On January 23 of my senior year of high school, my best friend Marie called me. She was sobbing incoherently and all I could get out of her was that she was alone and on the roof of a local building. She wanted me to be with her. It was the kind of call that no one—least of all a seventeen-year-old—is prepared to receive. Why was she on the roof? Did anyone else know? Was she going to jump? All questions I could not answer, and there was no time to try.
Hands shaking, I called the police. The night comes back to me in bits and pieces now, but I remember vignettes: my father reaching for my shoulder, my screaming, the sound of the sirens as they screamed past my house, racing to get to her before she jumped. They reached her in time and she was taken home, alive and with all her bones intact. She called me that night, promising that if I told anyone what had happened, she would jump—she’d really do it—and it would be my fault. It was too late. The police had already followed up with me and I had admitted everything: the previous attempt, the recent breakup, the call to CPS, the plan to run away, the burner phone, the depression, the alcohol, the drugs. I told her I loved her, that I would do anything for her. We never spoke again.
I was at a loss for words and for a period, I lost my mind. I barely spoke, but I managed to ruin most of the relationships I had left. I did handstands just to feel the blood rushing to my head and the way it left me dizzy. I disappeared into the woods for hours with my dog and reveled in getting lost. I scratched my wrists bloody and when they scabbed over, I began again.
It has taken years, but I now realize that while my grief was real, my expression of it was not entirely authentic: I was operating on the belief that suffering was not only demonstrative of but proportional to my love for her. Perhaps if I could make the scale of the loss visible through self-inflicted suffering, I could prove how much I had loved her. I had told her before, but perhaps I needed to prove it.
My loss was somewhat unconventional. After all, Marie didn’t die. She was still there, but it would have been easier to grieve her if she were dead: there would have been a finality to it, maybe even a headstone or a bench to return to. For all its evils, death is virtuous in the generous closure it grants.
Whether or not my loss was conventional, the way that my grief manifested certainly was. For millennia, suffering has been a legitimizing force when applied to loss. Charlemagne tore at his face and beard when presented with the body of his nephew Roland. In late imperial China, the highest honor a widow could bestow upon her late husband was committing suicide—not only to follow him into the next life, but also to demonstrate sexual loyalty. When one such widow died in 1529, poet and playwright Wang Jiusi published an essay celebrating the fact that “no sooner did [her husband] die than her heart was riven with grief, such that no one could prevent her death.”
Although the intense emotions associated with grief are universal, the way they are expressed is culturally conditioned. The Celts had keening (Caoineadh), and the Victorian middle class on both sides of the Atlantic developed notoriously complicated mourning rituals involving three stages of grief stretched out over a year, each complete with its own wardrobe and daily practices. After the death of her husband Prince Albert, Queen Victoria famously wore black for the rest of her life and had his clothes laid out for dinner each night. In an 1853 article on the death of Vice President William King, one reverend vehemently defended the cultural grief rites, maintaining that the public grieving was “not all pomp and show. There is meaning in it.” There is certainly meaning in grief, just as there is meaning in everything. But there is no more meaning in suffering grief than in simply enduring it.
Pain does not exist to legitimize the human experience, nor does it preclude self-actualization. In his 1961 book A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis transcribes the process of mourning his wife, the poet and author Joy Davidman. Davidman was everything to Lewis: partner, lover, muse, “a sinful woman married to a sinful man,” but nevertheless a “a soul straight, bright, and tempered like a sword” with a mind that “would have the truth at any price.”
Davidman’s death spun Lewis into a crisis of faith. “Where is God?” he asks. The problem is not so much that Lewis cannot find God, but that he feels a bitter resentment creeping in. What he dreads is not the conclusion that “God is dead,” as Nietzsche would have it, but that He is cruel.
When Marie was gone, I too glimpsed an angry God. How could I have been lucky enough to have been given someone like her, only for her to be ripped away? Acceptance was the key to loss, or so I was told. But she wasn’t dead. She was just gone. Lewis emphatically rejects attempts of those who seek to minimize death, to write it off as something which doesn’t matter. People die, and memories are no substitute for who and what the person was. There is the truth, which is the existence of death, and that truth matters. Marie’s absence was like Davidman’s in that “like the sky,” it was “spread over everything.” The very act of being alive became different.
Like an amputee, Lewis understands that while he may heal from the wound, he will spend the rest of his life with a part of himself missing. “There is nothing [he] can do with suffering except to suffer it,” and the depth of the loss marks a permanent separation of his life into a before and an after. “How often,” he asks, “will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say ‘I never realized my loss till this moment’?”
