My younger son asked me this week (as we had just been crying together): what is sadness for? His question arose from what I appreciated to be a wise insight – the practicality of grief and sadness feels different from other emotions which he and I have been in active conversations about, e.g. anger, anxiety or stress. These latter emotions and states address an urgent physical need, enabling a person to find safety or prioritise certain kinds of mental tasks when in danger. But as Isaac suggested with his question – the function of sadness is more opaque. We feel an urgent need, even a compulsion to express sadness but what is it for?

His question, at least for me, is also tied up in our ideas on how we should do grief and mourning. I’ve spent much of the past ten years working on the concept of grief, loss and mourning across a variety of contexts. This includes a large funded academic study I co-led with a friend and colleague on the intersection of species extinction and religion. Part of the reason I’ve had this enduring preoccupation as an academic theologies lies in personal experience of loss. When I was 8 years old, my father died – an unexpected catastrophic rupture in our family life and childhood. We all did our best to honour the memory of my father and grapple with our feelings, and probably – in retrospect – did an exemplary job of it. The loss of my father became an episode in a landscape of loss. By the time I was 18 many of the male members of my biological family had died, through heart attacks, cancer, stroke, and suicide. That’s not to say that I didn’t benefit from the support and mentorship of the other lovely uncles and cousins and many wonderful men who supported us in the context of church. But Shane and I were the last two remaining men to have the Kidwell name. If I’m being honest, some days that loss made me feel important, and provided a sense of vocation.

I did diagnostic work with various counselors in my 20s and 30s seeking to understand why and how anxiety and depression have been frequent companions for adult Jeremy. One of the core guiding insights that I drew from psychotherapy was that something had gone catastrophically wrong in my past. I think that people who have experienced catastrophic loss or trauma may be particularly drawn to this way of thinking as it provides us with a present quest we can pursue which seeks to make right what went wrong in our past. To some extent, it may be fair to say that Freud and colleagues were motivated by similar underpinning convictions (and quite a lot of misogyny). But the consequence of this was that my own diagnostic mind has been occupied for several decades on analysing how unprocessed or badly processed grief from this litany of loss haunted my everyday. I’ve been driven by this sense that misperformed grief or latent trauma was the engine driving my everyday experiences of anxiety and seasonal instances of low mood.

I studied (in some some cases experienced) the practice of grief and loss in other cultures and religions. I analysed historical and contemporary Christian rituals of mourning with a particular attention to the way that those practices echoed in other places theologically. I came away with a few core convictions, which are broadly shared by people who have written on so-called Western practices around grief and loss.

First, we do not create sufficient time and space for loss. In many cultures and religions ritual mourning is expected for at least a year. Within the Christian and secular cultures and communities we’ve been a part of in the USA, Canada and the UK, mourning is typically allowed for a week, and perhaps up to a month – but beyond that people begin to worry and ask about whether you are doing enough to move on with life. There is a pervasive anxiety that if we do not actively attempt to confront loss in some way and engage in practices of “moving on” bad things will happen, perhaps we will get stuck in that valley never to escape. I’ve come to believe that this is deeply pathological, and the cultural practices we have around grief in those contexts are misguided. The 1 year mark seems about right to me, and that’s what I’m aiming for as I honour the memory of my son.

Second, the physicality of death is important to the process of mourning. One thing which stands out to me from my father’s death relates to the time when my brother and I were asked if we wanted to see my father’s body. My younger brother quickly replied “yes” and my reaction was “no”. In retrospect, I have come to regret my decision (and my brother has not). Though I’m not sure how this could even have been done, I wonder if I should have been pressed to experience the tangibility of a body and to be grounded in the reality of death in a way that only this can achieve. I’ve spoken with many other adults who have been present at the time of someone’s death and the beauty and intimacy of this experience. This is particularly the case for those who have been present for a good death – the passing of someone who is old and full of years and ready to depart in the company of those they love. It is more ambiguous in cases of sudden and unexpected death, but I remain firm in my conviction that it is important to provide and take opportunities, even if you are a young person, to be with the body of someone we have lost if that can be done gracefully.

