Traditionally, mourning is a public and a structured process. We attend viewings and funerals and memorial services, cover our mirrors, sit shiva for a week, recite the kaddish for at least a month, wear black for a year and a day. Grief, by contrast, is a private experience, unconstrained by ritual or time. Popular wisdom will tell you that it comes in stages—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance—and that may be true. But the Paleozoic era also came in stages—Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian—and it lasted two hundred and ninety million years.
Like anything that goes on for too long, grief is (I don’t know why people don’t talk about this aspect of it more often) unbelievably boring. I don’t mean in its earliest days, when the sorrow is too acute and the overall rearrangement of life too recent to allow for anything like tedium. Eventually, though, as you grow accustomed to its constant companionship, the monotony sets in. I can’t recall exactly how long after my father’s death this happened for me, because mourning also played havoc with my sense of time, but I think several months must have passed when the grief that had sloshed around turbulently inside me ebbed into a stagnant pool. It made life seem extremely dull and it made me seem extremely dull and, above all, it became, itself, unbelievably wearying. I remember declaring out loud one day how sick I was of it—of the blanched, lethargic, dismal endlessness of grieving. It seemed an affront to my father, who was among the least boring people ever to live, as well as a waste of time, which, as his death had just reminded me in the strongest possible terms, is a precious and finite gift. But I could no more will away the dreariness than I could will back him.
To make matters worse, this boredom offered no protection from the capriciousness of grief. We think of “boring” as synonymous with “predictable,” but I found the process of grieving to be simultaneously volatile and tedious. In this, it resembled the experience of being in the hospital while my father was dying; the emotions were enormous and erratic, the days cramped and repetitive. Like stress, depression, and physical pain, grief wears us down by the mere fact of always being there. Each day you wake up and the mortgage is unpaid, each day you wake up and your back hurts, each day you wake up and your father is dead. But every climate has its weather, and on top of this bleakness, my grief felt chaotic—affected so constantly and subtly by so many different factors that its behavior at any given moment could shock me.
Some days, for instance, I would find myself feeling genuinely, deeply, gloriously fine. I recall in particular returning from one bright, cold winter run full of the exuberant conviction that I was okay, everything was okay, I was grateful for my father’s life and at peace with his death and aware that he had given me everything I could possibly need to go on without him—all of which was completely true but, as a mid-grief mood, unsustainable. Other days, I felt like a ghostly simulacrum of fine: calm, blank, functional, feelingless. Still other days, I was filled with a strange, undirected anxiety, as if part of my mind had forgotten that my father had died and was casting around with increasing dread trying to figure out what was wrong. I felt like I was waiting for the thing that had already happened, and it made me jumpy and distracted. (“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear,” C. S. Lewis wrote. “The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning.”)
Another thing I felt, albeit thinly, was anger. It is common enough for the bereft to experience fits of rage—at oneself, at God, at the injustice of the world, at the dead for dying, at a total stranger for having the nerve to still have a living spouse or child, at the sudden unbearable indignity and release of whacking your head on an open cabinet door. I had felt this kind of irrational, surging fury in the past while grieving, but after my father died, I found myself subject only to its lackluster cousin: irritability. Like sleep deprivation, grief makes it hard to maintain equilibrium, and regrettably often after my father died, I felt myself becoming testy and difficult. Minor things that would not normally have bothered me occasioned a hot spike of infuriation: the grocery store clerk needing to summon a manager to complete a transaction when I was in a hurry, my mother forgetting to turn down the television in the background when she and I were on the phone. Even in the midst of those moments, I knew that the ostensible object of my aggravation was not the issue. I was just frustrated with the new terms of my life—with the fact that my father was gone, and with the necessity of grieving him. “It’s so annoying that my father died,” I announced one day, which was completely true, although I had meant to say, “It’s so annoying that my phone died.”
Of all the ways that grief affected me, I liked this one the least. It paid poor tribute to the loss that caused it, and it left me in a strange, self-devouring mood, minor but with a vicious existential edge. Among the many emotional reactions I had to my father’s death, it felt furthest from the root state of sorrow—although, in my experience, sorrow often feels surprisingly distant when we grieve. Before I had ever experienced it, I’d assumed that grief was a form of sadness, basically synonymous with it but more extreme. And maybe, in some subterranean way, that’s true; maybe all the other things I felt along the way—anxiety and exhaustion and irritability and lassitude—were just secondary phenomena, produced by and more accessible than the sorrow they obscured. In the end, though, it makes no difference, because, by common consensus, it is all these other things that the bereft most often feel. Ever since Kübler-Ross proposed her taxonomy of grief (originally to describe the experience of facing one’s own death but now widely used for those in mourning), people have been debating the validity and universality of her five stages and proposing additional ones: shock, pain, guilt, reflection, reconstruction, hope. Yet neither the old model nor any of the new ones include sadness as a defining feature of grief.
That surprising omission accurately reflects my own experience. Obviously I often was and sometimes still am deeply sad about my father’s death. I can remember whole days when sorrow pooled around me, so palpable and unadulterated that the only answer to questions about how I was doing or what was going on was “I’m just sad.” And I can remember other days when a more dire form of that feeling would overtake me—the thing I thought grief would always be like, a tidal wave roaring up to swamp me with the undiminished measure of my loss. But neither one, the pool or the wave, were regular components of my grief.