Grief is not defined in the DSM V as a mental health issue, but I’m including it in my thematic series on mental health for two reasons: First, during several episodes of profound grief in my life, I was never quite in my right mind; and second, surviving grief calls on deep mental health reserves, without which one is at risk of diving into the bottomless pit of mental illness.
Lesley Buxton has been visited by more grief than most—enough to know that to survive and continue finding joy in life, she must have deep reserves of mental wellness. Buxton’s book, One Strong Girl: Surviving the Unimaginable—A Mother’s Memoir, tells the story of watching her only child die, over the course of years, of a rare neurological illness. Yet even amid her grief, she finds joy.
One Strong Girl is a deeply personal and moving memoir of living with loss. It’s no wonder this heartbreaking yet inspiring book won the inaugural Pottersfield Prize for Creative Nonfiction.
Mary Jane Grant is another person who has survived more episodes of grief than most. But when her husband suddenly left her after decades of marriage, something inside her demanded more attention. So, she went off to Europe and, in a tea shop one day, when taking in the fragrances of various blends, she started on the path that led to her book, A Cure for Heartache.
This slim volume recounts how she worked through her grief by teaching herself to experience “life’s simple pleasures, one moment at a time.” After my marriage ended, given that I was the one who ended it, I was surprised at the depths of my grief. A big part of my path out of it was learning the practice of mindfulness through, among other things, a course in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, which teaches a secular approach to meditation whose effectiveness in mental and physical health is supported by decades of properly executive research.
While Grant doesn’t write about attending any mindfulness programs or even use the word “mindfulness,” that is indeed what she describes. It is amazing to me that she learned to do this almost instinctively. That is mental health, and during Mental HEALTH Awareness Month, we need to be as mindful of using mental health to prevent mental illness as we are of specific mental illnesses like those discussed in last week’s post.
Laura Pratt’s Heartbroken: Field Notes on a Constant Condition is another study in surviving the loss of a partner. After a passionate, six-year affair ends suddenly and without explanation, the author crawls through the rocky emotional terrain of her grief. What differentiates Heartbroken from many other books about grieving is the way the author has, in lyric prose, braided together the story of the love affair and her profound grief after it ends with psychological research and artistic depictions of love and loss.
This is one of the most poetic grief memoirs I’ve ever read. It amazes me that Pratt didn’t win a bucket or two of awards for it.
Dying for Attention: A Graphic Memoir of Nursing Home Care, by Susan MacLeod, is less about the grief of losing a mother than of trudging day by day through the process of watching a mother die, slowly, while trying to find a safe and loving place for her to spend her final days. I remember this part of my mother’s life so well—her decline, searching for a nursing home, pushing emotions away until a more appropriate time.
After she died, it was as if each of those losses caught up with us one at a time; every time we thought we were finally adjusting to the permanence of her absence, another tidal wave of grief would wash over us. It was as if we were finally grieving each smaller loss in sequence over the year or two after her death. This is what I found myself reflecting on as I read MacLeod’s moving memoir, depicted in drawings that blended whimsical thoughts and self-deprecation with the pain of loss.
Walking the Camino: On Earth As It Is, by Maryanna Gabriel, is another story of losing a mother, about as different from the previous one as it could possibly be. The back cover reads: “For Maryanna Gabriel, the unexpected death of her artistic mother would change everything in her life. More than just overcoming this loss, she felt that she needed answer, not from other, but from within herself …. At times meditative yet punctuated with humour, the story takes place in a compelling European tableau where legends of saints and miracles abide.”
Walking the Camino is not the first book I’ve read about this pilgrimage taken by thousands of people from across the globe every year. More than a decade ago, I edited a manuscript about an author’s years of long-distance hiking with his wife, part of which was completing the Camino walk in three stages over three consecutive years. I was compelled to want to do the same; I still haven’t done that, but Gabriel’s book is a welcome reminder that there are many ways to integrate life’s losses and move forward.
I’d also recommend:
Still, I Cannot Save You: A Memoir of Sisterhood, Love, and Letting Go by Kelly S. Thompson.
Many of us have sibling relationships that waver between love and tolerance (or worse) over the years. Most of us don’t have to face the tragic loss of a sibling far too young. Thompson’s memoir is a moving study in mental illness (her sister’s addiction) and mental wellness (integrating the loss of the same sister to cancer into her life).
