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"Reading requires advocacy"
Recently, we can be said to have spent a lively "festival season": New Year's Day, Spring Festival, Lantern Festival, Valentine's Day.... Festivals emerge one after another, celebrating the joy of life, meeting and having, and behind these words of happiness, our lives are always facing death, parting and loss....
The sum of the two is the truth of life. Some people say that life is "big sadness" plus "small happiness". Therefore, how to face loss is an equally important proposition as how to face gain. "Loss" abounds in our lives. From losing a beloved object, to ending a bitter relationship, to facing the death of a loved one, and finally ushering in the end of his own life.....
When we mourn the "loss", what do we mourn? Why do we always have to bear to lose? If loss is always so unavoidable, how can we get out of this "pain of loss"? Today, the book reviewer invites the psychological counselor, founder and writer of "Simple Psychology" to talk to you about death and loss, parting and mourning. What do you want to say about "loss" – whether it's friendship, love or affection? Welcome to leave a message to the book reviewer to share the story of how you faced "loss".
Written by | Jane Riley
(Psychological counselor, founder of "Simple Psychology")
“Please help me to die... help me live to die.”
(Please help me face death...) Please help me live until death comes. ）
I was at an academic seminar for psychotherapists. A few of us sat around and we were a learning group that shared. The psychotherapist across my right hand suddenly said that I had a client who was 93 years old when he came, and this old man sat on the couch in the counseling room and said to her, "Please help me to die... help me live to die.” (Please help me face death...) Please help me live until death comes. ）
She worked with the visitor for three years until the old man died.
That day the words lingered in my head. After we are born, in adulthood, there are countless people who come to tell us how we should live; but no one has ever had the opportunity to tell us how to die, how to face the inevitable death, how to face loss.
We pretend to turn a blind eye to death; we pretend to be alive and sick, dead, dying of loved ones, mourning and changing, pretending that life goes on as usual.
And how exactly will life go on?
"You sit down for dinner and the life you know is over"
A friend gave me this book called "The Year of Fantasy". Jon, a 70-year-old writer at the time, was sitting down at home for dinner when he suddenly died of a heart attack. "Life changes in an instant, and that moment is commonplace." Jon wrote the book in a year after her husband's death. Record the delicate, overwhelming wave of emotions she experienced in her heart in the year after that moment.
"You sit down for dinner and the life you know is over."
This sentence is like a rope in the book, stringing together all the emotional waves and fragments that have experienced the sudden death of a loved one, page by page. She said, "There is no barrier to mourning. Mourning is like a wave, like a disease attack, like a sudden fear, making our knees weak, blinding our eyes, and erasing the everyday nature of life. ”
The Year of Fantasy
Edition: New Classic Culture/Nova Press, January 2017
But these are not about "self-pity and self-pity." The great changes in death, the mourning that followed, you and I have never learned how to face them.
On the first night of her husband's death, Jon insisted on not having anyone to accompany him and wanted to be alone. "I need to be alone so he can come back." In the months that followed, Jon said that his way of thinking in mourning was "like a young child, as if my thoughts or wishes could reverse the course of the story and change the final outcome." ”
She refused to throw away her husband's clothes because she felt they would still need them when he returned; she allowed them to perform an autopsy on him just to make sure that there was only a minor problem with him, and maybe the doctor could adjust to get him back; when a friend reminded her to notify the New York Times to publish an obituary, she wondered if she should notify the Los Angeles Times. New York and Los Angeles are a few hours apart, so in the time and space of Los Angeles, is the husband still alive? If the Los Angeles Times had not been informed of the obituary, wouldn't her husband's death have happened?
These strange thoughts in mourning were "symptoms" of mourning, but it was also these whims that helped her cope with this sudden loss.
Beyond the whimsy, life goes on as usual. Jon arranged everything after, took care of his daughter in the ICU, and approached the media to live "as usual".
Use "whimsy" to resist and digest pain
The theory of trauma in counseling often says that when people experience pain, they rely on fantasies to survive. Like a little girl selling matches, polishing one flame after another, that fantasy helps her to fight in the cold and hunger. And when the moment of trauma passes, people constantly return to reality repeatedly from the fantasy, slowly dealing with sadness and anger, crying and sadness in the alternation of fantasy compensation and reality's pain.
This is the instinctive protection of man for himself. Fantasies and fantasies are important, they help us insulate the wave-like emotional whistling, they allow us to occasionally breathe without being completely submerged; they create a space in which we wait for the wound to slowly recover.
"Necessary Loss"
Edition: Shanghai Sanlian Bookstore, August 2007
In the midst of constantly waiting for her husband to return, Jon knew that her husband would never return. She had been writing with her husband for many years, and she went to his house to close a book, and suddenly realized that the open book was left by her husband.
What if?
I've heard more than one person say that when they go through the death of an important person, they repeatedly look for clues. From the message left before the death, from the light and shadow on the wall..." I know this is ridiculous, but just in case. What if this is just a secret between the departed man and me.
Draw a map of "mourning"
In Bereavement: Reactions, Influences, and Care, it is said, "People who have lost loved ones may feel like they are wrapped in a cocoon or blanket; to others, they act as if they can hold on." In fact, this is the reality of death that has not yet penetrated consciousness, making people who have lost loved ones act as if they can still accept the death of their loved ones. The "particularly calm undead effect" that happened to them made the people around them think that they were acceptable, that they did things according to the rules, did not cry, and were reasonable.
However, this was only because the news of death had not yet penetrated their bodies.
