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Getting Over Getting Over It
long since forgotten the sound of her voice and the timbre of her
laugh. She died in 1981, and we never made tapes of her talking.
In my dreams she speaks in an unfamiliar pitch, her words
sometimes garbled, sometimes clear. I haven’t heard her real
voice in almost thirty-nine years.
Thirty-nine years. I know. That’s a long time. Says pretty
much everyone, ever.
Thirty-nine years and you’re not over it yet?
Anyone with major loss in the past knows this question well.
We’ve spent years fielding versions of it, explicit and implied,
from parents, siblings, spouses, partners, relatives, colleagues,
acquain- tances, and friends. We recognize the subtle cues—the
slight eye- brow lift, the soft, startled “Oh! That long ago?”—
from those who wonder how an event so distant can still occupy
such precious mental and emotional real estate. Why certain,
specific nodes are still so tender when poked.
How many of us have wondered the same?
You’re still not over it yet? As if the death of a loved one were a
hurdle in a track meet that could be cleared and left behind.
RANDOM
I wish there were a foolproof method for “getting over” the
death of someone we love. So much, I do. Except everything I’ve
experi- enced, learned, and observed over the past thirty-eight
years has taught me otherwise. Since the publication of my first
book, Mother- less Daughters, in 1994, I’ve collected stories from
thousands of women in the United States, Canada, Australia,
New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Europe, India, and the
Middle East whose moth- ers died when they were young. I’ve
spoken to, emailed, and met with their brothers, husbands,
fathers, daughters, and sons. Five file cabinets in my office are
filled to capacity with research into how the human body,
intellect, and spirit respond to major loss. In nonfiction writing
classrooms for the past twenty years, I’ve helped graduate
students and aspiring writers identify, question, and articulate their
stories of trauma and loss. And for this book, I conducted in-
depth interviews with eighty-one men and women who had
experienced
Introduction : xvii
What comes next for them? What can they reasonably expect
to face ten years later? Twenty years? Forty? What kind of
adjustments do they make over time? Which have been most
helpful? How do their losses continue to show up throughout
their lives?
Well, those aren’t easy questions to answer. For one thing,
grief is a very, very individual process. Any single outcome
depends on a long list of variables and the subtle interactions
between them. These include the following:
(and hadn’t) changed over nearly three decades was one of the
most extraordinary and rewarding parts of writing this book.
These women, along with the sixty-three other men and
women interviewed, revealed how long-term bereavement is
qualitatively different from the shock, numbness, confusion,
disbelief, exhaustion, anxiety, disorganization, reorganization,
and adaptations that take place immediately after a death.
“Grief” is a fine descriptor for the liminal, surreal, exquisitely
painful zone of adjustment between what existed in the past and
what comes next. What comes next, however, is broader and
more far-reaching. For 85 percent of us, the volume knob of
distress eventually turns down low enough to allow laughter and
joy to return but is liable to amp up at key moments, and often
without warning.
What comes next is the part where we adjust to a long list of
events that now do and don’t, can and cannot happen, both
celebra- tory and sad. The texts and calls that stop coming; a
relationship started; a relationship ended; a solo walk down the
aisle; a child born; questions that can’t be answered; goals
achieved without witness; holiday traditions perpetuated or
RANDOM
abandoned; a deep, deep apprecia- tion for every day; the
frustration when mere language cannot ex- press what is so
truly known and felt.
We move on, yes, but most of us do not leave our departed
loved ones behind. We carry them forward as models, as
advisors, as cau- tionary tales. We journey with them into a new
plane where our re- lationship shape shifts over time, potentially
becoming even more multi-dimensional, more nuanced, and
more emotionally complex than it was before.
This thing we call “grief” is just the beginning of a much
longer engagement with the thing we call “loss.” This next part
is what I call the Aftergrief.
The Aftergrief—until now, underappreciated, underreported and
largely misunderstood—is where the questions “What now?”
and “What next?” begin to be answered. It’s where we continuously
recal-
xxii : Introduction
In 1981, the year my mother died, few resources existed for be-
reaved families in our town. Religious communities offered pockets
of assistance, but local hospices and children’s bereavement services
were still at least a decade away. The Parents Without Partners
group my father sought out was made up mainly of divorced
RANDOM
women who passed him their phone numbers at the end of his
first meeting, which was also his last. In 1981, for the most part,
a family walked out of a hospital or away from the scene of an
accident and returned home to figure out their next steps alone.
By the time my father died in 2005, the landscape had
changed considerably. By then, hospice programs, nonprofit
bereavement centers, support groups, grief programs, and
weekend bereavement camps existed throughout the United
States. These resources have been, and continue to be,
enormously beneficial to individuals who have access, especially
in validating and normalizing the wide array of responses to loss.
Nonetheless, with only a few exceptions, these services are
de- signed for the recently bereaved. If an adult who’s lost a
parent, sib- ling, child, spouse, or close friend more than a few
years in the past experiences a resurgence of grief and contacts a
bereavement organi-
Introduction : xxiii
terribly and had learned valuable life lessons. They were still in
the grips of their pain even 10 years later and had become better
people through the experiences of their mourning. They wanted
their suf- fering to end and they wouldn’t change a single thing
about their grieving process.”
The Aftergrief asks us to hold such competing truths side by
side, not as contradictions but as companions. Over time, the
gravity of sorrow can exist alongside an appreciation for the
insights that arise from that suffering. Available language fails me:
I can’t find a word in English to express this idea. The closest I
can come is the Portuguese saudade, a feeling of longing for a
person, place, or object that’s been loved and lost, with equal
measures of joy for having had the love and sadness for having
lost it. Saudade, also known as “the love that re- mains,”
stationed at the midpoint along the spectrum between grati-
tude and sorrow.
Hope Edelman
Los Angeles, California