Tag Archives: grief process

Aug 26

Sixth Stage of Grief Modeled by Joe Biden

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The sixth stage of grief, finding meaning or purpose, was recently addressed by Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden at the national convention. An excerpt from his speech last week:

I know how it feels to lose someone you love. I know that deep black hole that opens up in your chest. That you feel your whole being is sucked into it. I know how mean and cruel and unfair life can be sometimes.

But I’ve learned two things.

First, your loved ones may have left this Earth but they never leave your heart. They will always be with you.

And second, I found the best way through pain and loss and grief is to find purpose.

This wasn’t the first time he’d said it. Having lost his son Beau to cancer, Biden wrote in Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose (2017): “So how do I want to spend the rest of my life? I want to spend as much time as I can with my family, and I want to help change the country and the world for the better. That duty does much more than give me purpose; it gives me something to hope for. It makes me nostalgic for the future.”

Following Beau’s death Joe Biden contacted noted grief expert David Kessler, who writes of this and much more in his 2019 book Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief. Kessler, who co-authored two books with his mentor Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926-2004), received permission from the Kübler-Ross Foundation to label a new stage of grief as finding meaning. Kessler, not so incidentally, also lost his adult son, a 21-year-old, several years ago to an accidental drug overdose.

Nick Owchar, Los Angeles Times, reports on Kessler’s overall view of the grief stages model:

To live on after tragedy requires more than acceptance, and Kessler says he hopes the book will help correct the public’s long misunderstanding of Kübler-Ross’ stages. She never intended them as a simple, clear progression, he says.

‘All these years later the public, the media especially, still misinterprets her five stages as a map, as a rigid linear rule to follow,’ he says. ‘That would have appalled her, and it bothers me to no end. People will often complain to me, ‘you’re trying to fit our grief into five neat categories, five tidy boxes,’ but there is nothing about grief that’s tidy or neat. There was nothing about my son’s death that was tidy or neat.’

Specifically regarding the author’s presentation of the sixth stage, Publishers Weekly states:

‘Meaning helps us makes sense of grief,’ Kessler writes, speaking both as professional grief counselor and as someone who has experienced tremendous loss…Kessler shows how large acts (starting a foundation) as well as small ones (eating an ice cream sundae in memory of a loved one as a celebration) help the bereaved to create meaning in a variety of ways.

Author Katy Butler, whose most recent book is last year’s The Art of Dying Well (see previous post) states the following in praise of Finding Meaning: “Whether our grief arises after a suicide, a difficult relationship, the death of a child or newborn, even the ambiguous losses that accompany mental illnesses and addiction — David reassures us that we can find in our deep pain an opportunity to contribute to the wider human story. Grief may not end, but David reassures us that it can change shape and be a source of generosity, love and meaning.”

Dec 06

“Three Billboards”: Female-Centric Film and Post

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Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri has one of the best story lines and some of the most interesting and complex characters and performances I’ve seen in a long time.

Most importantly, it has Frances McDormand in the lead. And in honor of rare female-centric films such as Three Billboards, I’ve decided to let this movie post be female-reviewer-centric as well.

Watch this trailer, which sets up the Three Billboards premise (and colorful language) really well:

Moira Macdonald, Seattle Times, describes the basic plot of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri: “[McDormand] plays Mildred Hayes, a no-nonsense woman (she dresses, every day, in a navy-blue jumpsuit; the sort worn by plumbers or mechanics) who’s out for revenge. ‘I’m Angela Hayes’ mother,’ she says, in a voice so low you could jump over it. Her daughter, seven months ago, was raped and murdered by an unknown assailant; Mildred, frozen in clenched-jaw heartbreak, needs to know who to blame.”

Mildred pays for three empty billboards to make the following statements:

    • “Raped While Dying.”
    • ″And Still No Arrests?”
    • ″How Come, Chief Willoughby?”

