One of the things that’s become clear about grieving, since Elizabeth Kübler-Ross wrote her classic book, On Death and Dying, is that the so-called stages of mourning do not occur in set patterns. Individuals are very likely to experience anger and sadness, guilt and elation, but not one after the other. They can even feel these things almost at the same time.
Hence, the family feud in Singapore over the mourning of Lee Kuan Yew. That the siblings, prime minister Lee Hsien Loong and his sister Lee Wei Ling, are raging over the loss of their father is most likely an expression of these different, conflicting feelings.
That said, such a rational understanding of the situation is unlikely to bring about a reconciliation. Feelings are feelings. Feelings around death are particularly powerful because they are about what’s absolute. It’s one of the reasons that the death of a child can be such a challenge to the relationship of the grieving parents. When one parent is desperate at the loss, and the other is relieved the struggle is over, it can be impossible to live together.
It also seems relevant that this row has erupted on the first anniversary of the death of Lee Kuan Yew. Anniversaries can be as traumatic as the actual event. At least at the time of death, there are things to do; rites of passage like funerals to help you through the empty days and long nights. A year on, there is nothing to do but mourn. In its own way, that’s just as hard – quite as painful as a open physical wound, CS Lewis realised, in A Grief Observed.
Time may heal the divisions of the Singaporean first family. The risk, though, is that the “magical thinking” – to use Joan Didion’s powerful expression – takes root. Instead of mourning being an exceptional time, when as Didion noted, the loved ones imagine all manner of bizarre impossibilities, it becomes the norm.
That’s the longer term risk with mourning. An almost inevitably messy process doesn’t work its way through, but gets stuck. One of Sigmund Freud’s most durable insights concerns this kind of impasse. He realised that mourning can become melancholia – what we would call depression. But not the depression of feeling wretched, which might be a normal part of grieving, but the more lasting, listless sense of terminal emptiness.
Freud conceived of this state of mind by wondering whether the mourner has now lost touch with what they are missing. The object of their sadness has slipped beyond the horizon in the profundity of the mood. Without an object to mourn, the grieving becomes general. The whole of life feels as if it has died. The experience now is that there is nothing good to hold on to. It feels as if the difficult period will last indefinitely.
Just why mourning can become melancholia is impossible to say. Each story will be different. But therapy can be immensely useful. Simply by being able to listen, and tolerate the pain, the therapist communicates the possibility that the loss can be survived. It doesn’t actually mean life has become a living death. In time, an echo of good things can return. What’s been lost can be remembered again, and so mourned.
But there’s something else that can be done, though it’s tricky in a culture like ours that has comparatively few sustained ways of encountering death. It’s to recognise that loss is not only what happens at the end of life. It’s a feature of everyday life too. There’s the losses and returns of the seasons. There’s the quotidian passing of day into night. Children leave home; we grow older; good books are finished. Deaths are multiform.
Wisdom traditions advise using these little deaths to practise dying. Rather than immediately seeking distraction, they suggest staying with the sense of loss; mourning what’s passing. “Now, with sullen shingle beaches wearing out the Tuscan sea, practise wisdom,” wrote Horace.
That doesn’t just build up resilience. It nurtures the sense that death is part of life. It doesn’t take away the pain. But it can place the aching in a wider context, of connection, understanding, courage, hope.