On Grief and Loss By Torrey Olson

I have seen a friend, broken, weep for a loss the same as my own. And I wept too. And it seemed to me intensely clear why we both wept: to suppress language from our bodies.

The first reaction to the comprehension of loss is the desire to change the situation, or, in other words, rejection (the subconscious thought, “No, he must be retrievable…no”). The weeping that emerges from such overwhelming sorrow-sorrow only possible as the result of a loss-is a mechanism that forces the body to face what has happened in its unchangeable truth: he is gone, he will not come back, and I am irrelevant to this equation. And it is never more viscerally clear that the matter is entirely out of my hands than when the weight of the realization breaks me, engulfs me, and comes upon me as something external and entirely out of my control—I will weep, whether I want to or not. And in this state, words are impossible. The audible emergences from the body are stifled: solely whimpers, gasps, and the sounds of choking remain. It seems clear to me that there is a necessary function to this choking of language. Language can only navigate around the feeling, because the feeling is one of loss, a lack of substance, a void in which the entire sadness resides, except for the knowledge that there will be nothing ever to replace it. We can talk about shared feelings, memories, future plans of memorialization, the facts, the tragic, or, like this essay, the experience of loss itself, but there is nothing really at the center to be described. What remains is nothing. It is a loss, and there is a corresponding loss for words. One can hate one’s sister’s new husband (he is selfish, he is ugly, he is a womanizer), but one cannot even describe the absence of a person, except maybe temporally (its beginning was untimely, its persistence is tragic, it is still a loss). Don’t get me wrong--the things that remain to be talked about are likely useful in some way or other. But when we weep, though we might wish it would stop, the sorrow of loss forces us to confront, in an experience in which our entire body participates, the experience of loss, and our inability to do anything but understand, and allow the truth to sink in that we are left with an un-fillable void.

This realization seems particularly tragic to us because we are used to wanting to make something whole, not leave gaps in our arguments, holes in our clothing, or breaks in our relations. But in the language of loss, memorialization seems to me the fortification and maintenance of the void with which we are left. Our task as memorializers is not to erase this space where the object of our love used to reside, not to let it disappear, not to fill it with something else, nor to forget about it. Rather, to memorialize is, as weeping recommends, to accept, to persist with it, and further, as the name suggests, to leave it as a space for memory, the memory of what existed before the absence, and through which, if there is hope left (and I believe there is), one may hope to reanimate, at times, something that was formerly there. None of this is intended as consolation, but rather as one of ways language can talk around loss that will (hopefully) begin to encase the absence that we will try to retain.