Moments of joy beckon him—the beauty in a grove of trees, a morning bath, the afternoon sunlight—but the happiness he is presented with feels disingenuous, even “insipid.” He does not want to “go back again and be happy in that way.” To choose happiness, or even to reduce the intensity of his suffering, would dishonor Davidman’s memory. Grief, inevitable and excruciating, thus becomes an ouroboros: an infinite response to an ultimate finitude.
And yet, there is a morning several months after Davidman’s death when “after ten days of low-hung grey skies and motionless warm dampness, the sun was shining and there was a light breeze.” The novelty of the beauty temporarily distracts Lewis from his grief, and it is at the moment when he mourns her least that he remembers her best: “It was as if the lifting of the sorrow removed a barrier.” “Passionate grief,” he realizes, “does not link us with the dead but cuts us off from them.” We must grieve sincerely, but sincerity is not predicated on suffering. There is a cross, and we must bear it, but we need not seek “the aches for their own sake.” Only by facing grief honestly can one hope to avoid the temptation of performative suffering.
I was unable to find such a method in the Catholic tradition I was brought up in. It was only when my undergraduate coursework forced me to read other philosophical traditions that I found an approach to grief which did not attempt to reconcile paradoxes but let them stand as they were.
The Tao Te Ching is a notoriously dense text, riddled with contradictions that frustrate undergraduates and weathered academics alike. If one is willing to sit with that frustration though, a truth-laden poetry is revealed. On the nature of things, for example, the Tao offers the aphorism that “all things in the world are born from what is there, / But what is there is born from what is not there.”
By allowing contradictions to serve as truths, the Tao rejects the binary logic that governs grief—healing versus despair, growth versus loss. There is no beginning nor ending, only a series of transformations. Like an alloy, the form taken in one life is a combination of other things. Death represents one of infinite transformations which the spirit undergoes. In one life, bronze, in the next, steel.
Grief, then, is the processing of a transformation. Done properly, “it claims no credit, / never dwelling on finished works— / and precisely because never dwelling / never departing.” This process is referred to as wu-wei, or “non-doing.” In a 2020 interview, University of Chicago Professor Brook Ziporyn explained non-doing as
what happens without being made to happen by a definite intention, without a plan, without an ulterior motive — the way one does the things one doesn’t have to try to do, what one is doing without noticing it, without conscious motive. Our heart beats, but we do not ‘do’ the beating of our hearts — it just happens.
Through non-doing, one defers the choices which Lewis tortured himself trying to make: Remembering or forgetting? The desire of healing or continued wretchedness? The solution Lewis arrived at, suffering without aestheticizing it, is a manifestation of the Tao’s non-doing. There is a desire to suffer, but also one to not suffer. To phrase it succinctly, a desire to suffer without desiring its continuation. While it may seem impossible to heal, it is necessary to accept this impossibility in order to accomplish it. Grieving is, itself, a paradox: an acknowledgement that healing is impossible which can only come from healing itself. Likewise, “vastness means passing on and on. / Passing on means distancing. / Distancing means returning.”
Several months before Marie’s attempt, I was sprawled out on her bedroom floor as she finished an SAT prep course, and asked her if she believed in God.
“Yeah,” she said, “I believe in Jesus.”
I was taken aback by this. She listened to Mt. Joy, smoked weed, trespassed, collected crystals and kissed girls—she was the least likely candidate to follow an organized religion, much less one accompanied by so many rules.
“But you believe in rocks,” I remember saying, gesturing toward the shelf of crystals above her desk.
“Yes, but I think you can believe in rocks and Jesus,” she said, laughing.
I didn’t understand it then, but her faith makes sense now because that was just how she was. Like the grief I was doomed to feel for her, she was a paradox. She was predictable as clockwork, except for when she was late; she was the funniest person I’d ever known until I couldn’t laugh because I was crying as I listened to the sirens wail toward that building. Marie believed in crystals and she believed in Jesus. I barely believed in anything but I hoped her flashing contradictions came from a lighthouse guiding me somewhere. In reality, they were glints off the shoals I’d wreck on, and my ship sank. I thought my suffering could be a lifeline to some kind of meaning, but it only anchored me to the rocks.
At the end of A Grief Observed, Lewis reflects on the four journals he has filled. In the infancy of his grief, he was attempting to capture grief itself. If grief is ensnared with language, mapping it becomes possible, or so his thinking went. It is only after months of scribbling, erasing, long walks, nightmares, and conversations with God that he realizes sorrow is not a state, but rather a process.
Only through non-doing can I remember Marie clearly, and only by recognizing the impossibility of the task before me do I stand a chance of accomplishing it.
Image: John Beasley Greene, Untitled (Still life with a statuette of the Venus de Milo), waxed paper negative, 1852-53 (Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois).