Grief waits sneakily

John Steinbeck – awardwinning literature giant and bane of any high school student saddled with The Grapes of Wrath for an assignment – wrote in his final novel, The Winter of Our Discontent, ‘‘It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone’’.

Grief is arduous to process at the best of times. The loss of loved ones, the sudden absence of someone from the rhythms of a life, the silence where a voice would once answer, it all becomes a difficult emotional current to navigate.

Grieving is time-consuming, draining and – perhaps this is not appreciated enough – completely necessary. Like most essential parts of the human experience when it is stifled, inhibited, or denied, it creates the emotional equivalent to a knot in a muscle.

Of course physical injuries are a lot more tangible in addressing. There is a process, a timeframe, and a commitment to healing. To a degree, we do this with grief, albeit differently depending on what our cultural backgrounds are.

Some will quickly farewell their departed, celebrate their lives, and drown many sorrows all in a day. Others spread their mourning period across a week, with various ceremonies, speeches and shared meals.

There is no right or wrong approach as long as it helps the bereaved. The most important part is that it ends.

There is a conclusion to the formalities that then eases into the semi-purgatorial state of loss, where a person attempts normal living, while grief continually pops out from unexpected places to cause disruptions and random eye-based waterworks.

Sometimes grief is there when a person wakes up, like an unwanted weighted blanket; comfortable to be under, but exhausting whenever you move.

Sometimes it cunningly waits in the kitchen radio, two songs after a weather report, in the lyrics of a song from a band you have never liked . . . till now. Damn you, Coldplay, and your slow, piano-based lamentations.

Sometimes grief sneaks out of the house before anyone wakes, down to the news desk, and waits till the TV is turned on, springing celebrity deaths on a person not ready to hear about the dead before the coffee has been poured.

Perhaps seeing the passing of Nichelle Nichols, who played the iconic Lieutenant Nyota Uhura in the original Star Trek, reminds them of a fellow Trekkie now gone, or the struggle of their parents during a time when a white man and a black woman kissing publicly was controversial.

Maybe their mother was a science teacher. Grief can take the most tenuous links and knit them together to create unexpected tears.

But what happens when the opportunity to grieve has to be delayed, partitioned off to a corner of the brain, waiting to be engaged with at a later time?

What happens when that time elapses until everyone else seems to have processed their grief but you? How do you avoid feeling accidentally isolated? How do you avoid feeling embarrassed by your grief?

That is the surreal and hopefully healing experience that will be taken by some visitors to New Zealand and Samoa this week and onward as the countries finally open up.

Because processing grief is also about being able to walk where the dead have walked, sit where they have sat and know that, while they are gone, the memories can still be reinforced.

It is one thing to view a funeral through a screen from the other side of the world. It is another not to be able to return and mourn, and share in the collective mourning of a community.

We sometimes forget that New Zealand as a country may be full of citizens who somehow work together, even as they squabble over matters as weighty as race relations, and matters as nonplussing to foreigners as cycle lanes, but New Zealand as a community extends beyond its citizens to the thousands of relatives, lovers, and close friends of Kiwis throughout the world.

Not all have been able to visit till now.

This is not to dismiss the very (especially in Wellington) important-to-discuss issue of cycle lanes. It’s just that bicycle traffic may not show up on the radar of someone who has waited years to grieve the dearly, but not recently, departed.

Our ‘‘Be Kind’’ mantra espoused at the beginning of the pandemic may have faded slightly, particularly in the face of growing economic pressure. Sure, kindness costs nothing, but just because something is free that doesn’t mean it is stress-free.

What should be remembered is that, while many Kiwis are operating under more of a ‘‘be as kind as you can’’ slogan, there are those returning who will still need some of that old-school, original 2020 ‘‘Kindness’’ with a capital K.