More about Mildred’s process, as expressed by Manohla Dargis, New York Times: “The billboards turn that grief into a weapon, a means of taking on the law and assorted men — a threatening stranger, a vigilante dentist and an abusive ex (John Hawkes) — who collectively suggest another wall that has closed Mildred in.”

Dana Stevens, Slate, adds to our understanding of Mildred:

…(T)hough Mildred makes many choices that are reprehensible or downright dangerous, McDormand never fails to convince us of the fundamental decency of this woman, a tragic heroine struggling to find even the tiniest scrap of meaning in a comically awful world…Mildred is a tough person to be around…there are moments late in the movie when she commits acts that push at the limits of audience sympathy and goodwill. But McDormand, at age 60 one of our most gifted and least calculating actresses, fearlessly challenges us to love her character anyway.

How does the police department deal with Mildred? Kate Taylor, Globe and Mail: “The decent Willoughby (another finely crafted portrait of sympathetic masculinity from [Woody] Harrelson) tries to pacify her and rein in the most vicious of his officers, the explosively racist Dixon, played by Sam Rockwell in full psychopath mode.”

April Wolfe, Village Voice, addresses dynamics that ultimately may leave some viewers dissatisfied:

[Director] McDonagh painstakingly humanizes a character who we find has unapologetically tortured a black man in police custody. And then Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri seems to ask audiences to forgive and forget wrongs like police violence, domestic abuse and sexual assault without demonstrating a full understanding of the centuries-long toll these crimes have taken on victims in real life.

There’s another problematic issue too. The Globe and Mail’s Taylor: “If the film fails to solve Dixon’s emotional puzzle, another one that remains troubling is Mildred’s relationship with her teenage son, Robbie (Lucas Hedges), the only remnant of her family and link to her motherhood, yet apparently an afterthought in her crazed planning.”

Nevertheless, this is a movie, one with overall positive reviews, that makes you mull such things over. In closing:

…just the bitter pill the times call for, offered with a loving cup to make it go down just a bit easier. Ann Hornaday, Washington Post

…a cathartic wail against the zeitgeist of rape culture and state brutality. It’s a rallying cry, a right hook to the jaw, and wow, does it ever hurt so good. Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service

Jun 26

“My Mourning Year”: Therapist’s Grief Process

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Andrew Marshall is best known for his self-help books, but his memoir demonstrates that mental health, even for experts in the field of psychology, is a universal struggle. Failed counseling sessions, spontaneous vacations, and romantic dates are all attempts Marshall makes in order to move past “the black holes of Thom.” Zane DeZeeuw, Lambda Literary, reviewing My Mourning Year

Although known in the United Kingdom as a top-notch couples therapist and author of 18 self-help books, Andrew Marshall‘s My Mourning Year: A Memoir of Bereavement, Discovery and Hope, about the death 20 years ago of his partner, may be his best writing, according to Zane DeZeeuw, Lambda Literary.

My Mourning Year is an almost unedited version of the diary he kept following Thom’s death. “He does not offer steps or guidance for how to navigate the mourning process; instead, Marshall uses his experience as anecdotal evidence that a person can survive and learn to live again after being affected by a tragedy.”

As Marshall explains in a Telegraph article, “When my partner Thom died 20 years ago, he was just 43 and I was only 37. I did not have the first idea how to cope with the grief that enveloped me.”

By publishing such a personal book, going against the usual privacy he’s maintained throughout his career, Marshall states, “I want to show that there is no right or wrong way to grieve and everybody – even therapists – make mistakes.”

One significant point Marshall makes in My Mourning Year (and I will continue to quote from Telegraph) is that “Bereavement has the knack of finding the fault lines in your life and blowing them apart. It exposed that my parents were not entirely comfortable with me being gay and I was not comfortable with their polite but distant way of showing they cared.” He needed to take some space from them.

