jmgoyder

In Western culture we don’t seem to have rituals of grief like other cultures. Yes, I realize that this is an overgeneralization, and debateable, however I have noticed at the various funerals I’ve been to over the years that it is appropriate to cry softly, to squeeze your heaving throat, and block your mouth’s sobs with a tissue but often, if anyone weeps loudly, they are avoided because it is so scary.

In many other cultures (we lived in Papua New Guinnea when I was a teenager), loud weeping is not only acceptable around death and illness, it is expected. I remember being shocked the first time I heard this wailing of grief. Here though, in Australia, the expression of grief is somehow inhibited, controlled. Even at my own father’s funeral over 30 years ago I remember, as a 19-year-old firstly being unable to cry from the shock (he died suddenly) but then being unable to stop crying and having to force myself to stop for the sake of dignity or control or something – I don’t know.

The other night – one of the nights Husband was supposed to have come home and Son was out – I woke up to the dark, creaky house, thinking I had heard Husband’s knock (he knocks on the wall of the bedroom if he needs me). It took me a moment to realize that he wasn’t even home, let alone knocking, so I tried to go back to sleep in the adjacent bed to his empty one. And then it hit me like a tidal wave of such intensity – that he was never going to come back except as a visitor to his own home – and I wailed and wept and scream-sobbed my way into dawn with our whole life together playing like a movie in my mind compared to the wretchedness of now. And I know there are so many other people who are gradually losing someone they love to illness but are unable to wail like I did because of the proximity of neighbours.

Husband and I have lost each other the way we were, and Husband and Son have lost each other the way they were too, and this is of such gut-grinding grief that it stops my breath.