Planned obsolescence

Defining grief is an American industry. Each culture has its codes and conventions for mourning. American culture invokes a planned obsolescence when it comes to grief. We are expected to move on quickly and get back to work, back to shopping, back to life. But for the human, a definition of grief is nothing more than an external limit of what is expressed. 

Emily Rapp devotes a chapter of her memoirs to a grief list, a simple listing of things that "Grief is:", including "Sudden clatter of sunlight everywhere." Rapp observes there is no hierarchy of suffering in grief or love, no floor or no ceiling, since "loss is not quantifiable." There is no measure and therefore no appropriate form in which to box grief. Loss is imminent in its immanence. Loss has no teleology, no goal or end point. 

Complicated grief & camellias

When one's longing for the dead lasts longer than a calendar year, the therapist may consider a diagnosis of complicated grief. I learned this from a therapist.

For a few months, in the second year of my mother's death, I paid $120 for each hour spent in the Febreze-inflected office of a highly-recommended therapist. I paid this money in order to talk about dying, losing, the gray bird, the ring, the terrible fuschia of camellia petals swallowing the stairs. 

"This is a classic case of complicated grief," she announced.

When I asked her, quite wondrously, what uncomplicated grief looked like, the therapist replied: "Oh that's just the word we use for medical coding so we can prescribe medications and make sure the patient doesn't continue any habits of self-harm."

But what are habits of self-harm?

The therapist smiled and assured me I wasn't quite there yet, although "not being happy can be a form of self-harm."

This struck me as a very americanist perspective.

She said it wasn't American; it was science; it was the cutting-edge of new diagnoses in grief-adjacent maladaptations.

Still worried about the bird, I told the therapist that the pressure to perform happiness was like a bulldozer clear-cutting the soul and smothering the sun. I told her the cult of positivity was brutish, beastly, and overly focused on consumption. I told her what I believe--and what poets have helped me to inhabit--namely, that happiness is happenstance. It is a happening. It is a surprise rather than a goal or achievement. Chen-Chen said Sara Ahmed said that--and I believe them. 

The therapist repeated her assertion that being sad is "maladaptive" and "not a good example for your children, who need very much for their mother to be mature about the loss of a mother." 

I asked if her mother was living. She said yes but--

I opened my eyes very wide to increase the effect of rolling them. I expressed the un-science of opinion in that her words seemed intolerant, unfortunate, and bland. Maybe the pressure to fake happiness is a form of living death. It's no coincidence zombie dreams are on the rise. Faking happiness is not innocent or generous--it is not innocuous--those are merely the looping justifications parroted by insta-culture and self-help studs. 

[Of course—during all this—I kept worrying if I was upsetting my therapist, or if I was inconveniencing her by being unlikable and not responding to treatment or being compliant or….. Each time these thoughts wandered through my head, I remembered how much money had between transacted between us, how much money she received to listen, smile, and pick a sticker to paste on my face. Was my job to affirm her? Was my job to make her feel good about doing her job, even though the work she was doing felt harmful? Everything from the You Can Climb This Mountain posters to the coffee mug rimmed with images of laughing children felt so flimsy in that room, in that office of therapeutic amaze-balls.

And isn't it amazing--if you stop to think--how incredibly reckless and loathsome we can be in our performance of Happy? It's a status symbol in the emotion economy. The bleached smile as a means of keeping up with the Joneses.' And isn't it terrible how the performance of happiness cuts you off from yourself, and makes it more difficult to experience or recognize authentic happiness when it arrives?

I told my therapist that faking happiness was like faking an orgasm--after a while, you can't tell the real thing from the performance of it. After a while, you can't tell the feeling apart from its objectification as a product one delivers to others. 

My therapist's face stiffened into an uncomfortable smile. She insisted that faking orgasms was a sensible strategy when a woman didn't really feel like having sex. 

I stopped seeing this therapist because the poet in me knows what the human in me hopes, and that is: not having sex is the most sensible thing to do when you don't feel like having sex. 

And grieving is what you do for a long time after death.

*

I forgive myself—in advance in continuum—the failure to score progress marks in therapy.

I forgive myself, as I forgive my therapist her insularity, her narrow vision, her overwrought posters.

Anna Akhmatova once said to Joseph Brodsky, "You do not know just what you've been forgiven," and he treasured these words like a talisman.

I, too, know so little about the distance between the roof and the nimbus named Death.