Third, we do not account for the velocity of grief. Again, looking at the cultural and religious contexts I’ve occupied, we are allowed to weep openly, for a certain duration, but never in an uncontrollable way. People feel compelled to explain what has happened, to bring coherence back to the world, and in some ways to bring a sense of order and control to grieving. When I was young, I wore my self-control as a badge of honour – I can recall confiding to some friends (with pride) that I hadn’t cried (at all) for years as a teen. As the oldest child in our family when my father died, I was encouraged by other men in my life to be the “man of the house,” and to concentrate my efforts on being mature and filling the gap left by my larger-than-life father. I remember harboring an internal narrative about how it was important that I hadn’t succumbed to grief – and hadn’t cried really at any time during my childhood. But this also tied into being an autistic adolescent and teen – I can find the presence of others to be so overwhelming, body language, microexpressions and just pure raw emotions will quickly flood my own experience. It’s very hard for me to process anything with others around. It’s when I sit in silence by myself at the end of the day that it begins to wash over me in overwhelming waves. This is in some contrast to my wife who processes grief best in company (and for which I am so very grateful for the many lovely women who have come to sit by her this week). But for me as a young person this must have felt like a protective mechanism, suppressing my own processing of loss and trauma even when I was alone so that my secluded self matched my social self. I spent a long part of my 30s trying to reconnect with emotional expression, to find ways to let loose that grip of control over my self-presentation. This usually just amounted to a few silent tears at a funeral but that felt like an accomplishment.

This experience has given me a particular sense of vocation for speaking authentically and encouraging grief with young people. And this week, I’ve been struck by all the young people in our life who were friends to Noah, and the ways that they are processing this loss of a friend. I have (always tentative) conversations with young people, and find myself reflecting afterwards on whether that young person matches my memory of little Jeremy. There are some symmetries: iIt seems to me that young people process grief in more direct and tangible ways: asking extremely practical questions: “what will you do with his bedroom?” or “did you see his body?” but at the same time, I suspect there is something this practicality is masking, an inner awareness of lagging capabilities for the work. When you are young you do not yet have emotional templates for confronting and processing grief – you are making up the script as you go along, so there must be time for experimentation, and kindness from adults around when that experimentation doesn’t quite follow social convention or achieve its intended aims. Most young people don’t know what they feel or how to connect to the feelings associated with loss, and I think think this is probably natural. So it has been interesting for me to observe that they don’t often want to sit and cry as we share stories. I would have previously worried that this was a form of suppression and might even feel compelled to do some gentle but proactive work to encourage authentic emotional release and expression. But I am less confident in this diagnostic insight than I once was.

Part of my journey which has unfolded in the background as well has been coming to understand my own neurodivergence, which I’ve written a fair bit about on this blog previously. This learning has salience for grief in several ways and I think it is important to affirm that autistic grief has it’s own landscape(s).

Though I still hold that it is important to stay with the feelings, let yourself sink into them, and see where they carry you, or how they hold you in place, I find myself unable to suppress my tendency towards analysis. For now I’m holding onto this as a somewhat unique element of autistic grief  – we can think and feel things out together, or at least I can. And these things are intertwined for me.

While so much that has brought me grace in these two weeks has been the opportunity to be present with and speak to friends in mourning, it’s also the case that I particularly need to find times and places of solitude. My autistic world is so vivid and sensorially cacophanous that I cannot find my way to deepest mourning until I am by myself. That has been the case this month. Very late at night, or when everyone is out for a play, or very early in the morning, when my sensory and analytical buffers are finally clear, I find the overwhelming waves of sadness begin to come over me and I can gasp out the gutteral and incantory questions which drive me right now. Why have you left me? I miss you so desparately. Where are you Noah? Were you afraid? Do you know how much I love you?

For the theologians and philosophers reading: these are NOT questions. They are places where the bottom has fallen out of my world. I ask them to speak truthfully about what has happened to me, not to seek consolation, or to resolve some matter of cognitive ambiguity. I do not want footprints in the sand poems, theological platitudes, shoulder patting, “he’s in a better place” bible verses, or really even any consolation at all.

Let us weep together beside Noah’s body, while looking over photos, recalling memories, or in those random moments when our breath catches at the sheer incomprehensibility of it. Let us speak of the weeping that we have done in our solitudes. Let us share the questions which well up in the place of darkness, but not seek to explain what has happened. If that comes at all, it will be much later.

I’ll share more about what I’m learning and thinking about it all later, but I think that’s enough for now.