In the early morning hours of November 27, 2020 I received an email that let me know that gifted painter and adventurous woman Dorothy Goode had suddenly and unexpectedly died in her sleep. I had written about her, in admiration, in January here.

The news arrived literally while I was lighting a memorial candle for my mother, who had died on that very date decades earlier, also suddenly and unexpectedly in her sleep. Neither woman reached her 6th decade of life.

I will leave it to others to reminisce about Dorothy. Her devoted partner and circle of family, friends and admirers are better able to do so than I ever would. I do want to say a few words about grieving, though, particularly mourning for those who are loved with unusual intensity and passion and who are ripped away without a chance for mental and emotional preparedness.

My firm belief that there is no right or wrong way to grieve comes from personal experience, though it is informed by my familiarity with the psychological literature on mourning. I find it irritating that stage- theories of grieving (originally derived from the Kübler-Ross speculations on 5 stages of grief) are still propagated by healthcare professionals and pop-psych publications alike, when they have long been debunked. The idea that you have to progress through a series of defined emotional reactions to adapt to the loss of a loved one, and if you don’t you’re doing something wrong, has added to the burden of those overwhelmed with mourning in their own way.

Recent findings regarding the stages-of-grief models make it clear:

“Major concerns include the absence of sound empirical evidence, conceptual clarity, or explanatory potential. It lacks practical utility for the design or allocation of treatment services, and it does not help identification of those at risk or with complications in the grieving process. Most disturbingly, the expectation that bereaved persons will, even should, go through stages of grieving can be harmful to those who do not.” 

Grief comes in many shapes and forms. The large majority of people will be resilient enough to make it through months and sometimes years of mourning without life-long psychological damage that interferes with continued functioning. This is particularly true if there were no other pathologies preceding the loss, like a preexisting pattern of clinical depression, for example.

Immediately after a loss hits you, grief overwhelms you, sears you, seizes you, eviscerates you. It can interfere with regulation of your days, your ability to sleep, eat, connect to others and maintain a healthy immune system. Acute grief has many of us intensely sad, angry, anxious; you can also experience, at the very same time, an emotional numbness, and are hard pressed to concentrate on anything at all. Others do not feel this way, or do so with less intensity, or do not communicate that they feel this way. There is no evidence that they adapt less well, ultimately, to equally hurtful losses.

Bereavement is shaped both by the pain of having to live without the person (loss-related factors) and the stress of having to function in a new identity, a life change abruptly requiring you to change with it (restoration-related factors.) They obviously vary from person to person – a widow’s ability to feed her family when her husband was the sole bread winner is a different kind of existential threat than when I lost my daughter. Losing the love of your life after decades of togetherness is different from a a child dying at birth.

When death arrives suddenly and unexpectedly it adds a burden. In addition to the pain and the absence of anticipatory mourning that can blunt the feeling when the actual grief arrives, it propels rumination. Should I have seen this coming? Was I blind to something that could have prevented this? Were there signs that I missed? These thoughts certainly crop up with health-related early death. But there is also the brooding over the last exchanges that might have been different if we were already in the frame of mind of saying good-bye to a loved one. Did we have to fight? Was I too selfish? Did I spend enough time? They will fade, peacefully, when there is room for rationality again.

I believe it is paramount to allow the bereaved to feel those feelings and think those thoughts. No promise of “it will get better.” No admonition “don’t worry about that.” And never, ever, urging the mourner to move on, leave it behind, be grateful for what you had. Grief takes its own time, finds its own path, and the one thing another human being can do for you when you grieve is to acknowledge your pain and not shy away from witnessing it.

I think Dorothy would have liked the poem I am attaching below. She certainly summitted the mountains, many of them, not leaving dreams to be fulfilled “later.” I don’t think her life was easy, but she lived, created – and loved – with a vengeance.

Imagine her joy on rising.

How to Fly (in Ten Thousand Easy Lessons)

by Barbara Kingsolver

Behold your body as water
and mineral worth, the selfsame
water that soon (from a tree's 
way of thinking, soon) will
be lifted through the elevator hearts
of a forest, returned to the sun
in a leaf-eyed gaze. And the rest!
All wordless leavings, the perfect
bonewhite ash of you: light
as snowflakes, falling on updrafts
toward the unbodied breath of a bird.

Behold your elements reassembled
as pieces of sky, ascending
without regret, for you've been lucky
enough. Fallen for the last time into
a slump, the wrong crowd, love.
You've made the best deal.
You summitted the mountain 
or you didn't. Anything left undone
you can slip like a cloth bag of marbles
into the hand of a child
who will be none the wiser.

Imagine your joy on rising.
Repeat as necessary.

Music today is dedicated to Richard, for whom Dorothy was the sun and the moon. Last movement of Schumann’s Davidsbündler Tänze.

This is what it says on my sheet music edition:

In all und jeder Zeit
Verknüpft sich Lust mit Leid
Bleibt fromm in Lust
und seid dem Leid mit Mut bereit.

In all and every time 
Joy and suffering are intertwined
Stay devoted in joy
And meet suffering with courage.