Katharine Smyth explains “How Virginia Woolf Taught Me to Mourn” in her recent essay on Literary Hub. Smyth outlines how Woolf described the mourning period surrounding her mother’s death, and how that “spring of 1895 in London… may as well have been the winter of 2007 in Boston” when she was grieving her own father.
Smyth and her mother illustrate how people can react to grief differently. Her mother “saw the ringing doorbell as an interruption,” while Smyth “liked hearing from the outside world: grief is rapacious, and cards and flowers functioned as its fuel. As long as they continued to proliferate, the experience of loss was active, almost diverting. It was only when their numbers dwindled, then ceased altogether, that a kind of dullish hunger set in.” I think the same can be said of those who experience trauma. Often, others surround you during and immediately after the event, but as time progresses and active support dwindles, a loneliness takes its place.
One of Smyth’s friends “invited me to her parents’ apartment for a kind of mini sitting shiva. For several hours she and her mother listened as I talked about my father’s life; I loved that neither was cowed by death’s awkwardness.” This gift to Smyth seemed an unexpected balm. Do you think most of us succumb to death’s awkwardness? Why do you think this is a cultural norm?
Smyth notes that when the distractions end, “Above all, I disliked the passing of time, disliked the thought that every minute carried me further from my father.” She can relate to Woolf’s surreal experience in the wake of a parent’s death: “The tragedy of her mother’s death, she said, ‘was not that it made one, now and then and very intensely, unhappy. It was that it made her unreal; and us solemn, and self-conscious. We were made to act parts that we did not feel; to fumble for words that we did not know. . . . It made one hypocritical and immeshed in the conventions of sorrow.'”
Smyth identifies with Lily in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse: “her frustrations are those of the grown writer who must confront grief’s fogginess, its unreliability. ‘Why repeat this over and over again?’ she thinks angrily of her attempts to register the fact of Mrs. Ramsay’s passing.” Smyth, too, finds herself repeating, “My father is dead, I continued to say, my father is dead.”
In To the Lighthouse, Smyth discovers that Woolf conveys “her understanding that we all need some structure by which to contain and grapple with our dead.”
Writing Prompt: Although not religious, Smyth finds the act of sitting shiva cathartic, finds herself “longing for ritual, for structure, for some organizing principle by which to counter the awful shapelessness of loss.” Think of your own experience of grief or loss. Can you relate to the healing benefits of structure? Write for 10 minutes.