Grenfell & Grief
It’s strange but then again, maybe it makes perfect sense that an article about the Grenfell Tower tragedy makes me face a much more personal grief.
In late April, my oldest friend, Julia, died of complications caused by cancer. Such a straightforward sentence. Julia, a friend I knew all my life, is now dead. This notion of death, particularly Julia’s death, bashes about in my tiny mind like a sneaker in a tumble dryer.
And then I read the article in the LRB written by Andrew O’Hagan and my brain careens from the impersonal empathy I have for those victims to the immediate anguish I struggle to understand about Julia. The article is written with a novelist’s eye for scale and human-ness. And despite, or perhaps because of, the dry evidence, the bureaucratic details, residents’ accounts, activists’ anger, it’s the despair of the lives lost that leak through the almost mind numbing investigative details. He quotes John Donne:
Language, thou art too narrow and too weak
To ease us now; great sorrows cannot speak.
The sting of tears makes me wince. Am I crying here for Grenfell or for Julia - should one have dominion over the other? And, really, should I give myself aggravation if it’s Julia that I'm crying about and not those poor people in the 11th floors and above who lost their lives? The question is rhetorical.
Julia with the kids at Gafa. God love her.
What puzzles me, what angers me about Julia (and there are many things I’m angry about) is my inability to properly, truly mourn her. For now.
It’s too fresh and grief has all the dark alleys that none of us can make sense of until we’re spat out at some point in the distant future but nonetheless, it makes me wonder why this thing we call heartache, sorrow, sadness can smack us about and just as suddenly slide away again, into the shadows. For me, I borrow and steal from others’ to give me a leave pass to cry. And the crying is not the same as grieving. The tears are quick scratch of a much bigger itch. But I want the scratching. I want to pick and pick at the scab until it’s properly bleeding because then I can maybe cauterize it. Right now, the tears get me nowhere because they’re a little bit crocodile. I’m waiting for the grief monster to rear up from the chasm so I can properly know I’m grieving. I don’t know what this is that I have at the moment.
Other peoples’ reminisces on grief and just general bad juju at least give me something that I don’t even know I need to understand because it’s so stupidly obvious: the knowledge that none of us escape death. But the paradox is we’re mostly alone in our sorrow and confusion when we face this inevitability. It’s rarely a collective emotion that we share together.
Not surprisingly, I’m going down every black hole on death and dying that I can find. Something that I recently listened to gave me a momentary perspective on this thing that’s going to grab us all. Alie Ward has a podcast called Ologies. Yesterday I listened to her podcast on thanatology: the scientific study of death and the practices around dying. Carl Sagan says—my go-to dude for all things science-y and the turtleneck sweater’s cheer squad—that we’re all star dust. Ain’t that the greatest leveler out there? Surely in that there's some kind of existential comfort, I tell my teary self. Some day Julia will be in someone’s apple pie, she’ll be the calcium in someone’s teeth, the nitrogen in the DNA of the next century’s Mozart. As will I be. (I'd like my DNA to be in a girl who pens Nobel Prize winning romance literature but that's a topic I've covered elsewhere).
But today, sitting here with Handel’s organ concertos in my ears, that broad brush thinking doesn’t work. Andrew O’Hagan doesn’t help, Handel doesn’t help. He may be the 18th century’s most upbeat guy to ever write a tune but Julia’s not listening to him any more. She’s not calling me up to urge me to come to an Australia Ensemble concert and I won’t find an excuse not to go because it’s Julia on the other end of the line and we’re going to be in this life together for years yet. Aren’t we?
And as the notes skip through my mind, and the tears keep coming, I keep asking myself is the music a help or is it a hindrance to this grief and why should it matter one way or the other?