Dolphins refuse to eat after being widowed, and wild geese will fly and mourn until they are lost. What about people? Will faint, will not be able to distinguish the direction, will not understand the words of others... The study found that these living relatives have a variety of physical, cognitive and emotional troubles.
Death Lessons: On Death, Dying, and Bereavement
Translator: Rong Li
Edition: Chinese University Press, June 2011
These "symptoms" are described by artists and are faithfully documented in poetry and fiction; but they rarely enter the public perception. They actually have rules to follow, they can be accompanied, understood, and given space; and people who experience these misfortunes should not be like scattered marbles, closing their doors day after night.
We don't know how we're coping after trauma. We don't know how these misfortunes that happen in our lives are manipulating neurotransmitters in our bodies, our heads, our brains. Jon mentions a detail in the book that after her husband's death, a friend of hers delivered a bowl of porridge to her every day. She said she could drink porridge. There was no need to persuade her to eat, just put a bowl of porridge in front of her, and she would eat it mechanically. She said not to be "kind" enough to persuade her to throw away items that were no longer useful, because she was still waiting for him to return, and she needed to feel that he might come back, that her life might go back to the past.
Although you all think this is ridiculous. But you and I can only wait patiently. Wait for these tidal wave-like emotions to come and go, to come and go. Expect each wave to come a little differently, and her sadness fades a little when the tide fades.
To know what has been experienced in reality this loss is too intense. Fortunately, Jon recorded these in the language of the camera. You see what a person experiences in a fantasy when she suffers loss.
Death and mourning
Humanistic scholars have long said that there are several major themes in life: death, loneliness, freedom, and a sense of meaning. Loneliness has some mysterious beauty, freedom is full of power, a sense of meaning is like a teacher in a political class... There is always some positive sense of meaning; and death alone, in which death is like a hand stretched out in the darkness, you are caught, whispered, you are never seen again.
No one wants to face death, but we know it is at any given moment, and we try to resist it in all sorts of ways, and there's nothing we can do about it.
In the counseling room, we talk to almost every client about loss and death. Sometimes it is a person who has existed, sometimes it is a part of our spirit that dies, and sometimes it is a relationship between us and others that dies and loses. We keep gaining and losing in the world. We lose some inherent connections, we lose some identity, sometimes we lose something fragile, sometimes we lose something precious.
Sigmund Freud (May 6, 1856 – September 23, 1939), the founder of the psychoanalytic school and the famous Austrian psychologist, pointed out in his essay "Mourning and Melancholy" on the issue of mourning and loss that the criterion for testing whether mourning is complete is whether you have liberated yourself from the loss of the object of desire.
Every loss, we mourn. We mourn the lost time, we mourn the missed feelings that we deserve but never get; we always crave certain feelings, definite answers:
The Bible says, "Now that I have been poured out, the time has come for me to die." I've fought that good fight and when I've run the road I've run out. I have kept what I believe. From now on, there is a crown of righteousness that will remain for me. ”
But the only certainty in this world is that death will come, and we spend our whole lives waiting for him to come.
Fortunately, we can "whimsically", and we still have a lifetime to prepare for his arrival.
"A serious farewell to a normal attitude towards life"
A good friend of mine experienced the sudden death of a close friend a year and a half ago, and I recently recommended this book to her. I think I probably never really understood what had changed in her spiritual world, what kind of waves had gone through, but maybe Jon did. My friend asked me, did Jon finally come out? I asked her how to define "coming out"? She said she no longer felt depressed.
No one knows.
I suspect that these things sometimes happen like a red-hot iron block burning on your body, and the wound becomes a scar, and the scar slowly fades. But it's always there.
C.S. Lewis is a British writer. He has taught at Oxford University and has written a series of children's novels such as The Chronicle of Narnia, The Fable of Love: A Study of medieval Traditions, and The Dark One.
C.S. Luiz wrote after the death of his wife: "I think I am finally beginning to understand why mourning feels like it hangs in the air. Its origin lies in the fact that so many habitual impulses have been thwarted. For years you've gotten used to having someone across from you, and now it's all turned into an ultimate silence, one dead end after another.
I listen to my friends who have experienced mourning, and sometimes after a thousand thoughts, I feel that maybe this is a gift from God to teach him something; sometimes I wonder why God is so cruel, and whether the coming of death really makes sense. This feeling of indecision, even if you wear clothes to cover it, this pain is there. Sometimes depression and sadness pour out. This wound, this scar, it constitutes you, it makes me. You can't throw it away, and you can't fool yourself.
In Mourning and Melancholy, Freud said that mournful acts "mean a solemn farewell to a normal attitude towards life." ”
Yes, a solemn farewell.
Forever new, never ending
Mountains change, islands disappear; ocean currents swell beneath the invisible depths.
I read an old lady who once said: I have reached this age, I have experienced many things, I have made many attempts, and now only death is left and I have not tried. I am now ready to meet the coming of death.
Since its publication in 2005, "The Year of Fantasy" has won numerous awards, and such a book about "mourning" unexpectedly ranked among the best-sellers of the year. Like you, I don't know if Jon's mourning still came like a tidal wave in the years that followed, and she did cry uncontrollably on the radio broadcast afterwards.
But what I want to share with you is that ten years after the book was published, Jon endorsed the luxury celine at the age of 80 and became the "new face of fashion" in the world at that time. The media described her as "talented, unconventional and slightly rebellious." ”
As Jon repeatedly writes at the end of the book: "Just as in the beginning until the present, it is eternal and new, and it is never ending." ”
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