And, adds Marshall, “the most important message of all: grief does not work to a conventional clock. Sometimes it feels like 20 months since Thom died and I still find new things to mourn. (Just recently, I wept about never getting to know him as an old man.) At other times, Thom’s death seems so long ago that it happened to someone else – perhaps because I’m not the same man I was 20 years ago.”

In the aftermath of Thom’s death there were certain things that failed to make Marshall feel better: a rebound relationship, for example—also counseling, it turns out. He actually tried it twice. This “was particularly upsetting because up to then, I’d thought of therapy as the holy grail. The problem was partly me. Just as doctors are terrible patients, therapists make terrible clients.”

(My own take on that latter statement is that it’s overly generalized and certainly not always true. I’ll accept, of course, that he is a therapist and that he feels he made a terrible client.)

Some of the things that did help Marshall’s grief process included the catharsis involved in attending theater, learning to be assertive about specific needs, taking a course in something new to him, and a one-year death anniversary dinner shared with close friends.

Eventually, moreover, he mended the rift with his parents that Thom’s death had provoked. Too, he was able to love again:

Bereavement is a wake-up call that none of us immortal. So I worked hard on improving my relationship with my parents and they have not only learnt to accept me but came to my wedding, two years ago, with joy in their hearts.
Perhaps this is the reality of mourning: you never get over the loss, but if you allow it to open you up to new experiences, you can transform your life into something that might be different, but still rewarding and meaningful.

Dec 23

“Manchester by the Sea”: Parenting Unexpected

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Manchester by the Sea, featuring the highly praised performance of Casey Affleck, is the “best movie of the year,” states Rex Reed, New York Observer. And as of this writing it’s a rarely seen 8.5 on IMDB and 97% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Although I found it to be longish, slowish, and above all utterly sad—the latter of which was repeatedly attested to by Affleck himself in his recent and humorous SNL monologue—it’s certainly worth seeing.

Basic info about Manchester by the Sea from A.A. Dowd, AVClub:

Casey Affleck, in the great internal performance of his career, plays Lee Chandler, a withdrawn handyman scraping by in Quincy, a suburb of Boston. Lee is the kind of miserable bastard who’d rather sucker-punch a stranger at the bar than go home with the beautiful woman trying to pick him up. Who is this broken man? What eats at his heart and swims behind his eyes? The questions hang like storm clouds over the early scenes, a solitary life told in odd jobs and punchlines: Lee shoveling snow, Lee screwing in a lightbulb, Lee unclogging a toilet for a tenant who has the hots for him. Frances Ha editor Jennifer Lame gives this opening passage a certain comic pop, until a phone call sends Lee racing to his hometown of Manchester By The Sea—but not fast enough to say goodbye to his older brother, Joe (Kyle Chandler), who’s just died of the degenerative heart condition he’s been afflicted with for years…

Lee becomes legal guardian to his 16-year-old nephew Patrick (Lucas Hedges). April Wolfe, Village Voice: “That prompts a string of flashback sequences, where Lee seems an altogether different man; he’s jovial, physically affectionate, has a wife (Michelle Williams) and three kids. The impact is immediate — we now understand that something has happened to make him so cold, and it certainly cannot be good…”

Rex Reed, New York Observer, regarding Patrick: “It’s wrenching to observe the values of a boy too young for a driver’s license, sensitive, witty and highly intelligent enough to cope with his father’s death and the challenging alternative of living with a neurotic, estranged mother (Gretchen Mol) who lives in Connecticut with her emotionally blocked and religiously obsessed second husband (Matthew Broderick).”

The Trailer for Manchester by the Sea

Various Themes

A.O. Scott, New York Times: “It’s a masculine melodrama that doubles as a fable of social catastrophe…”

Matt Zoller Seitz, rogerebert.com: “It’s a story about the complexity of forgiveness—not just forgiving other people who’ve caused you pain, but forgiving yourself for inflicting pain on others. It’s a story about parenting, of the biological, foster and improvised kind. And it’s a portrait of a tightly knit community that depends mainly on one industry, fishing, and that has evolved certain ways of speaking, thinking, and feeling.”

