How Stoicism Can Help Us to Manage Grief
I spoke to a room full of people trying to cope with loss at a public Bereavement Evening held by The Irish Hospice Foundation - This is the speech I gave
On November 2nd, 2017, I spoke to a room full of people trying to cope with loss at a public Bereavement Evening held by The Irish Hospice Foundation at the Alexander Hotel in Dublin. Following on from last week’s column on grief eight years after loss, I thought that I would post it here as a long read. There is an almost thirty-minute audio version behind the paywall. It details my own relationship with grief up to that time, after my mother's premature death in 2015. If you are struggling with bereavement, the below may help in the smallest way. I hope that it does.
Stoicism has been misrepresented in our time. It was a school of philosophy that positively flourished throughout the Roman and Greek world until around the 3rd century AD, when it went a little out of fashion. But it has informed philosophers and psychologists through the ages, and provides the theoretical groundwork for the way we think about some central concepts in psychology and even modern therapeutic methods like cognitive behavioural therapy today. Now, we think of a stoic person as repressing their emotions, as being cold. That is not stoicism in the philosophical sense. Stoicism was designed to teach us to conquer our emotions by facing them, processing them, dealing with them, and doing it now, before they conquer us.
Though I write for The Irish Times, my day job, as it were, is in academic philosophy and psychology. My research is on emotions, because I don’t like them, and because I want to understand them better. They’re inconvenient, uncomfortable, and, I think often appetitive. They remind us that we are made of meat. They are the vehicle of all our bad decisions. Unfortunately, they are also one of the things that make us uniquely human, and uniquely vulnerable. Nothing makes us more vulnerable than death. Despite its being a complete certainty in life – sometimes the only one, we never seem to be prepared for it. The knowledge that we ourselves will die tends to be something most of us avoid addressing. Worse and harder still is acknowledging this truth about those we love.
It is rare that, when someone we love dies, we can feel peace about it. Grief is, at base, about the bereaved person, and not about who they have lost. We are never content to lose the people we need – no matter the circumstances, their death will never feel just. My mother’s death was not just. It was not fair. It did not make sense, and it left my brother and I without any sense of peace, or justice.
Being honest (after all this seems like the right setting for it) I was reluctant to come here this evening and tell the story of my mother’s death. If you know me at all, it might be from my column in The Irish Times. In 2015, when my mother was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, I decided with her blessing to write a column called Leavetaking, to document the experience, selfishly, to give myself an outlet, and, hopefully, to help other people who could relate to the experience.
That column was frank, to say the least, but I’m reluctant to go back to that place in my life, and that space in my mind. We are all veterans of grief here – my bereavement is no bigger than yours, my sense of loss no deeper. So I am reluctant to trot out the details of my mother’s life to prove how cruel and unjust her death was. I’m reluctant to compare wounds with you, or display the shrapnel that is lodged still under my skin.
So I will be brief – my mother was an outlier (I’m sure we all think the same of the people we have lost), but you’ll permit me the indulgence. Her life was, on paper, difficult. She was born into an abusive family, carried her lack of self-esteem and perspective into an abusive relationship. She had my brother, and then me. She took us from the toxic situation in our home, but never spoke a single bad word about our father in our hearing, and encouraged us to see him when he was sober. When we got older, she worked two jobs, six days a week, to keep us fed. We had very little money and nearly lost our home, but she pulled us back from that, alone, and by force of will. She didn’t get the education she deserved, so she encouraged us academically. She sent us both to third level education to postgraduate level. While staying in it herself, my mother pushed my brother and I up and off the poverty line, again, by sheer force of will. When she was in her mid-fifties, and I my mid-twenties, she was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and given a maximum of a year to live.
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