Good Grief! by Rin B. Coppola by rca-issuu

Rin B Coppola

Good Grief! The New Five Stages

By Rin B Coppola MA Print Tutor: Benjamin Wiedel-Kaufmann Wordcount: 6,217 2020

Dedicated to Generation Z

Contents

the bereaved

(I) preoccupation

(II) pining

(III) captivation

(IV) numbness

(V) wishing

still bereaved

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

All images are my own. They were made with a Holga camera and natural emulsions. The results are impermanent.

the bereaved “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (London, Penguin Classics, 1818) 220.

8 Is that the goal?

To be happy?

Put on the planet unwillingly just to give us unrealistic intent.

What about those of us who will never get there?

My favorite freak of existentialism, Frankenstein’s monster. My first example of absolute justified antipathy for humanity. The other students in my eleventh-grade brit lit class condemn his violent actions, but I was no rube. He very clearly tells you he’s in pain, but nobody listens. Looking at it now, I’m not even sure those rednecks knew how to read.

I always had a premonition that we were akin; both full of blind hope and blissfully unaware of the torment awaiting us. Surely enough, like all the tragic characters (fictional or otherwise), there’s a switch, a defining moment. Is it evil? To know just how ‘good’ feels and to be robbed of it instantly? Are all the villains in every story ever told just misunderstood; their feelings bubbling until their bitterness is solidified? Somewhere along the line, they are made to feel guilty for their reaction to agony. Alas, nobody ever talks about the villagers that teased relentlessly. Maliciousness is simply the loss of purity. That sounded like somebody’s English teacher, but if the point of life is happiness… I am convinced that I will never be.

Maybe it’s time for me to disappear…as all the monsters do.

Take my advice and don’t give your therapist a soliloquy comparing yourself to Frankenstein’s monster.

They’ll call it Borderline. 2 I’m not a doctor, and I know that’s not correct.

Depression and Anxiety come up a lot, duh.

Maladaptive Daydreaming seems to be the closest diagnosis I’ve ever been gifted, and that was from some witch lady in Prague. 3

The rest just call it grief. Seems a little simple to me.

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-5 (Arlington, American Psychiatric Association, 2011).

Borderline Personality Disorder is defined as a psychological disorder with unstable emotions that cause acting without thinking. 3

The DSM-5: rejects experimental diagnosis but often makes reference. This one, Maladaptive Daydreaming, by Professor Eliezer Somer of the University of Haifa in Israel, is a psychiatric condition which causes intense daydreaming that produces oratorial feelings. Some cite these daydreams as hallucinations, blending the material and illusory. It distracts a person from their real life. Often, real-life events and trauma trigger the dream state.

9 Lorazepam makes me drowsy, Benzos make me dull, Xanax makes my heart race, I think it’s supposed to do the opposite. Prozac makes the feelings worse Vyvanse makes me want to punch walls. Sorry, there’s no more eloquent way to say it. Omeprazole makes me puke, Someone said the GI and the brain are attached. Acid makes me fun, again Mushrooms help me think. Alcohol is for the British. Cigarettes for the French. Marijuana is my treatment of choice, it’s only a plant anyway.

10 Grief is that five stage thing, the one that tangles between elementary emotions like anger and sadness and acceptance and whatever else. Depending on who you talk to, there’s up to twelve, and that’s how you know it’s all speculation. It’s the cloud in which all feelings of loss supposedly cover. I never once have felt emotions that lackluster. Unbeknownst to me, other’s feel these emotional one-hit wonders are appropriate enough to encompass it all. That or they’re too ill to question. ‘Anger’ doesn’t cover it for me. Pills don’t stop negativity. They don’t revive the dead. If Frankenstein’s monster is grief why am I being treated for stomach ulcers and fevers.

Nobody knows what the fuck they’re doing so why do I expect doctors to be any diﬀerent. Diagnoses are suggestions, pills are poison, and cognitive behavioral therapy only works if there’s a will. I am convinced that whatever this is will never end, so why try?

