My experience is that closure is an extraordinarily compelling fantasy of mourning. It is the fiction that we can love, lose, suffer and then do something to permanently end our sorrow. We want to believe we can reach closure because grief can surprise and disorder us â even years after our loss.
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A passage from the poet Wallace Stevens (1989) has guided me for many years in my understanding of both religion and depth psychology: âThe final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willinglyâ (p. 189). These words are not as radical as they may sound at first. You just have to accept that everything we say is colored by the limits of our understanding, our emotional biases, and our hopes and wishes. Imagination shapes everything we say and think. Whenever we tell the stories of our lives, we are all novelists. In his book Healing Fiction, Hillman (1983) went further. He said that therapy offers the opportunity to opt into a better fiction, tell a more advanced story about your life.
Temporary insanities, like those of hard loss and grief, are always potentially creative, depending on how you deal with them. The temptation always is to sink too far into self-pity and to find relief in the compassion of others. Itâs important to feel the sadness, but emotion is always only a partial resolution. Grief is complete only with a shift in being, in the way you live, think, and relate to the world.
...new life always requires the termination of the old. Death is an appropriate image. And that is exactly what it is, an image. It doesnât mean you are going to die, although you may feel the sadness of ending in the midst of your dark night. It means that life wants to go on differently. Real, vital life doesnât repeat itself.
It is difficult for anyone to watch someone close suffer. The grief comes from not understanding the pain, and from knowing that suffering, even when it ends, will live on as memory. A child does not, and should not, understand her parentsâ memories, yet this incomprehension does not offer exemption. The child in every one of us carries the burden of memoryâs melodrama, not only our own, but those before our time.
It is easier to take something away than to give. Giving requires understanding and imagination; taking away requires only resolution and action.
Is the wish to escape suffering selfish? It is considered so with suicide. But even less extreme escapes leave wounds in othersâ lives. The Death of the Heart is not only a study of selfishness, but also a study of the struggle to escape suffering. To whom the damage is done no one wants to ask.