Theme
5:32am December 23, 2014

Five Identities of Grievers

I found the following on Wikipedia on their page on grief.  It is the first mention of anything like the response I have had to my father’s death, and I want to know more.
I have described my grief response as a desire to memorialize Ron as much as I can.  I want to capture what we know of him now, so that thirty years from now, if I’m still alive, I can look back on how everyone saw him, for good or for bad.  He was both a very simple man and a very complicated man. 
Here’s the quote from Wikipedia (italicizing, bolding beyond headers, and underline are all mine in different combinations to try to convey what are my most important and least important grieving response.:
Five identities of grievers
Berger identifies five ways of grieving, as exemplified by:
1. Nomads: Nomads have not yet resolved their grief and do not seem to understand the loss that has affected their lives.
2. Memorialists: This identity is committed to preserving the memory of the loved one that they have lost.
3. Normalizers: This identity is committed to re-creating a sense of family and community.
4. Activists: This identity focuses on helping other people who are dealing with the same disease or with the same issues that caused their loved one’s death.
5. Seekers: This identity will adopt religious, philosophical, or spiritual beliefs to create meaning in their lives.
#1 Nomads, and #4 activists, are the two that are the least like my grief response.  I definitely understand how the loss of Ron has affected my life, and along with one of my brothers, I think we were the first two to cmd out of denial (if we’d ever been in denial in the first place — I don’t know about him, because I haven’t talked to him much since moving to Vermont.  but I know that a long proximity to death has given me the ability to sometimes look death in the face in a way most people can’t yet. 
As far a #4 (Activists), I am an activist in other areas, but I’m not one of those single-disease medical-activists, I’m someone who lumps all disabled and chronically ill people together, or into accident-of-history sub groupings like developmental and psych disabilities, and I advocate more for rights and accessibility in general, rather than just medical care in particular.
#3 Normalizers ( underlined but nothing else) is getting a little warmer.  Though I don’t like the name, I have continually advocated throughout the entire grief process, that as a family we needed to stick together and give Ron as much love as we can possibly give him.  But beyond that, I’ve felt almost as if grief is a living being, that will try to make us see the differences between each other, and will try and pull us apart.  But that if we fight that, and i f we continue to love each other, these events can make us stronger as a family.  But that only works if everyone involved wants it to  work.  So this is really up to everyone, not just up to me.
Aside from memoralizers, the only one that really fits me well in a way would be #5 Seeker.  Except it’s not that I’ve turned to spirituality to get a reason for his death, or to understand life after death.  It’s just that I turn to spirituality to deal with any and all difficult situations, and this is one of them.
And #2 Memorlializers. That’s me in a nutshell.  I want to gather together everything i can that helps me remember him.  If people were willing, I’d put together a book of everyone’s memories of him — short and long, abstract and concree, but showing him in a whatever light people want to show him in — good, bad, indifferent.  But one family member said that could interfere with other people’s way of grieving, so I may be on my own here.  in which case I would include memories, photos, artwork, and poetry, all of my own making, and memorialize him that way.  I have also built him a small shrine in my room to remember him by and connect with him in some of the only ways I know how.  And I have worn his clothing since before he was dying, but especially after he died, and that along with his hats and a locket full of beard hair have made me feel connetedtohi
And I know that being the youngest in a family with a wide margin between me and my brothers (who are 9 and 14 years older than me, I was the “oops, we went into the woods and forgot our protection, but we’d better not let that prevent us from having a good time” baby — the date on the fishing license is exactly 9 months before my birthdate).  I feel like there are so many things I don’t know about him, so many things I missed. 
And I can tell, because I know him, that some of the things I missed were really bad, and not things you’d want to live through if you had a choice.  I can tell because of the way people talk around things.  It’s dangerous to talk around a subject near me, because I can and will start seeing the gaps in your stories take shape into something real.  I have even — although I swore I would never tell, and I won’t, not without permission — figured out the shape of a couple events around the time of my birth, simply by looking at what people were not saying.
Every family has secrets.  I have no wish to air our dirty laundry.  But I do wish to commit to a concrete form of memory, such as a print-on-demand book where the URL is only given out to select people who knew him and would understand.  And I wouldn’t put the worst of the dirty laundry in unless the rest of the family gave their permission, and sincerely believed that Ron would too.  I got the idea of all this from the Patty Clark Memorial that people put up online, where anyone could post their memories of her.
i wish I could write more, but I’m not feeling well tonight.  Nothing big, just general crud.  I’m going to be reading the Kindle book I found that those five ways of grieving are a reference to.  Because until now, I’d only read stuff saturated with the theories of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, which even she herself admitted didn’t apply to everyone — her stages of grief were taking from the dying themselves, not those they left behind..  And I’d been talking about my main way of grieving being an intense urge to memorialize Ron in any way possible.   So this should be interesting reading, especially reading how other people experience grief differently than I do.
If you’re curious about the ebook, it’s available here for Kindle (which has reading apps for most platforms):  The Five Way We Grieve: Finding Your Personal Path to Healing after the Loss of a Loved One.  I don’t expect to find my personal path to healing through a book like this, but I do expect it to shed some light on areas that are confusng for me, or give words to things that are hard for me to express, and that matters to me at least as much as getting over it. (And for me the mourning process has not been entirely negative, but i’ll write about that probably another day, another post.)
One thing about this that I do think is related to being autistic:  My expressions of grief have been very concrete and very physical.  They are things I can hold in my hands, wear on my body, and remember through movement and the way he moved and the ways our bodies synced together so well in good times and in bad alike.  I think that in his choice of things to send to me, my father understood very well my need for the concrete and the tangible to remember him by, and so he sent me his clothes to wear, he sent me his hats, he sent me some of his rocks, he sent me a backpack he’d personally made (with a tag on it saying “An Original By Ron Baggs), he sent me things both useful and sentimental and both, but all of them solidly tying my life to his life in a way that has made it much easier to mourn without being overwhelmed with sorrow.  Because when I look for them, those connections are still there, they still exist, they’re still real.  Just because he’s on the other side of a wall of time, and outside time altogether, doesn’t change that.
But the concrete physical objects… for a tactile-kinesthetic-olfactory learner that means so much, and I think he knew it.
Notes:
  1. withasmoothroundstone posted this