11 I distrust the social sciences, and medical literature alone only highlights traditional examples of grief. Palliative care4 is supposed to cover the bereaved, I suppose, but apparently loss only happens to those late in life because the pamphlets at the hospital only show the elderly. Allegedly, death only takes you at the ripe age of one-hundred. What about accidents? Murder? Terminal illness… too far.

I always assumed the tone-deafness of grief portrayal was because the neurodivergent were hiding.

The avalanche is indescribable, the adverse eﬀects on relationships and work ethic and confidence is real; those trifold bibles will spare you all grim details.

But I won’t.

I search for likeness everywhere; some buoyant proof that more of us exist. And these feelings are real.

John Waters would even call me very fuckable by the size of my bookshelf5, yet I remain single. That is not what I meant; however, it is full of women who’s language will forever be more helpful and descriptive than even the DSM-6. Imagine, artists, writers, musicians, revolutionaries…those who have been through it too; their proof delicately displayed like an altar to call upon.

All of the spiteful desperation,

the pathetic cling to past,

the half second hallucinations,

the feeling that there is no hope for you now.

These are the true feelings of grief.

“Either everyone feels like this a little bit, and they're just not talking about it, or I’m completely fucking alone.”6

Palliative care is family administered and focusses on comfort during the final months of a patient’s life. It is also a big patronizing joke. 5

“We need to make books cool again. If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them”- John Waters 6

Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Fleabag (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 2019) 398.

(I) preoccupation I build a small queendom. A rooftop garden of astroturf and half-lit roaches. All this because my sister tells me Shakespeare wrote King Lear during the Plague…

14 I think it was the dejected weather that sold me,

streets narrow and uninviting,

never-ending dampness,

all housed within a country that only reminisces the past.

I hate it here.

I resent our glaring similarities; but that is only because I would probably hate it anywhere that wasn’t New York. Be still my ordinary life,7 the one that I watched fling itself from the Empire State Building. I had a job, a real one— not one of those stupid customer service disasters that no feeling human should be subjected to.8

As disenchanted as I am, shamelessly sprawling on my illusory throne made from a stolen lawn chair and a duvet cover sans stuﬃng, I have a task. Cherry-picking my way through yet another helpless book trying to name (justify) my condition.

I conceptualize how bizarre I look; half naked, sunglasses, something rolled, American. Existing. The nice normal folk in the flats around me wince– I don’t blame them, I have the most disgusting rooftop garden on the block. But it is mine. Virginia Woolf sees no reason for me to be procrastinating.9

Joan Didion, The Year Of Magical Thinking (London, Fourth Estate, 2005) 4.

Didion describes an engrossment with a newfound definition of ‘ordinary’. Most who grieve describe the past as ordinary, as if there was no trace or warning of unconventional disturbance. Was it ‘an ordinary beautiful day’ when that drunk driver hit? I bet it was… Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto (New York, Verso, 2004) 41.

I love Solanas’ outlook on an automated future here. She suggests all non-creative jobs should be automated, freeing humans (especially women) to use their brains as they were intended. Considering my attitude and treatment of the public has gotten me fired at every low end job I’ve ever had, I welcome this future. Customer service has killed honest emotion. I know you don’t want to work either, so why are we fighting? 8

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London, Penguin Classics, 1929).

Virginia Woolf infamously claims that in order to write fiction a woman must have, well, a room of her own. The idea here is that history is male constructed, nobody can argue that, but women have been trapped into views that don’t represent us because our sources are male. A room is a start, but I bet a shit ton of money would help. $ £ € ¥.

Speaking of nice normal folk my neighbors seem nice and normal. I don’t actually know that I just know that their gardens are much nicer and much more normal than mine. There’s an old lady with some sort of spaniel in the flat east to mine I think she plays reggae unpredictably, and I like it she chats with her youthful working class neighbor she offers him a beer they share a stonewall that is covered in moss. I saw him bring her groceries once I wonder if she has a condition or if he’s just nice I doubt it but, he refuses the money she offers I can see him waving his hands in the air I can’t hear what he says but I do try.

16 I am ripped from my fantasy when the old lady with the spaniel belatedly asks if I am enjoying the uncharacteristic English weather. I nod too eagerly, as one does when they are caught being a dirty voyeur. I might as well have binoculars.

I have this strange urge to introduce myself. I do not. It’s complicated.

