I wish to apologize up front for the length of this hub but trying for a Cliff's Notes version didn't work.  If you read it, get a nice glass of tea, decaff.  I'm discussing politics here.

I finished reading a book by author Thomas Dumm.  It is titled:  Loneliness As A Way of Life.

It was eloquent in that it is one of the more existential books I’ve read in a while, truly a journey of the mind.  His writing can get Socratic but that isn’t always a bad thing.  He takes his reader through Being, Having, Loving, and Grieving and through it all he brings in the comparisons of personal loneliness to political loneliness.

The chapter on grief was particularly interesting.  He reviews aspects of the Bush administration and a statement the president made following 9/11.  On 9/20 President Bush announced, “We are finished with grief.”  Dumm found that interesting, as I always did.

One of the steps in working through grief is denial.  The power of denial can be effective and strong.  As a personal tool, it can be used to get through a moment, a day, a difficult week, but after that it becomes harmful as each week thereafter passes because denial can become addictive.  “He is just out of town.”  “She went to visit her mother and will be back.”   Hazy end dates for the return of someone who we know will never return.  I’ve used it myself to “get through” a sudden storm of emotion, but I always return to the awareness that he has died and that means I will not ever see him again in my lifetime.  I have to come back to that or I will go insane from a different kind of loneliness.

Denial of grief used in politics after a catastrophic event also hinders working through sorrow together as a country.  After 9/11 we were speechless in the face of such horror.  We were heartbroken as we were directly involved if we had a loved one die, a friend, even an acquaintance.  We were directly affected if we were part of the rescue, the work involved in the days, weeks, and months thereafter.  We were directly affected simply by watching the devastation that on the faces on the television.  Nevermore had I seen the “six degrees of separation” play a role so predominately in every day life than people relating how they were touched, however remotely but directly, by 9/11.  Dumm writes that President Bush in his speech to Congress on 9/20/01 had said, “We are finished with grief.”  I could not find that exact wording in his speech.  What I found was, “Our grief has turned to anger and anger to resolution. Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.”  The implied gist of the rest of the speech is that we, as a nation are taking our grief and turning it to action, retribution, working ever forward for justice.

This is only my personal opinion but I agreed with part about the nation as a whole needing to take “resolute action.”  I disagree with “turning grief to anger,” the implied concept that our grief is finished.  I am by no means a professional with regards to grief so take my opinions with a grain of salt, but it seems to me that grief of that magnitude is never finished.  I know that I will never be “finished with grief” over the death of my husband.  I know that years from now, I will hear a song on the radio, or awaken from a bad dream and reach for him, and then cry for him.

When President Kennedy was assassinated, the country grieved for him for a long time, but we did proceed forward in the Johnson administration.  I was very young in 1963 but nowhere can I find a public address from President Johnson where he told the country that our grief and shock were over.  Action to bring justice to all those who died on 9/11 could not wait.  But to force grief to become anger does not seem like the best or safest course.  I have found that grief can bring clarity, as in the way the Oklahoma City Bombings were addressed.  There was anger, yes, but there was never once the suggestion that grief had to be curtailed, to be altered into something it was not.

I have to wonder if people are afraid of the power of grief?  It seems to be something that is resisted as a general rule.  The referrals of “moving on,” of “you are the only one who dropped out of life.  Rejoin the human race.  It’s already been two months,” makes it seem as if people believe grief is a conqueror storming the castle that has to be turned away with spears and hot oil poured down from the ramparts.   I understand how grief can seep in and control our behavior but to fight against it without addressing it feels just as wrong. 

I had no personal connection to 9/11.  There was no one I knew, nor anyone I knew who knew someone on any of the planes or on the ground yet I felt such a sense of loss and empathy for everyone, for every picture of every face.  The innocent lives destroyed that day would have affected me even if I had lived in another country.  It was a soulless action.  And to not allow grief to have its say would make me, again personally, to feel guilty that I had not given the personal value to those lives.

It is highly possible that Thomas Dumm and I have taken too literally what President Bush said but the entire speech feels like that.  Don’t let grief conquer you.  I feel that when someone, or many someone’s die, individually and/or collectively, we are forever changed.  Acknowledging that seems to be the purpose of grieving.  Yes, we continue on “resolutely” for to not continue on is no option at all, but to categorically say we are now, ten days later, not only setting grief aside but making it into something it is not does us no good.  Not recognizing that that is what we are experiencing seemed troubling at the time and now revealing.

The book had the single most interesting sentence I have read in a long time and the other motivation for this hub.

“A president who hides coffins, who refuses to go to funerals for the dead, who celebrates the death of his proclaimed enemies with relish and vigor, who encourages us to consume and refuses to lead us to honest sacrifice, who escalates simply to avoid his personal embarrassment when it is clear that the war is lost, is pursuing a politics of blocked grief.  In his isolation, his sovereign madness, his stupidity, he is leading a nation to a place where our citizenry is unable to move forward unable to go back, unable to reenter history, unable to do anything other than lash out at those who would have us begin the process of sloughing off our loss.”

Dumm concluded the paragraph by stating that “our leaders are still unwilling and unable to think about themselves as human beings, but instead believe they must be self contained isolates, our most representative lonely persons.”

Political decisions based on “blocked grief” was a new one for me but I can almost see it.  All the photos of Bush back then, the videos of him walking and waving to the public, the haphazard grin or smile and the eyes.  I had looked at him and wondered if he understood the seriousness of the situation.  Blocked grief seems like an interesting way of labeling the foundation for his decisions and one that I thought I would share for you own personal reflection.

My husband is (was – I have a hard time with used past tense verbs with regards to him and his death so just overlook that quirk) a Vietnam veteran.  Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day holidays were sometimes difficult for him.  Instead of going to the very public parades, we would help place flags in cemeteries.  We would meet the people in charge at the front gates, get our flags, and then he and I would walk off alone, two people with one heart and one mind.  Our goal was to help him through any tough memories of lost brothers.  We felt the grief of their loss, him more than me as they had names and faces, shared laughter and shared terror.  When my husband saw the first photos “snuck out” of the military flight with all the flag draped coffins, there was a large sigh that left his chest.

“Finally,” he said, “there is the recognition those men and women deserve.  This country needs to see the price of this war.”  I will not go into politics here.  There may be a need for war but to hide the cost in human lives is censorship to my way of thinking.  Am I wrong?  Denying the private grief of a public war where the bodies kept coming after the 2 May 2003 announcement of “victory in Iraq” did not seem good for the country.   I had one high school student in a class I substitute taught say, “It’s like telling a kid when his mother dies that mommy has just gone to sleep.  It’s a lie.  Knowing that Bush won’t let the press cover the soldiers coming home in coffins seems like he’s lying to us, as if either he can’t take it or thinks we can’t.”  Out of the mouths of babes.

But we can take it.  Can’t we?  We should.  It’s not our first war.  We are made of sterner stuff.

Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “If I had a formula for by passing trouble, I would not pass it around.  Trouble creates a capacity to handle it.  I don’t embrace it; that’s as bad as treating it as an enemy.  But I do say meet it as a friend, for you will see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it.”

I always thought that was good advice.  I truly believe it works the same for grief.  At least it has for me.  I fully and completely admit that I am grieving the death of my beloved husband and no matter what others tell me to do; I will not shirk the work that goes with it.  My husband deserves no less than my best work.  =o}