SHARE A BRAINWAVE

In the blog that I have recently decided to fade out (as it was the log of the first year after my Mother died, a year that just passed the one year mark last week), I have tried to grasp what grief is. And now, reading Joan Didion’s amazing book on loosing her husband, The Year of Magical Thinking, I stumble upon this:

Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of ”waves”. Eric Lindemann, who was chief of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital in the 1940s and interviewed many family members of those killed in the 1942 Cocoanut Grove fire, defined the phenomenon with absolute specificity in a famous 1944 study: “sensations of somatic distress occurring in waves lasting from twenty minutes to an hour at a time, a feeling of tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath, need for sighing, and an empty feeling in the abdomen, lack of muscular power, and an intense subjective distress described as tension or mental pain.”

Tightness in the throat.

Choking, need for sighing.

Such waves began for me on the morning of December 31, 2003, seven or eight hours after the fact, when I woke alone in the apartment (Didion, J. 2006 (2005): “The Year of Magical Thinking”. Harper Perennial, pp. 27-28).

Here is yet another field of knowledge where waves apply. The imagery of grief as waves is stronger than any other attempt at describing grief, simply because it rings true. That is how it feels. That is how it is to hold a wave.

And about The Year of Magical Thinking: A highly recommendable book for anyone wondering about the fine line between life and that which is not life.

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