The only one thing I know for sure is I am not present. My imagination seems to get thrown easily these days. “Certainly someone could produce an account of this freezing time as an act of dissociation, or a borderline psychotic effort to erect a shield against the death’s reality,” writes poet Denise Riley, who lost her son unexpectedly, “I want to avoid offering my amateur speculations about existing theories, instead, while hoping not to lapse into melodrama, or self-regarding memoir…” I must interject. No, the maudlinism is real. I do not know where in history sorrow became regarded as exaggeration. I blame the masculine sources Woolf was talking about. I am twenty five years old, I am in pain, and I will not apologize for sounding as such.

“I’ll try to convey that extraordinary feeling of a-temporality.” 10 I am not here. As Riley admits, this state is not rare, possibly the most universally untold symptom to loss. I am a voyeur to this Earth, I watch it rotate without me. This arrested time lasts days, months, and then if you’re me, well... Back to the sort-of present now I am three years unrecovered! I declare this mockingly into the sky. Three years? I have left my grief untouched for three years? I unsuccessfully try and direct my attention away from the clinical and back towards my dysfunctional peeping habits. But alas, I’m record-scratch-stuck in grief again.

I wonder what She would think of all this fresh madness…

Denise Riley, Say Something Back/Time Lived Without Its Flow (New York, NYRB, 2020) 71.

17 My sister breaks me from my lead-colored11 reverie with a ring on the telephone. I lost my page anyway.

“Happy Birthday!” A sing-songy lyric transmits over the ocean.

I’ve lost track of time figuratively and spatially. I’ve let my skin burn red.

April is a minefield, taunting me with all sorts of ironies. I will spare you all the calendric details, because even when it happened I thought it was a joke; that someone would conjure up a world where She dies five days before my twenty third birthday. Her death and my birth are housed in the same month of deceitful renewal. The planet decided to add to the festivities this year with a pandemic. So much to analyze and yet all I can conjure is that April is an inconvenient month for me to be stuck alone and almost out of drugs…

“It’s not my birthday yet.” I say dryly. Do not age me and push me further from my last tangible moment of normalcy.

“I know that, we are celebrating early!” She keeps the enthusiastic charade. It’s very impressive considering my sister cannot keep a secret.

I’m waiting.

“Okay, I had a morbid thought,” she finally admits. “I’m sending your gifts early, just in case I die the same day mother did, I don’t want my present to also arrive on your birthday posthumously.”

Simone De Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death (New York, Pantheon, 1964) 20.

My absolute favorite phrase when talking about a melancholic world view, “a lead colored world”.

(II) pining

“That’s quite dark, I’m surprised you’re the one who came up with that.” My response perfectly bland.

19 That’s Her. That’s the She. Mother.

Remembering that I am human and on the phone with my human sister, I come back to truth unfazed. I am the Nietzsche fan in the family after all. 12 Sister is nineteen years my senior and in many ways my antithesis, for someone who’s been through it, that is. Admittedly, I am jealous of her for reasons beyond my grasp of the written word. She approaches the world diﬀerently than I would ever dare. Sometimes, you can’t even tell…

The sharp incompatibility of my high, the sun, and my straight edge sibling presents itself. I reluctantly shake myself awake because she does not probably know the extent of my new grief given habits.

Simone DeBeauvoir reveals an obsessive divinity and absorption she felt toward her mother post death. She admits, “Her death like her birth will remain in some legendary time.”13 I imagine my mother as godly lately... probably because I am godless, I have no rituals, I don’t know where She went. My only excuse for thinking about god is that It’s almost Easter.

You look exactly like your mom. Distant relatives and strangers alike try and appease me. Is this what normal people think I want to hear? Imagine being lovingly obsessed and absolutely terrified of a visage. Riley suggests that you die along with your loss, but then the spirit of the deceased jumps you.

Friedrich Nietzsche is credited with the introduction of Nihilism, the rejection of then christian centric religion and morals. In her essay Deviant Payback, Avital Ronell shares that many philosophers of the time had Neitzche figured as a woman, in fact, a scolding mother. I’m sure this will come up again. 13

De Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death, 20.

