Grief as Self-Definition

How we lose ourselves and others…

We just can’t stop talking about self-definition, does that make us self absorbed? Or perhaps we merely ARE ‘self-definers’? (We always felt like that was a noble calling.) Regardless, let’s look into how we can just find ourselves through the things we lose.

Enjoy!

Grief as Self-Definition

Loss is often a quiet and unobserved thing, whether it be a casual friendship with a relocated mailman, that YouTuber you enjoyed who just stopped producing videos, or just a novelty drinking glass you got back in college that slipped and shattered against the hard tile floor. We spend so much of our time in the same familiar spaces that it’s impossible not to collect a web of these small connections to the living, hyperreal, and inanimate parts of our daily surroundings.

Ultimately, grief is just the awareness that we no longer have something; thus, even for minor losses, such as a broken drinking glass (and it’s associated memories), we are still experiencing the process of grief in miniature. It first manifests as an outburst of anxiety and depression followed by a much longer tail of disorientation as one integrates with the new reality. This torrent of emotion is most often framed within the Kübler-Ross “Five Stages of Grief” model (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance), which I find to be inaccurate and reductionist to the point of being unhelpful — both because it describes the crisis of the griever symptomatically rather than causally, and also because it assumes a conclusion to the grieving process via “acceptance”, as though it was describing a factory floor task.

Perhaps this model of grief is a reflection of our society’s individualistic bent, a preference to imagine each person as a concrete and eternal stage character in the story of their own life, the modern rational Homo economicus, its pure and independent intellect briefly hijacked by some kind of primordial madness to be quickly analyzed and dismissed. In my experience, grief is more of a lifelong shift, perspective gained, rather than a hurdle to overcome. It is a forced change to our moment-to-moment process of self-definition.

A Perfect Anchor, A Poor Mirror

The effects of grief are most pronounced in cases of death of course, but this process does seem to apply nearly as readily to objects and habits, be it changing jobs or moving to a new town — all leave an impression on our self identities.

I’ve written before about The Reproduction of Daily Life and how our own identities and sense of dignity are continually formed by our daily activities; in more thoughtful grief counseling I’ve found a similar concept under different names when dealing with the loss of self-definition following the death of a loved one. They say that this feeling of confusion stems both from the practical changes required in our daily habits and from our need to define ourselves relative to our surroundings.

Just as Perlman’s tribesmen daily reproduced their own status as a tribe, so too do we produce our own sense of self through daily parental, sibling, work colleague, and spousal acts. Active relationships act as anchor points, grounding us into a particular story about ourselves that we can only genuinely believe by observing ourselves within a role. A strong older brother is empowered by his own definition through enacting his protective role, just as a young mother, by her tender care towards her infant child, will see herself grow into a caretaker role that once seemed mythically out of reach to her. It is telling that when someone is asked what kind of person they are, that their first response will almost always be to describe themselves in relation to a loved one — either as parent, spouse, or a doting aunt or uncle.

After a loss however, we are directly and abruptly cut off from this method of self-definition. We are no longer able to reenact the treasured rites of our station. Instead we have only our memories, poor mirrors that they are, to struggle to see our old self within. This practice is limited also by the fading nature of memory.

In a very real sense, an aspect of you has died with the other person. Part of the pain of grieving is realizing that so many of the fleeting moments of your life have somehow become more distant along with the person you shared them with. The memories themselves feel fainter and there is no one else who can speak to you about them or stand before you as a testament of your character in quite the same way.

At its darkest, this can lead to a feeling that the most beautiful part of you has died, and maybe it has. But life is not lived for the most of anything, such moments are brief abnormalities in the grand scheme of our days. Life is only for the next thing, whatever we may choose to make of it from what remains before us.

The Grief is for You

And so whatever you lose, be it a novelty glass or the love of your life, it is worth allowing yourself the time to experience grief unselfconsciously. But you should appreciate the gift of this process by being aware of what that person or thing you lost made you.

After the initial shock of any loss we should have an eye towards what connections we can purposefully forge to make us the person we wish to remain, or wish to be. After all, grief is an act of self repair, and so when done properly should be a fully self-serving act — neither broken glasses nor the dead have any needs that we can serve; rather, it is our place to accept our losses and decide how we wish to grow, because whether we wish it or not, we will continue to define ourselves relative to our living surroundings.

And so my advice is simply this: if you lose something beautiful, honor it by connecting with something beautiful again.