Love with nowhere to go

Grief is not only for the dead. When we are unable to honour other profound losses, we become strangers to ourselves

by Derek van Zoonen  BIO

Telemark, Norway, 2011. Photo by Jonas Bendiksen/Magnum Photos

is a philosopher and researcher on the interdisciplinary research project Modeling Human Happiness at the University of Oslo, Norway, where he researches ancient philosophy and positive psychology. He also works as a (philosophical) counsellor trained in the Hakomi method – a mindfulness-based, body-oriented psychotherapy – and is writing a book on the place of pleasure and pain in a good life.

I have been grieving my mother for years, even though she is still alive. Sometimes before falling asleep – in that liminal space between waking and sleeping where the self becomes porous – I’d see the image of the sweet and caring woman who would come to say goodnight, her cheeks covered in thick layers of night cream. Then, out of nowhere, the image would flip into the raging woman who was so entangled in her own suffering that she turned her frustration on us. Over the years, that second woman slowly swallowed the first, as she got pulled into my brother’s addiction. It’s hard to say where her own unhappiness ended and my brother’s suffering began, but together they drifted into a parallel reality, cut off from the world beyond their heads. There was no funeral for this. No condolence cards. No flowers. No phone calls. No leave of absence. What was I supposed to mourn?

And yet what I felt for them, what I still feel, has the unmistakable gravity of mourning. Can there be grief without death? I have come to think that we grieve much more often than we realise, and that death is grief’s most visible occasion rather than its essence. If that doesn’t match your experience, it may be because we rarely call these other losses by their name. Most of our losses arrive without a funeral. That is the human predicament: we are creatures built to attach, living in a world where nothing stays. Sooner or later, we lose the things we care about. And since we are complex beings with a body, a mind, a community and an environment – beings who love many different things – there is a great deal we can lose, from our physical health to our sense of who we are, from relationships to homelands to the natural world we share with other species. For creatures like us, there is no way around heartbreak: to live is to lose. Grief is what love does when its object is gone. It is love with nowhere to go.

Over the past few years I have accumulated many such losses. There is the psychological loss of my father as I knew and loved him: a brutal stroke rendered him incapable of walking and cycling, and cycling was the only thing that could ‘make his thoughts liquid’, as he used to say. There is the loss of old friendships. First you are no longer part of each other’s lives – you just update one another about your life – and then, one day, it becomes awkward to reach out at all. There is the gradual softening of an academic identity I’d spent the most vital years of my life constructing. It was a genuine vocation, a life of the mind that taught me to think slowly and carefully. But it was also, as I came to realise, a way of living safely at one remove from where actual life takes place. What is slipping away is a future in which being an academic philosopher would be the whole answer to the question of who I am.

There was the woman whose calmness, clarity and silence embodied the qualities I have come to like so much about the Nordics since moving to Norway. Like a magical stranger, she entered my life unexpectedly, but at the same time her arrival felt so natural, her presence so obvious, that it was as if she had always been there. After our first meeting, which lasted almost 24 hours, I wrote in my journal: Ze is gekomen om te blijven. ‘She had come to stay.’ And she did, for nine intense months. She tried to teach me to ski. We listened to the music of Nils Frahm, which reminded her of melting snow. And she made me see that the deepest form of intimacy happens in the space between the words.

But despite the depth of our bond, she left, abruptly, as if she had never been there. She had fallen in love with another man. I was left behind, dazed and disoriented, and although my heart was broken, this kind of loss did not have a name that matched how shattered I felt. It was ‘just a breakup’, and it didn’t even deserve that name: we had been dating, but it never technically became a relationship. It was also a romantic connection that ran alongside another one, a long partnership that was open by mutual agreement and conscious design. Much about it wasn’t legible to most people around me. I faced the grief largely by myself. No scripts, no rituals, no recognised form, no legitimacy, no shared language, no way to make sense of what had happened to me.

Part of what made the experience so disorienting was a narrow idea of what grief is. In psychology, in philosophy and in our Western culture at large, grief has been treated almost exclusively as a response to the death of someone we love. It’s a neat, tidy understanding. The most celebrated grief memoirs – think of The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) by Joan Didion and A Grief Observed (1961) by C S Lewis – are concerned with the loss of a life partner. And Michael Cholbi’s Grief: A Philosophical Guide (2021) – one of the most extensive philosophical treatments of the emotion – focuses mostly on the grief we experience at the death of someone we love or who otherwise matters to us.

Restricting grief to bereavement is like restricting pain to cluster headaches

Death is visible and final: it has a body, a date, a medical certificate. The other losses are blurrier: they have no physical object, no clear beginning or end, no tangible proof they happened. We also have an infrastructure for death: funerals, condolence cards, flowers,........

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