20 “You are cut down, and yet you burn with life…”

I look in the mirror and turn into her subconsciously, more and more with each passing day. I love it.

Explain that duality. Explain how eerie. Explain the enervation of that daily reminder. Her, skin thin like homemade paper, eyes overcast grey.

“It is something Ineffable about my mother that I search for What I want is amber green glass and gold, like her eyes. Our eyes.” 15 I find uncomfortable peace knowing I am not the only one consumed with a visage. I have decided the reminder comes from the long hair I have let grow since She left me. I twirl the length between my fingertips. “Is this why I cut my hair so close to my head, so that when I look in the mirror I see my dying mother?”16 I had short hair all my life. The image starts to provoke me. I stop chopping it the week she dies. I let it grow relentlessly. It should be longer. It feels like an eternity ago.

“Hair.is.everything.”17 Fleabag claims, she’s the personification of unprocessed grief in popular culture. She’s a double whammy when it comes to loss, her best friend and her mother. I saw a live version of the play when I first moved here. The audience especially erupts during the therapy scenes, where Fleabag admits she may be using humor and sex as a deflection. Friends tell me I’m funny like Fleabag, but I can see that her erratic behavior, the unstableness that the public has fallen madly in love with, is fueled by loss. I don’t seem to get the same reaction when I go out fucking, drugging, and stealing sculptures. I stare at myself in the reflection of my telephone. Sister hung up a long time ago.

Riley, Say Something Back/Time Lived Without Its Flow, 76.

There’s a confusion between life and death here, I don’t feel her spirit. But I do see it. Maybe only because I want to. 15

Kate Zambreno, Book of Mutter (South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2017)135.

Everything becomes a projection of loss.

Zambreno, Book of Mutter, 128.

Waller-Bridge, Fleabag, 361.

You have a lock of your Mother’s hair In that small wooden pot she brought to you from Mexico. You shaved Her head for Chemo; you kept a piece because she didn’t need it anymore. She sees herself and wonders aloud why she never cut her hair short before.

(III) captivation “Women are born with pain built in. It's our physical destiny—We carry it within ourselves throughout our lives”18

Waller-Bridge, Fleabag, 311.

23 Misbehaving Bodies 19 is the closest I’ve been to feeling like I saw Her struggle in the mainstream.

Pancreatic Cancer, I guess I always assumed it was about that. Terminal illness was the only context I could house my art and my grief, it was the only tangibility. Spence’s portion of the show explores familiar specifics: images of her own decaying body, angry world spiting text, and self severance. Seemingly hard to look at verisimilitude. It was honest, I was not scared, but the hesitation of my peers is palpable.

Jo Spence and Hannah Wilke, that’s basically it when talking about making Cancer art. Autobiographical. I can oﬀer no reason as to why these are the two artists I can name in the mainstream. I splay images of my mother in chemo across my desk. Cirrhosis, skeletal, catatonic at points. My tutor asks why I want to expose the public to such shocking images.

Shocking? Is the truth shocking? Maybe it’s not for the public, just proof that horrible things happen. The public needs to see that, I think. Death to blind optimism and fuck Cancer, too.

I discover here that I am not trying to communicate a cancer story. It’s always in the background. It is my context but not my story to tell.

After the show I quietly escape to the bookshop because I need to be alone. There are only so many times a classmate can tell me, ‘how relevant this show is to my practice’. I became part of the show.

A book with the aggressive title Motherless Daughters 20 might as well have slapped me in the face. I truly cannot escape. I go to it, but not before I decide I have the audacity. Without even skimming I purchase the book. I shove it in my bag before I have to explain it to anyone.

Is this a self help book?

I ponder this on the bus home.

The back says “cover image courtesy of Shutterstock”.

Really…

Misbehaving Bodies, a show at the Wellcome Collection in 2019, was described as a ‘heartbreaking experience’. I saw no heartbreak, only reality. Artist Oreet Ashery plays a movie about her father’s loss of motor function, she dresses up as him in healthy glory. Photographer Jo Spence shows the chronology of her breast cancer diagnosis. There are images of medical procedures juxtaposed with angry but satirical messages to western medicine. I question who this show was really for. 20

Hope Edelman, Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss (London, Yellow Kite, 2018).

