I was watching our son play last weekend and recalling my own younger self as a recently bereaved 10 year old several decades ago. In his movements I recognised the balm of friendship and play and remembered seeking out with a particular intensity the busyness of friends, projects and chores as a form of distraction while I waited for my body and mind to press on with the inexorable process of reconstructing itself. This process can’t be hastened, even though you might desperately want it to culminate or long for a return to “normal,” but normal doesn’t exist and one can only wait with patience or rage for it to unfold.

This work ticks along with an expensive budget. My own energy reserves remain half of what I can remember being normal today, and it was the same when I was a young person. I find myself suddenly flagging in the aisles of the grocery store and shortening my shopping list so that I can get home to sit in a less demanding ambiance. So it is helpful to have undemanding (but perhaps sacramental) work to keep the body and mind moving, folding laundry, preparing meals, speaking with friends of a future as yet uncharted. But these forms of movement through quotidian days remain haunted and chased.

So too in his play I caught hesitations, an occasional flagging of energy, and flashes of a latent but acute self-awareness that one carries in the wake of personal tragedy. I think that one of the features of modern grief is the way that it suddenly transforms a person into a singularity, it can feel like there aren’t any people you can sit with and speak of the experience of life disruption that you’ve experienced.The thing that has happened is unspeakable and the only thing you desire is to be with someone who carries the same experience in the same way such that the ambiance of your mutual carrying can provide a form of refuge. But there is no such thing. Even among our family, the landscape of grief is shaped differently and requires different way-finding for the mother, brother, father or friend. So in your interpersonal moments you find yourself confronted by the singularity of human experience, and by an experience of often being partially and invisibly estranged from the company of those who would weep or rage by your side, but weep and rage in a different cadence, with a contrasting rhythm. The dissonance of the lack of harmony can cause you to hold back. The reasons are various – to share outside of shared experience feels like performance. But also it just takes work to translate and render your particularly strange inner world accessible. This isn’t a solipsistic holding back, just a gentle form of reserve.

This morning as I reflected on that experience of singularity – which I think may ultimately lie at the heart of every human experience of love and loss, I did also wonder if the uniqueness of grief is also something of a uniquely modern experience: a privilege that is perhaps not altogether edifying. I’m not one of those people who thinks that before the advent of electricity, running water, and instagram every person’s life was ugly, brutish and short – indeed I’m confident that before the industrial revolution and the abusive marriages that slowly followed to capitalism and the aquisition of wealth and power the lives of people were often more full of joy, happiness, and pleasure than we can possibly understand. Sure, people didn’t have ibuprofen, and there were in some places pervasive regimes of oppression, but people responded in the ways the could, carried on with regimes of medical herbalism, holistic day rhythms, the ability to sing through the day, and a sense of work in balance with the world. I’m sure they had their own problems, but let’s just say that the balance of suffering between then and now might ultimately be even in the end. It was certainly the case, however, and remains the case in many corners of the world still, that mortality was not so far away from each individual as it is now. And I wonder what that drifting away from the immediacy of soul-clenching loss, that regular return to awareness that your body was undergoing work to psychologically reconfigure itself to function without the presence of people who brought light, levity and grist to your everyday. What has it meant for many people to lose touch with that experience of profound personal loss?

I’ve noticed over the years that many people unconsciously find themselves grasping for proxies. We absorb reports of hardship among friends and acquaintances and feel, at least in a partial way, the jarring sensation of life briefly out of joint, and our reaction is not to flee or flinch, but to seek out the grief and suffering of others. Perhaps there is an ancestral element to this thirst for tragedy, trying to reconnect our own insulated lifeworlds to the raw and more intense experience of our predecessors. The problem with suffering is that we will rarely seek it even when we are swimming in privilege, even when we become aware that we are diminished by our privilege. The same can be said for human engagement with ecological loss – the spectre of climate change and other forms of ecological loss has provided a  comprehensive proxy for people to grapple with extinction-level bereavement, even if that is not actually materialised in a meaningfully personal or tangible way. Was it also the case that this sense of personal singularity for our great-grandparents was less acute? If many people could expect to lose a spouse or sibling, to live with chronic pain, did that grant a different or more pervasive form of fellowship?

None of this is to say that I find the solidarity and love of friends has been insufficient or lacking. Quite to the contrary it has been a luxurious thing to bask in. But I have the sense that there is an unavoidable loneliness to grief and I wonder if this is a somewhat novel experience across the wide expanse of human experience in this world of ours. I’ve never been quite sure what to make of it.