Supplied
- Title: Dispatches from Grief: A Mother’s Journey Through the Unthinkable
- Author: Danielle Crittenden
- Genre: Non-Fiction
- Publisher: Infinite Books
- Pages: 208
“Do not think that grief is pure, solemn, austere and ‘elevated’ – this is not Mozart’s Requiem Mass.” So writes Joyce Carol Oates in A Widow’s Story, her 2011 paean to her late husband, Ray Smith. “Think of crude coarse gravel that hurts to walk on. Think of splotched mirrors in public lavatories. Think of towel dispensers when they have broken and there is nothing to wipe your hands on except already-used badly soiled towels.” Grief, in Oates’s conception, is neither ennobling nor grand: It is, by contrast, both quotidian and sullied, something “crude” and “splotched” and “soiled.”
What is equally notable about Oates’s idea of grief is how embodied it is, a characteristic that one expects might resonate with Danielle Crittenden. In her latest book, Toronto-born Crittenden describes her own struggle with grief after her eldest daughter, Miranda, died at 32 from complications following surgery to remove a benign brain tumour. At the time of her operation, the surgeon informed Miranda that her pituitary gland had been irreparably damaged but, with proper drug therapy, there was no reason she should not be able to lead a “normal” life.
But the cocktail of pharmaceuticals Miranda was prescribed came with negative side-effects – bloating, weight gain, and changes in mood – that resulted in her experimenting with dosages in an attempt to feel more like herself. What she mistook for symptoms of a common cold were in fact warning signs that her cortisol was dangerously low; she awoke one morning at 3 a.m. in her Brooklyn apartment, promptly lost consciousness and died.
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Dispatches from Grief is a document of Crittenden’s emotional life in the fallout from this horrendous and unexpected event. With extraordinary honesty and directness, Crittenden confronts the cascading effects of her daughter’s demise on her and her family, including her Canadian-born husband, journalist and political commentator David Frum. These range from the “Bureaucracy of Death” involved with funeral planning and cross-border travel to an early-morning panic attack – just around 3 a.m., in fact – that sends her to the emergency room. She writes about “omnipresent” trauma that “floats in limbo,” waiting to be triggered by the smallest, most everyday occurrence. And she explores the difficulty someone undergoing such trauma faces when attempting to secure help from the medical establishment.
She likewise comes to realize she is part of a previously unrecognized community of sufferers that Oates refers to as the “walking wounded” – parents who have lost children to suicide, in childbirth or at the hands of a drunk driver. Together, they form an ad hoc community of the bereaved “living parallel nightmares.” Crittenden even discovers friends who have similar traumas in their lives but have kept silent about them as a barricade against “useless sympathy, inadequate condolences.”
These well-meaning but hopelessly misguided words of so-called comfort come to afflict Crittenden with stark acuteness, as with the person who compares the death of her daughter to losing a great-aunt. Crittenden bristles at this kind of “griefsplaining” or thoughtless, rote sympathy, for example when the concierge at Miranda’s building tells her smilingly that her daughter is in a better place now. “She was already in a good place,” is the mother’s caustic response. “A one-bedroom co-op in Brooklyn Heights near the promenade. That’s pretty good, right?”
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Crittenden is not the first person to chronicle the pain left in the wake of a loved one’s death; there is a veritable cottage industry of books available, from personal memoirs to self-help to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross-type staging manuals, and Crittenden cops to consulting them all. What sets her book apart is her clear-eyed dismissal of conventional platitudes about death and recovery, most especially those that claim grief is a gift for the one suffering it. (She has particularly harsh words for Rumi’s assertion that “Sorrow prepares you for joy.”)
What she highlights instead is the persistence of grief – the fact that one doesn’t simply get over it and its causes can be maddeningly arbitrary. She quotes Christopher Hitchens confronting his own terminal cancer diagnosis: “To the dumb question ‘Why me?’ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?”
None of which is to suggest that Dispatches from Grief is a hopeless or nihilistic text – far from it. Crittenden insists on the importance of finding what she calls “oases” from grief and manages to gain solace from locating a burial place for Miranda that will allow a wildflower garden on her plot. There is also the recognition that Crittenden’s grief is so powerful because her love for her daughter was equally strong; this essential dialectic provides the glimmer of a beginning in terms of how to live with the pain of loss.
Dispatches from Grief is a short book, but not slight; it is physically small, packaged to resemble a prayer book. Which, finally, is what it most closely resembles: a prayer of thanks for the time the author was given with her daughter and a prayer of longing for all the life moments no longer available. It is also a story about survival, once again echoing Oates, who concludes her own book on a note of defiance that again echoes Crittenden: “Of the widow’s countless death-duties there is really just one that matters: On the first anniversary of her husband’s death the widow should think I kept myself alive.”