The first edition was written in 1994 which is the year of my birth. There’s no connection here but I can pretend all I want. I read an article in the New York Times claiming that Millennials will see the earliest cases of parental death in generations. I can’t find it to prove it, oops.

24 I’m a fat ugly American cunt who’s mom died when she was twenty two. 21

That’s my version of Anna Quindlen’s self introduction after I read her article in that book with the bad cover. The beginning is stolen from a homeless woman’s shouted opinion of me the day I moved to London. “Unlike an adult who experiences parent loss with a relatively intact personality, a girl who loses her mother during childhood or adolescence co-opts the loss into her emerging personality, where it becomes a dominant, defining, characteristic of her identity.” 22 I suppose this is the reason I don’t introduce myself to my neighbors.

I leap from my outside world into what I lovingly refer to as my shoebox. Attached to the ugliest rooftop garden on the block is the ugliest flat in probably all of Brixton. Plop! onto the bed from the window. The whole room shakes as I land. I try not to take it as an insult. I bought myself a birthday gift despite my lack of care for the passing of time. I, like my sister, buy it way in advance for no discernible reason. An ancient looking 'athome darkroom kit’ is hardly a glitzy twenty sixth birthday present. The chemicals sit in their beakers as days go by, all unmarked because who cares. I was lazy before the mother death so I can’t blame that one on grief.

Dev Stop Fix They’re covered with cling film because I’m not an animal. The only thing that makes this kit 'at home’ is that it has no real rules. The film comes out fine without them. I let another passing thought that tells me that this is not my home flee. I haven’t really tried to find home since She passed. Zambreno confesses, “Mother is our point of origin. And when she is gone we are homeless.”23 Three capable cities perfect for new lives and nothing sticks. I find nine other references before dinner of women who call themselves orphans after their mother died.

I ask myself if I am being triggered by a box filled with photo chemicals and the answer is yes.

Edelman, Motherless Daughters, xx-xi.

Edelman, Motherless Daughters, xxvi.

Zambreno, Book of Mutter, 41.

Madonna’s mother died when she was five years old. They share a name. 24 Sylvia Rivera said a piece of her died with Marsha P. Johnson. It was also the reason she became an activist again. She pleads, “Well Marsha, we tried” to the Hudson. 25 Debbie Reynolds dies one day after daughter Carrier Fisher. Granddaughter Billie Lourd was only twenty-four. Paris Jackson was eleven when father Michael died. I watched his funeral on TV. Kanye West’s public attitude changes after mother Donda’s death, he’s running for president for fuck’s sake. Mindy Kaling losses her mother to Pancreatic Cancer, too. Louis Tomlinson loses his mother and sister five days apart. He has a child the next year. Lee Alexander McQueen notes three important women in his life. He takes his own after the loss of his mother, the last of the three. Ann Patchett loses her ‘native language’ with the loss of her ‘best friend’ Lucy Grealy.26 We all know what that means. Andy Warhol lives with his mother his entire life, yet is absent at her funeral. His last painting at the Factory is made in her honor. Kathe Kollwitz experiences the death of all her siblings, and her son. She dedicates her printing career to it.

Rupaul’s Drag Race, Season 12/Episode 7. “Madonna: The Rusical” Netflix. 61:00. April 10th, 2020.

The Life and Death of Marsha P Johnson. David France. Los Angeles, 2017.

Ann Pachett, Truth and Beauty (London, Fourth Estate, 2004) 257.

“Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn't realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker— She convinced me she would live no matter what… that was my mistake” 26

26 Yoko Ono calls death of John Lennon the ‘worst of everything.’ She considered herself cursed. 27 Carrington shoots herself two months after the death of Lytton Strachey. Patti Smith dedicates whole publications and songs to her late Robert Mapplethorpe. 28 A whole country mourns over the loss of Princess Diana every single year since the nineties. The world erupts at the death of George Floyd, drudging up hundreds of other deaths with him. I don’t know what any of this means but there is a connection. There has to be.

She founds Yoko Ono’s Spirit Foundation in his memory.

Patti Smith, Just Kids (New York, HarperCollins, 2010).