A.A. Dowd, AVClub: “Are there experiences so crushing that they ruin you forever? That’s the big question Lonergan asks, and we wait hopefully for a charitable answer.”

Selected Reviews

Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times: “…heartbreaking yet somehow heartening, a film that just wallops you with its honesty, its authenticity and its access to despair.”

Rex Reed, New York Observer: “…a triumphant exploration of the way real people think and feel about grief, loss, love and survival that will stick in your gut and cling to your heart long after the final frame fades to black.”

Andrew Lapin, NPR:

…a sprawling work that revels in its messiness, because being uncertain and uncomfortable and not knowing whether to laugh or cry when something happens is the real grist of humanity. One of the film’s final lines is ‘Do we have to talk about this now?’ But that’s what Manchester captures so beautifully about life: it’s a series of difficult conversations we’d rather avoid, about death and family and responsibility, and the ones that matter are with the people we love, or once loved, or will learn to love someday…

Nov 23

“Louder Than Bombs”: Deception in Grief

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…Louder Than Bombs is interested in the intersection between grief and memory, and how difficult it is to capture both either through photography or film. Brian Tallerico, rogerebert.com

Looking for an intense dysfunctional-family drama? David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter, sets up the plot of Joachim Trier‘s 2015 Louder Than Bombs, seemingly overlooked in theaters but now available on DVD:

Three years after the death of celebrated war photographer Isabelle Reed (Isabelle Huppert), a major exhibition is being planned and her longtime colleague Richard (David Strathairn) is writing a New York Times feature pegged to the opening. We learn via a quick montage of award speeches, interviews and news reports that Isabelle did her best work by remaining in conflict zones after the tanks pulled out, in order to capture the consequences of war. It’s also revealed that she died not in the field but shortly after retiring, in a road accident just a few miles from her home in Nyack, New York.

Richard respectfully informs Isabelle’s widower, Gene (Gabriel Byrne), that he intends to reveal the full circumstances of her death in the profile; it’s believed that she drove deliberately into an oncoming truck. Gene asks for time to tell his withdrawn youngest son Conrad (Devin Druid), who was just 12 when his mother died and has been spared any knowledge of her apparent suicide. Conrad’s older brother Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg) takes a break from his wife, his new baby and his college professor job to come sort through Isabelle’s studio for material from her final trip to Syria to be included in the show.

Jesse Cataldo, Slant: “…(D)espite its status as the emotional and narrative center of the film, the exact nature of Isabelle’s death is never clarified. Possible scenarios are glimpsed via the daydreams of one character, and discussed obliquely by others, but precise explanations are avoided.”

The trailer:

Themes and Meaning

Bilge Ebiri, Village Voice: “A fractured film about a fractured family, Louder Than Bombs takes a potentially tired premise and reshapes it before our eyes…a story of parents and children in which we’re pulled by the currents and countercurrents of desperation, depression, and love.”

Sasha Stone, The Wrap: “…(W)hat are we obligated to tell our loved ones? What are we obligated to tell our wives to prevent their getting hurt by the things we do? What are the benefits of deception? What is the eventual harm?”

Selected Reviews

Michael O’Sullivan, Washington Post: “Along with his regular co-writer Eskil Vogt, Trier has crafted a profoundly beautiful and strange meditation on secrets, lies, dreams, memories and misunderstanding.”

Michael Rose, Huffington Post: “Some might fault Trier for tackling subjects about people who appear to have it all. In ‘Louder Than Bombs,’ the angst of the upper middle class becomes universal as Trier takes us into their struggle to find what it takes to hold a family together.”

Guy Lodge, Time Out : “…(T)he emotional conclusions here can be a little pat, and catharsis too easily come by. It’s more cautiously sound-proofed than its title implies. Only when Huppert’s on screen does the film feel it could detonate at any moment.”