GRIEF RECOVERY FICTIONS

READING books is helping me a lot to cope with grief. After my wife died, I kept on consuming books obsessively, in an attempt to have anything that would fill in the time where I could possibly think about my loss. Keeping myself busy days after my bereavement was a pain reliever. I was loneliest when I was not reading.

I read mostly fiction, and there was a time during this period that I scoured bookstore shelves and e-books lists for any helpful grief books, hoping that they would give me wisdom to help me better understand my experience, and that they could speak to me on a personal level in the quiet solitude of my darkest days. A kind of a lifeline to carry around.

But I got no success, or perhaps I didn’t search well. I’m not the religious type of a person, and I’m not so much into reading inspirational books, though I have read a few of them.

It was only last year that I was able to get hold of an e-book copy of The Grief Recovery Handbook, a self-help grief book authored by John W. James and Russell Friedman. It is actually a teaching manual handbook on how to recover from grief. The authors draw from their own histories of grief (one about divorce, the other the death of a child and a grandfather), as well as from others to illustrate how it is possible to recover from grief and regain energy and spontaneity through a well-defined plan. The readers or grievers are offered with specific actions, or guidelines coupled with some homework activities.  

The book didn’t give me the miracle I need, maybe because I didn’t work with their method or stay on track with the program. The handbook however impresses on me some valuable information about my situation: that there are no absolutes in grief; that recovery from loss is achieved by a series of small and correct choices made by the griever; that incomplete recovery from grief can have a lifelong negative effect on the capacity for happiness; that one can have complete grief recovery only by being totally honest with himself or herself and others; and that there are several pieces of misinformation about dealing with loss. I also learned that saying “I’m fine” is often a lie.

In fact, I get better insights on grief from reading fiction than any information or clinical method I got from the handbook. The novels I’ve read are diverse enough, from classics to bestsellers. Some of the fictions that have really gained me something valuable carry the universal theme of loss and the different ways people deal with it.

Maybe I’m just trying to justify my fiction addiction. When I started reading fiction years ago, I did it more for entertainment and perhaps for the thrill of saying I’d finished Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield or Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Now later, or just after my loss, I read fiction as if to learn how to thrive in life. Fiction has helped me in a far more significant way than nonfiction has.

Fiction, as I have just learned, conveys truths straight to the heart closer because of its capacity to tap the emotional side. It could expand our mind and teach us to be more open to other experiences and perspectives.

And more importantly, fiction builds empathy. This reading of our own state of mind into what we read is a tool that allows us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals. As you read fiction, according to Neil Gaiman, you’ll find something vitally important for making your way in the world, which is the idea that, “the world doesn’t have to be like this” and “things can be different.” Empathy in reading provides us with a great deal of straight information, such as facts about what it’s like to be each character in the novel getting a handle on grief.

Judith Guest’s bestselling novel, Ordinary People, for one, had put more than the usual amount of emphasis on depression from a clinical standpoint than what I could learn from nonfiction. This novel made me realized that depression is, in the words of the novel’s psychiatrist, Dr. Berger, “not sobbing and crying and giving vent, it is plain and simple reduction of feeling.”

I also have read novels that give me everything that I need to know or do, from mere reminders to be strong and self-reliant to simple methods on how to recover from adversities. I get myself into each of these fictional worlds, and understand better the perspectives of characters suffering immeasurable losses similar to mine.

From Scarlett O’Hara of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, I learned not to dwell on something that I could not solve (e.g. my grief), with all possibility, at the moment because after all, “tomorrow is another day.” And when I tried to muster all my energy to solve something before it’s too late, then I would be like the clever orphan Violet Baudelaire of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events and think that “there must be something” or a solution to every problem. Even when the planet will be blown to smithereens and I will be hurtled through the vast space, Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy would give me the best advice printed on the sturdy plastic cover in large, friendly letters for every Earthman: “Don’t panic!” 

Despite the loss, I learned not to give up. And there’s no middle ground because “there’s no such thing as a temporary suicide,” according to Henry Rearden of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, who must have to hang on despite the loss of his steel mills to grabbers. I don’t have to be so removed from my life, like old Lyman Ward of Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, who has gone into retirement, afflicted by a bone disease that has resulted in the amputation of his right leg and living alone in the house, because it’s the only life that I got. 

And I wouldn’t think that my wife whom I have loved so much, have left me completely like a heavenward smoke of a candle. There’s a fictional old bridge where five random lives perished in Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which reminds me that we ourselves shall be loved for awhile and forgotten, but the love will have been enough and memory is not necessary for love because between the living and the dead, “the bridge is love.”

Books that use death or separation to propel the plot also help me learn about other experiences. I can easily imagine what things might be like for someone else, or what it’s like to be each character. I know how Jack Salmon in Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bone feels about the tragic death of his daughter, that gnawing guilt of having failed to save her. My heart bleeds for Gondor King Denethor II for the heroic death of Boromir by orc archers while defending Merry and Pippin in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and I could feel the call of revenge from Don Vito for the ambush of his trusted son Sonny Corleone in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather.

The death of a spouse or a lover would never fail to tug at the heartstrings, especially when it is used to drive home major themes and symbols of the book. I only have admiration, than pity, for Cuyler Goodwill of Carol Shield’s The Stone Diaries, who builds a tower in his wife’s memory, slowly or one stone at a time in the passing years, but is unable to recite her name at the time of his own death. Or I might be like Archibald Craven of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, who locked his wife’s garden after her death and secluded himself away from his world and even his own sickly son. Or like Frederic Henry in Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms who couldn’t utter a word after the death of his beloved Catherine and her stillborn baby. He just walks back to his hotel in the rain. I grieve for Isak Dinesen in his autobiographical novel Out of Africa who sold her coffee farms, after the death of Denys Finch Hatton, her very special friend, and returned to Denmark and turned to writing.

Reading reminds me that I’m in control of my life. After all, nothing relieves better than reading Dickens’ famous opening: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” a realization that human well-being cannot be matched by human despair. If, however, new studies come out tomorrow saying that reading fiction digs me deeper, rather than pulls me out, in my loneliness—I’ll be damned! But I’m not giving up.