(IV) Numbness

“It's true, that people, I've been sad (People, I've been sad) It's true, that people, I've been gone (People, I've been gone) It’s true, that people, I've been missing out (I've been missing out) And missing out for way too long (People, I've been gone) It's just that me, myself and I (Me, myself and I) Been missing out for way too long (Out for way too long) Been taking calls I should have missing out (I've been missing out) Forsaking things for way too long (Didn't take for long) If you disappear Then I'm disappearing too.” 29

Christine and the Queens, People I’ve Been Sad (Paris: BEC Music, 2020)

29 Today is the day. So close and so far away. My body knows it before I even wake. In my sleep nothingness I feel an anticipation brewing in my gut. "Maybe the body remembers what the mind wants to forget.” 30 Regardless of my physicality, time moves with or without me. I must go to work and my boss doesn’t care about my symptoms. I should be in Berlin right now fueling my depersonalizing drug lead fantasies. I run away this time each year. I begrudge the disease for closing borders31 and not letting me eject myself from my reality. Being somewhere without her mark is the only way I can truly escape. I am aware of how this sounds.

The tube is empty on my commute to and fro. The occasional construction or health worker enters and sits as far away from me as possible. I am not an essential worker, everybody knows it. Customer service is not essential work. New York never felt as dangerous as it does here. I say dangerous lightly because I no longer feel fear. I pass through the turnstiles as two men rush me in an attempt to steal my wallet or my fare, who cares which. A police man watches. Don’t get me started on them 32 . I almost give them whatever it is that they want. I remember the exact moment I stopped caring.

“here we go…” An echo in my sister’s pitch enters my frontal.

I lay on an uncovered mattress on her unfinished plywood floor, hands across my chest, begging existence to swallow me whole. I feel her on the other mattress doing the same. I was the last to know. Why is the baby always the last to know? Tumors don’t grow overnight. She reaches for my hand through the blackness; the end of our lives as we knew them.33

Zambreno, Book of Mutter, 164.

Smack dab in the center of Coronavirus 2020.

“No cops, no priests, no criminals”- Helen Coppola

Zambreno, Book of Mutter, 199.

Similarly to Riley, Zambreno notes that here is always a definitive moment where life turns. This was mine.

30 The same boss that does not give a damn about my symptoms fires me on Her Birthday because of my so called ‘aggravated attitude’. I did mention that I have been fired from every menial job I’ve ever had. I do not feel bad about my inability to maintain a smile. If they wanted perfect nothingness they should have hired a robot. L’appel Du Vide 34 , call of the void, I finally have a phrase for it. English doesn’t quite cut it here. In present blackness I sit and let the blue light from my laptop reflect.

There aren’t many women existential nihilists. If there are, I cannot find them. Aforementioned, men dominate literature and Philosophy may be the haughtiest of them all. Solanas, often cited as the lady Nietzsche35 , seems to think it’s because the human condition that we all know and love is actually the male condition.36

“The ultimate male insight is that life is absurd” 37 DeBeauvoir could also be considered, but many reference her husband Sartre instead. Solanas vehemently hates DeBeauvoir due to her middle class upbringing.38 I wonder how class eﬀects grieving. One is considered to have written the Bible for first wave feminism, and the other is only known for shooting Warhol.

Tiﬀany Watt Smith, The Book of Human Emotion (London, Wellcome Collection 2015).

Do I need to point out the sexist irony here?

Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 3.

Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 53.

Like reverse racism, reverse sexism does not and cannot exist. Women are not in a socially higher position than men, therefore cannot oppress the oppressor. 37

Solanas calls DeBeauvoir “an overrated windbag” on page 6 of SCUM Manifesto.

31 I’m only interested in philosophy when I’m stoned, which is what I actually wanted to write about. The smoke fills my room as I scribe. Eighteen year old me would be disappointed. There is no direct correlation between bereavement and risk behavior, but I know it exists.

I was gifted a copy of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild 39 for Christmas a few years before She passed, suspiciously in the same way the author’s mom did. I was such a square that I thought if this ever happened to me (it wouldn’t) that I would turn into a motivational speaker or something (I didn’t).

