Literary lapses for a grieving mother

I've been reading a lot lately. I have to keep busy or I feel the anxiety within me rise and rise, with agonizing grief right on its heels. So if I'm not busy with the children, cleaning, doing writing or transcription for clients, or knitting, I'm reading. Being busy doesn't stop me from feeling sad, but it helps me feel as though I'm not being swept away by sorrow.

I guess it's the misery loves company philosophy of book selection, but I find myself drawn to books about Depression-era Liverpool*. I've been reading everything by Helen Forrester that I can get my hands on at the library, finding comfort in the sad struggles of her own life chronicled in her four-book autobiography or the fictional lives of her very real characters who are for the most part hardworking Liverpudlians. These women lived with the very real fear of losing babies and children, expecting that they would suffer bereavement and infant loss. Maybe that's what fascinates me; that somehow their expectation of being babylost mummas has been lost among my contemporaries - until it hits us personally of course. That these characters exhibit a resignation that mourning one or more children is to be expected in life is somehow comforting to me, as if my own baby boy's stillbirth wouldn't be such a shock had I not had the misguided impression that healthy infants do not suddenly die in Canada in 2009.

The non-fiction book I'm finding endlessly fascinating is The Mourner's Dance: What We Do When People Die by Katherine Ashenburg. While I find her style at times clunky, she writes about cultural and historical approaches to mourning as she remembers how her family dealt with the sudden and tragic death of the fiance of one of her daughters. Her detailed research and the scope of material she covers, plus her own family's experience with sudden death, makes it a very absorbing read.

I have felt so many times that my mourning would have been better accepted in Victorian times or earlier and I think, from what Ashenburg writes, my intuition is correct as she uncovers a shift in attitude that resulted in etiquette books encouraging the bereaved to consider other people's reactions to their sadness. This was, she says, "a new and very 20th-century attitude: the bereaved should not make other people uncomfortable. The Victorians, who regarded the mourner as an absolutely normal and unembarrassing member of society, would have been astounded by this idea."

Rituals and styles of grieving, ways to remember the deceased, and even grieving parents and gender differences in approaching grief are all topics for discussion in The Mourners Dance, which was published in 2002.

Ashenburg touches on a book written by bereaved parents after the death of one of their four-year-old twin boys in the 19th century called, The Empty Crib: A Memorial of Little Georgie. And while the language of some of the passages seems charmingly old-fashioned to modern sensibility, one passage struck home. A clergyman friend of theirs wrote, reassuring the parents that their loss was great and acknowledging they would certainly feel cheated by losing a child so young: " 'It is all very well to be told how he has been saved from the sorrows and perils of earth. You wanted to see him upheld amid the perils of God's grace, doing a brave, true-hearted man's work in this life, and then receiving his reward up yonder. It is easy to say that he has 'only gone on before.' You wanted him as a companion here. It is a grief, - a terrible loss...' "

Centuries later, I wish people understood that. So many people, I feel, want to hurry me through my grief so that they don't have to deal with it or feel uncomfortable. They want happiness, closure, and a quick fix. After a few months, if I express I am still sad, some people have recommended that it's time I talk to an expert if I'm still feeling upset, as though feeling sad just months after the death of my child is bizarre and wrong on some level - and that by talking to some counsellor I don't know will magically make everything all better and we can just move forward and talk about the news, weather, and happy things like rainbows and sunshine. Not my dead baby. And of course there are all the well-meaning people who say that losing a baby isn't the same as losing a child I'd raised for several years and "knew better." I shake my head at that one, because to me the logical rebuttal to that way of thinking would be that someone who loses a person they've had in their lives for longer therefore shouldn't miss them because they have had time to spend with them. It's all pain. It's all grief. It's all valid. You either mourn what you had and lost or what you wish you'd had and lost.

Why do people nowadays want grief contained, kept private, and dealt with expeditiously? And why do some seek to quantify grief, deeming some losses "more" or "less" painful?

I know I don't have the answers, but it has been really interesting to me to read about how other people handle death.

Today is four months since our George's heart stopped beating during my labour. I'm still sad. I don't think this means I'm not coping well; I think this means I'm missing him and mourning. As I should be. I'm his mumma and he was my baby boy. And I miss him.


*My husband will laugh at this and say if it's Irish, English, Scottish, Canadian, historic, and tragic I'll have read it and cried over it. Okay, I do like historical drama and this isn't new for me. But it really hits home now.