Bernadette's Scrapbook, Denoument

The world was kind to me yesterday, and understanding. Randy took the girls downtown for the night; they went to Comic Con and saw Us on opening weekend -- they had to sit in the front row because the theater was so packed and Mia said the audience reactions were hilarious. Randy took them to buy new bathing suits for our trip to Akumal tomorrow.

So I spent the day with Bernadette's scrapbook, but at noon, total coincidence, Hope Edelman, author of Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss and Motherless Mothers: How Losing a Mother Shapes the Parent You Become and Mother of My Mother: The Intricate Bond Between Generations and Mothering Motherness: Mommyhood's Motherliness (that last one I just made up ha ha but it almost belongs, right?) anyway, Hope Edelman had this conference call (four hundred people listening in, she said) specifically to discuss the challenge of loss anniversaries and she said some very helpful things.

I'll spend some time considering her news that grief counselors are now encouraging "affirming a connection to those who died" and "renegotiating your concept of your younger self" and "recognizing and honoring the biological emotion of grief." Her idea that rituals "give a structure and turn an absence into a presence" was easy on my mind. Also, "recognizing and acknowledging an emotion helps reduce its intensity." And the new book Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief  by Clair Bidwell Smith sounds interesting. I mostly loved the feeling of connection and acceptance with her gentle voice over the phone.

And then there was this essay in the New Yorker by James Marcus  about the death of his scientist father that I happened to read yesterday. 

"Our notions of emotional proximity don't really apply to our parents. They are simply too large, too looming--planetary presences that defy our puny tools of measurement."

"We were a religious sect consisting of two people, and now half the congregation was gone. There would be closure, no healing. I would simply adjust myself to a new and severely depleted reality. The world would come to an end, as it always does, one world at a time."

But.

"'Aaron, your uncle died fifty years ago,' (the scientist's wife) said.

"'I know,' he said. 'But nonetheless.' 

"There, in a single word, is the best argument on behalf of the afterlife that I have ever heard. The dead may walk among us simply because we insist that they do. They just keep circulating, those beloved, resented, lamented figures, our better selves and interlocutors of choice, with whom the conversation never ends."