Drug addiction, let’s call it more like misuse, seemed so far from possible. I had seen it too much, the matriarch was so against it. I honestly don’t remember when I started this habit. It materialized out of thin air post death, I swear. All I remember is feeling baseline, a severely stark contrast to my new norm. “The place where there was no pain, where it was unfortunate but essentially ok that my mother was dead…” 40 Cheryl Strayed was talking about heroin, but I prefer the psychedelics.

The drug and dark tourism started instantly. Concentration camps, Chernobyl, I only wanted to be places I could remain in my somberness appropriately. Amsterdam was my first. My best friend Joyce and I made a pact that we would die using heroin, our final drug frontier, on our sixty-ninth birthday. For now, I am basically living like I’ll never get there. “In my youth and sorrow, I was ready to self destruct.”41

Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, (New York, Vintage Books, 2012) 21.

Strayed, Wild, 21.

Strayed, Wild, 52.

Poppy calls me on the phone, she’s been cornered at the local Sainsbury’s. There’s a person demanding money from her, but she has none. The employees watch, I grab my jacket, I bring a bottle of hairspray and my best paper shears. As weapons, of course, I’m from New York… “Help me, give me money, help me put a needle in my arm.” I wonder what her grief is.

(V) wishing “The skeleton was happy as a madman who’s straitjacket had been taken off. He felt liberated at being able to walk without flesh. The mosquitos didn’t bite him anymore. He didn’t have to cut his hair. He was neither hungry nor thirsty,

hot nor cold…”

Leonora Carrington, The Skeleton’s Holiday (London, Penguin Classics, 1988) 45.

34 My only regret is that she didn’t take me with her.

There were plenty of opportunities.

I was still afraid to fly when she was first diagnosed. It only took one turbulent winter flight to her specialty hospital in Chicago to sign a death wish.

My book flew across the plane,

the cabin went dark,

She squeezed my hand.

I looked at her half smile and downward turned eyes hoping for it too. At least we would be together. In that moment, and every other plane trip after, I begged to fall from the sky. That would not be fair for the other passengers.

The feeling is less immediate now. I walk through the city carelessly in my colorless daze with the invitation for trouble plastered to my back. A double decker 43 and I almost collide because I still don’t know which way to look. My fight or flight response must be broken because I don’t even flinch. Unfortunately I am still here, and I cannot help but wonder why. Even Frankenstein’s monster killed himself in the end. 44 Before he does though, his last soapbox resonates with me the most:

“Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.” 45 Wishing does not include action. I am self aware enough to know that death causes more pain than it ends. I have children in my life. To put onto them what the world has onto me would be heinous. But still I wonder where She is, and when I will get to see Her again…

“How mutable are our feelings, and how strange is that clinging love we have of life even in the excess of misery!” 46

The Smiths, There Is A Light That Never Goes Out (Manchester: WEA Records, 1986)

“And if a double decker bus, crashes into us, to die by your side is such a heavenly way to die. And if a ten-ton truck kills the both of us, to die by your side well the pleasure and the privilege is mine…” 44

Spoiler alert

Shelley, Frankenstein, 260.

Shelley, Frankenstein, 261.

still bereaved “Positive energy takes work. In the last six months, I’ve excelled. I take all the negative emotions and just bottle them and bury them and they never come out. I’ve basically never been better.”47

Waller-Bridge, Fleabag, 144.

36 I consider my grief ‘untreated’, and in all of its poignant irony, grief cannot be cured.

Grief is lifelong.

I will always be the first to sorrowfully admit that.

The concept that the bereaved will cycle through a set course menu of single syllable emotions perpetuates this six-month-and-done contract with grief. It leaves those of us who grieve individually to the masses feeling stunted on the way to recovery. After that half year of prescribed grieving, when the ‘new normal’ is supposed to start, we imperatively continue with our lives, because, as Denise Riley says, “The surface of the world, like a sheet of water that’s briefly agitated, will close again silently and smoothly over his death. His, yours, mine.”48 Grieving causes a hyperbolic world view, one that may only be temporary but is very much real to those who can see it. A fully conscious parasite, it interprets for itself and projects meaning on all facets of life. Grief has the ability to consume and become the only reference point for intuitive feelings.

