Meaninglessness and Grief - Essay Example

Meaninglessness and Grief Grief is an emotion that is complicated and very difficult to understand. It is synonymous with a feeling of meaninglessness or living without any purpose in life. Grief is an emotion that is very different in reality. Joan Didion writes about her experience of grief after her spouse died. She says that all people have an idea of what is grief and what should it feel like when it finally hit us. But she says that grief is not what we expect it should be in reality. In order to explain how she fought with grief after her husband passed away, she makes an attempt to associate the feeling of meaninglessness that she felt during childhood with the feeling of grief she experienced later in life. At first she thought that the feeling of meaninglessness and the feeling of grief are very different from each other. But she realizes, after being a mother and a wife, and after losing someone she dearly loves, that what she felt as a child was very similar from the grief that struck her as an adult. This essay talks about the journey of Didion through grief, particularly how she describes her experience with grief in terms of the feeling of meaninglessness that plagued her throughout her young life. Didion explains how different our notion of ‘grief’ is from what it really is in real life. She explains how our expectations of grief are too ‘simple’ or ‘easy’. We know that we will lose someone we love. We expect to go through definite changes, and ‘heal’ immediately. We expect that we should be strong during this very tough time (Worden, 40). Didion explains such in the following manner: “In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be ‘healing’. A certain forward movement will prevail” (Didion, 392). We think that the normal course of grief is toward ‘healing’ or ultimate ‘acceptance’ of a loss of a loved one. That we do not have to exert too much effort in moving on because everything will resolve by itself. She adds that “we imaging that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place” (Didion, 392). She mentions ‘hypothetical’ to emphasize the fact that this belief is somewhat flawed. However, based on her experience with grief, it is an emotion that does not subside easily; it is an emotion that is very difficult, sometimes impossible, to deal with. As Didion says, “We have no way of knowing…” Grief is something that is uncertain; something that is unimaginable (Didion, 392). Grief is a feeling of meaninglessness, according to Didion. She experienced the feeling of meaninglessness when her spouse passed away, the same meaninglessness that she felt when she was a child. It was a feeling of ‘smallness’ in the face of physical, geologic changes. It was as though life is meaninglessness because anytime our loved ones and even we will be taken over by these overpowering, uncontrollable geologic forces. She always remembers the Episcopal expression, “as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end” (Didion, 393) every time she thinks about the purpose or meaning of her life. But she always feels empty because of the thought that anytime she could die. For her, it is like we are living simply to ‘exist’. She sums up this feeling of meaninglessness in this way: “That the scheme could destroy the works of man might be a personal regret but remained, in the larger picture I had come to recognize, a matter of abiding indifference” (Didion, 393). It is such thought that makes her doubtful of her very purpose in life. Throughout her young life she felt detached from reality, from the very meaning of her existence. But this feeling of meaninglessness momentarily vanished when she became a mother and a wife. It was as though she found her purpose in life as a mother and a wife. She found meaning in the everyday rituals of motherhood and domestic duties. As she describes it, “Later, after I married and had a child, I learned to find equal meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life” (Didion, 393). She believed that her purpose has finally arrived; she believed that her purpose is to be a mother to her child and be a wife to her husband. The thought that a geologic event, like an earthquake, could take her life and that of her loved ones eventually became clear to her, but she was too preoccupied of her domestic life that she no longer paid heed to such thoughts. It was as though her personal life and the larger geologic reality converged to give purpose to her life. She says, “That I could find meaning in the intensely personal nature of my life as a wife and mother did not seem inconsistent with finding meaning in the vast indifference of geology…” (Didion, 394). But this momentary sense of purpose was eventually taken away from her when her husband suddenly passed away. She all of a sudden found herself in the inconsolable world of grief, a feeling that she felt for the first time, but a feeling that was very similar to the feeling of meaningless that she wrestled with during her childhood days. Didion explains in her short article her unexpected plunge to grief and the unexpected things that accompany it. It was as though she was totally unprepared to confront the overwhelming feeling of grief because of the wrong expectations that she had. She narrates how she fought with a sense of meaninglessness that plagued her throughout her young life and how, all of a sudden, she found her purpose and meaning in life when she became a mother and a wife. She believed that this was her purpose, just to be taken all away by the sudden death of her husband. She plunged once again to the world of meaninglessness, to the world of ‘real’ grief. Works Cited Didion, Joan. “Grief.” The Norton Field Guide to Writing with Readings and Handbook. Ed. Marilyn Moller. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 2006. 932-35. Print. Worden, William. Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy, Fourth Edition: A Handbook for the Mental Health Practitioner. New York: Springer Publishing Company, 2008. Print. Read More