Grief is an emotional reaction to loss. It is what we feel when we lose someone, something, or even a goal. Grief is the process we go through in the aftermath of that loss. Our problem is that our grief is often short-circuited. We have not been allowed, or do not allow ourselves, adequate time to grieve over our losses. Beginning with boyhood and continuing throughout the life cycle, we are told that the appropriate way to handle loss of any kind is to acknowledge it stoically then to get on with life, quickly, which usually means acting like the loss never occurred.
This simply does not work. If a loss is not adequately mourned, it can have adverse effects on a person’s psychological development, particularly on the way the person behaves in future relationships.
A few years ago I became aware of the consequences of not having mourned the loss of my maternal grandfather, who committed suicide one day in 1970 when I was twenty-three. Here’s the story of what reignited the grief so many years later.
After having put off cleaning the garage for months, I decided to confront the tangled extension cords, the dust-covered garden tools, and the boxes filled with items long forgotten and not missed but somehow too important to be thrown away.
Reluctantly I dug in. Not far into the sorting and tossing, I paused to examine the contents of a gray metal box. I was unprepared for my reaction as I discovered an old electric sander with a manila tag on it. I recognized it immediately as a pawn ticket from the shop where my grandfather had worked most of his life. In his beautiful handwriting I could still make out the words, “Henry Washington, June, 1958,” the name of the man who had hocked the sander and the date it had to be claimed. Evidently Mr. Washington had not claimed it on time, so my grandfather had bought it cut-rate. Gazing at that ticket, I realized I had not seen anything in my grandfather’s handwriting since his death in 1970.
I remembered myself, as a child, living with my parents and grandparents in a small suburban home, eagerly awaiting the return of Grandpa Izzie from the pawnshop on Saturday night. He would often bring home an array of drills, radios, and other unclaimed items. I always thought of them as his special gifts to me. Holding that ticket, I felt the rush of memories it summoned. It occurred to me that the small piece of cardboard was the only memento I still had of Izzie.
During the Detroit riots of 1967, the pawnshop was burned down. Less dramatically but just as inevitably, Izzie, out of work for the first time in his life, began deteriorating, too. For income he rekindled his old habit of gambling; as the losses mounted, his drinking increased. He began issuing suicide threats. I was teaching school in New York City when I received the call from my father. Izzie’s final threat was not idle. He had killed himself by swallowing jeweler’s acid, just as he had threatened many times before.
As I showed my wife and kids that tag, I felt myself fighting back the tears. In a way I wished they would finally flow. Due to the mixed feelings associated with his suicide, I had never been able to cry over the loss of my grandfather. The situation was made more complicated by the family’s decision to keep the cause of death a secret. At his age, we figured why dishonor his memory? No one would doubt the family story that this heavy smoker had had a heart attack. Little did I understand that keeping the suicide a secret would block me from adequately mourning the grandfather I had loved so dearly. My friends knew my grandfather had died, but out of loyalty to my family I could share with no one my anguish over the manner of his death.
In the years immediately following his death my feelings about Izzie alternated between guilt and anger. As an only child growing up in a house of adults, my specialty had been to keep everyone cheerful, especially this alternately morose and exuberant man. I had failed to cheer him up this time. It seemed perfectly natural for me to major in psychology in college. As a psych student, moreover, shouldn’t I have recognized the warning signs of suicide and been able to prevent it? Maybe if I hadn’t left home he wouldn’t have become so depressed. Maybe I should have invited him to visit me in New York City. The list of should and maybes was long and persistent whenever I was reminded of Izzie, which happened often since I like to listen to Detroit Tiger baseball on the radio. Izzie always seemed to have a portable radio stuck in his ear, listening to Ernie Harwell, the voice of the Tigers. (Izzie liked to call them the Pussycats in those days of constant fifth-place finishes.)
The only match for my guilt was my anger. Somehow I could not easily forgive him for having tarnished two of my life’s greatest joys. Izzie had always been my number one fan. How often I had heard him say, “Robbie, you’re going to be a great man someday.” With his encouragement I had made two important decisions in 1970: to apply to graduate school and to ask my girlfriend, Pat, to marry me. How sad and disappointed I felt that he had not waited around to hear about my acceptance at Harvard and to attend our wedding. If he had really cared about me, he would not have taken his life just four months before the wedding.
As the years went by, though, sorrow emerged as the dominant emotion. I missed him. I ached at the memory of him waking me up in the morning by imitating an alarm clock or driving me and my friends to high school in his ’61 Chevy Nova. “Who’s kicking me in the amplifier?” he’d ask the laughing teenagers in the backseat.
I was sad, too, that my own sons never had a chance to meet Izzie. They would have enjoyed this slight, handsome man who made bad jokes, spoke his own foreign tongue especially designed for his grandchildren, and who would pile all the kids in the neighborhood into his small car to take us to an afternoon Tigers game.
As I showed my sons the ticket, I was pleased that they, too, have had a wonderful relationships with their own grandfathers. I know, of course, that they were in no way responsible for their grandfathers’ well-being. This thought helped me to realize that I wasn’t to blame, and Izzie wasn’t to be punished for taking his own life. Now I can understand how painful his undiagnosed manic-depression must have been. No, the most painful facet of Izzie’s death — missing him — was simply a function of his passing away. Suicide and heart attacks have equal status there.
I detached the tag and gently cleaned off the dust. I realized that maybe a pawn ticket wasn’t such an inappropriate memory for this man. In some ways he had pawned his own life away. But in many ways I owe a debt to him as well. He contributed much to who I am today: to the development of my playful side; to my courage to take risks; and to my love of baseball. Now I am determined not to allow his manner of death to obliterate the spirit of the man. To me he had been a hero, a dapper guy in a Fedora and a natty sport coat with his shoes always shined. As I placed the ticket in my wallet, I vowed never to stow it or his memory away again.
Your Own Experience with Grief
Grief occurs not only over death. Grief can be a reaction to almost any type of loss, and we have all experienced many. I invite you to reflect on your own losses and to ask yourself how adequately you have mourned these losses.
