Grief
I was thinking about this yesterday, but I thought I’d wait and give myself a little time to process. Yesterday I attended a funeral for a friend of mine who lost a child. I can’t really describe what that was like, only that it’s something that nobody should ever have to go through. Two things in particular struck me.
One, our culture really doesn’t allow people to grieve in public. Nobody wants to watch people get emotional; it makes everyone else uncomfortable. But I was struck, yesterday, by how much unnecessary pressure this puts on people. It’s a whole lot harder to hold back grief than it is to let it out, and I would imagine it’s not healthy to hold back. Yet this is what our society demands of us. Makes me appreciate certain Middle Eastern cultures, where weeping and wailing in public is accepted and in fact, expected. I mean, when they grieve, they go all out. They cry out, and beat the ground, and tear their clothes, and cut their hair. It seems over the top until you’ve actually experienced grief like that…then you understand how freeing such actions are.
Two, I can never know for certain what it’s like to experience something without actually experiencing it for myself. I know that I as a writer…and maybe a lot of fiction writers do this…will find myself thinking that I’m more in tune with how people think and how people really feel than they are themselves. It’s an arrogant state of mind, and yesterday I was confronted by what utter bullshit it is. I can’t fully imagine that kind of grief because I haven’t been through the circumstances. It was potent enough being on the fringes of it…actually experiencing it? I can’t imagine. It’s a humbling thing for me as a writer to have to admit.
My job is to put myself in my characters’ shoes, but sometimes I do need to step back and admit that sometimes I don’t know what a particular feeling or thought or event is really like. I certainly don’t have the right to assume that because I habitually put myself in other people’s shoes, that I possess a surer grasp of an emotion than someone who’s actually gone through it. I’m good at guessing and mimicking how people think, and of course I know how I think. But I was struck yesterday by how much of what I know about people is simply outside observation, and not internal knowledge.
The only person I can ever truly know is myself.
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