Here, in all of its satirical and not so glory, I have attempted to show you mine. The true and honest five steps of grief. All the intrusive thoughts, humor masking, confused visions, triggers, and memories. My grief reads like two worlds, one radically and resolutely influenced by pain, while the other is intrinsically aware, but unable to untangle. Unwilling, at times. Grief is a full-time job.

It’s a state so underrepresented in discourse, yet probably the most universally understood state of being. That and probably love…and they go hand in hand, don’t they?

We grieve our old lives, our lost potential, things wrong but out of our control.

We grieve because we are now seeing that we once had it all,

at least that’s why I do.

Sure, the sadness is there on the screen sometimes, we talk about the anger too, but nobody told me that grief would have me screaming at a god for my mama in the middle of Waterloo station at the slight inconvenience of a contactless error, or that all of my memories of her would be stuck skipping on her last moments, lack jawed and stiﬀ. Phew.

I hope you weren’t looking for answers, unfortunately I have none. It has taken me the past three years to collect this small amount of evidence of our nature. Hell, it took Kate Zambreno ten whole years to even consider spilling hers. 49

“There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth…”50 48

Riley, Say Something Back/Time Lived Without Its Flow, 76.

Zambreno, Book of Mutter, 164.

This dissertation is based on the stream of consciousness style of Kate Zambreno.

A quote by Friedrich Nietzsche. Maybe I did become a motivational speaker after all.

I might feel forever like my grief is belaboring for those around me. I might see her face in crowds for the rest of my life. I might permanently feel the weight of the loss of her. That’s the real first step in this fallacy of ‘recovery’, understanding that it doesn’t always get better, but, maybe, just maybe, I’ll wake up in a world un-tinted with enough curiosity about the future to consider sticking around for it. Dramatic, but, society needs your grieving to end for its own comfort. So you can go back to work make your boss more money, so that you can go to lunch with your friends and not cause an uncomfortable silence at brunch. Wow, did I really bring up capitalism again? All the things you used to do that seem trite. Because now they are. I know that, and soon you will too.

the end

Bibliography American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: DSM-5. Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Association, 2013.

Carrington, Leonora. The Skeleton’s Holiday. London: Penguin Classics, 1988.

De Beauvoir, Simone, A Very Easy Death. New York: Pantheon Books,1965.

Didion, Joan. The Year Of Magical Thinking. London: Fourth Estate, 2005.

Edelman, Hope. Motherless Daughters: the Legacy of Loss. London: Yellow Kite 2018.

Letissier, Héloïse. People I’ve Been Sad. Paris: BEC Music, 2020.

The Life and Death of Marsha P. Johnson. Directed by David France. Los Angeles, 2017.

Morrissey, Steven. There Is a Light That Never Goes Out. Manchester: WEA Records, 1986.

Pachett, Ann Truth and Beauty. London: Fourth Estate, 2004.

Riley, D., 2020. Say Something Back/Time Lived Without Its Flow. New York: New York Review Books, 2015.

Rupaul’s Drag Race, Season 12/Episode 7. “Madonna: The Rusical” Netflix. 61:00. April 10th, 2020.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. London: Penguin Classics, 1818.

Solonas, Valerie SCUM Manifesto. New York: Verso, 2004.

Strayed, Cheryl. Wild: From Lost To Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. New York: Vintage Books, 2012.

Tiﬀany Watt Smith, The Book of Human Emotion. London: Wellcome Collection, 2015.

Waller-Bridge, Phoebe. Fleabag. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2019.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room Of One's Own. London: Penguin Classics, 1929.

Zambreno, Kate. Book Of Mutter. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2017.

Acknowledgments Thank you Benjamin for keeping me off my solipsistic path (mostly).

Thank you Beatriz, my editor in chief.

Thank you to my sister Stacey for being my soundboard.

Thank you to Eva and Ben, my inspiration for everything.

Thank you to my besties Joyce and Poppy for letting me appropriate your stories.

Thank you mama. I miss you.

Good Grief! by Rin B. Coppola

Articles inside

V) wishing

IV) numbness

II) pining

III) captivation

I) preoccupation