until some piece of her well-hemmed grief splits open, more embarrassing and unavoidable than ever.)

The challenge for my family, since we include both bearers of old grief and of new love, is best put by the Duke of Albany in the final lines of King Lear:

The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

It is appropriate that Albany should say these words--a character who struggles against loveblindness throughout the duration of King Lear, and repeatedly mistakes loyalty for treachery, true affection for dubious manipulation, has learned to lift the scales from his eyes.

If only we could only "speak what we feel," and not have half the battle still before us! When either the griever or the lover dares to speak, the greatest challenge lies ahead for the other: to listen, and by suspending the primacy of his own particular experience, make repeated attempts to understand--unpackaged, raw--what is being said. Only in doing this will a family be able to restitch together the shreds of their shared life left by grief, and fashion a radically different but equally beautiful tapestry.