Reading Through Grief
My imagination in the years after my mother’s death might best be described as catastrophic. Death was everywhere. Cars sped into pedestrians. I fell down subway steps or was hit by swinging fire escapes. Grim visions I both desired and got stuck in. I inhabited my own little invented universe of disaster, taking solace in the idea that if I could imagine the worst-case scenario before it happened, I could be ready for the subsequent grief when it came to pass.
For a while, this seemed foolproof in its stability. One knows what to expect from misery: more misery. When the poet Anne Boyer was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer, she began to find security in her diagnosis. “It provides such clear instruction for existing, brings with it the sharpened optics of life without futurity,” she wrote, “the purity of the double vision of any life lived on the line.”
The philosopher Ian Hacking saw this, too, and coined the term “looping effect” to describe how people become of illness. Grief easily became my sole spiritual nutrition, from which I derived meaning, pleasure, and reward. One of the most frightening aspects was how thoroughly it took over my sense of self, shifting not only how I saw the world but also how I saw myself: as a griever, a person whose fundamental personality is rooted in trauma and loss.
