A quick word for people who are new to the blog: I’ve devoted 12 months (perhaps more) to writing about grief. Our son died unexpectedly earlier this year. We are heartbroken and devastated and the best way I know of to put myself back together is to continue writing. You’re welcome to read, and I hope too that for those who knew Noah or wanted to know him, you’ll find out a bit in my writing about the luminous soul that has left us. You can read my posts in order here.

I think most people think that the point of grief is to “get over it” more or less as quickly as possible. There’s a certain logic to this – that the pain of loss is like normal pain: communicating a state of emergency which demands adrenaline and a efficient escape. It’s best said that relational pain is not like the usual kind: note the percentage of music written to chronicle a break-up of relationship and the many versions of that story which highlight the difficulty of escaping the bittersweet experience of the bodily experience of loss.

I’ve felt pressed to reflect on this as we near the one year anniversary of Noah’s death. I can still feel flashes of his presence in embodied recollection and it is a two-sided experience. Particularly I’ve had a few dreams where we’ve been together doing something utterly ordinary – so unremarkable that my consciousness can’t quite catch the disjunction of him being present to me until a few minutes after I’m awake. And the aftermath of that is a dull ache which takes a while to subside.

In Greek mythology, one trajectory of a visit to the underworld is to drink from the waters of Lethe, the “river of unmindfulness” or “forgetting” which causes those who have left the mortal realm to move on with a blank slate, or in other versions to embrace oblivion. There are ways to do this in the terrestrial sphere as well, and the pain of loss often serves as a catalyst for sense-dulling alcoholism, drug abuse, or the pursuit of noisy pleasure to an extent that can cause a certain kind of oblivion.

Not all loss is painful for those of us who are left behind, or at least that’s what the Old Testament and many liturgies which flow from it suggest. Abraham died “old and full of years” (Genesis 25:8), so did Job (42:17) and the Hebrew expression drives home the weight and deposit of years lived well such that a person can depart at the proper time. This is the promise of Genesis 15:15: “You… will go to your ancestors in peace and be buried at a good old age” and of many other texts which suggest that we may remember those who have died with fondness, comfort and gladness (Psalms 112:6) and that in perhaps the most classic expression of Ecclesiastes 3:2: “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die.” I’ve known friends and family who have been at the bedside of a parent who died in old age with plenty of advance warning, the privilege of time to speak with an awareness of what was ahead, and a feeling of readiness for what lay ahead.

But the back side that Ecclesiastes text is that there are forms of moral loss which lie outside of any coherent sense of divine economy. I’d say that these losses happen outside “the time” and serve as a rupture which leaves time feeling, as Shakespeare puts it in hamlet: “out of joint”. This phrase is picked up by Jacques Derrida in his Spectres of Marx to describe the state of dislocation in time that is caused by trauma, where our ability to locate ourselves coherently in relation to past, present, and future comes apart. People who find themselves in this state, Derrida suggests, rightly in my experience, are “haunted”. That’s the reference to spectres in the title: our experience of anachronism, feeling out of joint with the flow of time, is tied to an experience of “hauntology”. I find that Derrida’s analysis, like that of Marx often fails to connect social analysis with a textured account of the inner experience of our daily lives, but here I think the connections he draws feel significant on both the grand stage of class struggles in history and in the microcosm of my personal everyday.

For those of us who have experienced loss which causes the form of bodily harm we call trauma, you are left with an uncomfortable eccentricity: not dwelling in time in the usual way, not reckoning with bodily presence (or absence) as straight-forward, and not responding to the onset of pain as a simple catalyst for flight. It is these complex dynamics which are the hardest thing to understand if your experience of loss is never more than arms length. Far too often the remedies offered are of a “back to baseline,” but this still feels to me radically unwise. One may be rendered permanently eccentric, stuck inbetween two realms, and I’m not sure this is something that should be feared or avoided. Derrida himself was skeptical about the value of “successful mourning” that we eventually metabolise our loss and move on. To honour those we’ve lost requires us to in some way preserve their alterity, and if this is true mourning in the sense that Freud conceives of it is impossible and leaving that work unforeclosed is not pathological. In her book Precarious Life, Judith Butler suggests that grief can reveal to us that we were not as self-contained as we imagined ourselves to be. Loss may leave us undone but we are not damaged as a result of it. Perhaps, as Butler suggests, the most faithful response we can muster is to accept that love has altered the coordinates of our lifes permanently, and that learning to live within that alteration is not failure but fidelity.