Jamie Anderson Felix Revello de Toro - Woman, 1965
It has been a little over a year and half since i lost my Mother(i spent the last decade living with/taking care of her) and the grief is still there. I cannot show it (because i am a "Man"), don't know how to process and deal with it but am only trusting to the passage of time to help me forget. "Human Bonding" is not mere words but is really something strong. I used to poo-poo at all sentimental emotions but now i know better through experience.
Elizabeth Akers Allen's emotional poem Rock Me To Sleep nicely captures much of the feeling - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52071/rock-me-to-slee...
I forgot to mention a very important book on the subject of Grief from the great Cicero which is rectified here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40472916
It reminds me of all the times when I was young where I thought I was deeply in love, but really I was just in love with the feeling of being loved and accepted. And my grief when that was gone was love that I could've directed towards myself where it should've gone. It took until my 30s when I realized I could provide the love that I'd been missing all my life, and only then could I be in love in a way that wasn't suffocating and borne of fear.
Calling grief maladaptive seems deeply wrong, while I both grieved and persevered through the loss and have been financially successful and am "well adjusted" and "successful" by any external observers measure, I do not think I would judge myself or anyone else who was pulled into the abyss by grief, I still doubt if living with grief was even the right choice, though I am glad I ended up in a mental state where I retained my volition to make the choice.
Loss is loss, a person who has part of their brain removed, their heart damaged so it barely pumps enough oxygen, their limbs lost or kidneys damaged... their inability to function or find joy, meaning or energy in life would never be judged as maladaptive.
I persist, that is true, but I see no moral or emotional difference between my functioning and if I was non functioning. I so repeatedly see people discount grief, mental trauma and other forms of true tangible loss as if was somehow different from other types of physical loss, but it isn't.
To call it an inability to adapt to loss is one thing, just as a head without a body could not open a door with our current technology, but I would humbly suggest that it is too far too call it maladaptive.
I loved every person I lost, due to my age for my parents I was quite literally dependent on them, and the sheer force of will required and personal self subjugation I cannot clearly say was worth it, After all, I've never met an unhappy, struggling or grief stricken man in the ashes of an urn. Loss is loss, it is as real as a limb or organ lost.
We all have different experiences, but just some thoughts to consider.
Félix Revello de Toro is a Spanish artist born in 1926. He specializes in portraits of women, including a 1965 one depicting a woman curled up on a chair with her head tilted down so as to permit her long black hair to hang down and obscure her face.
Jamie Anderson is the author of the blog "All My Loose Ends". The quote in question is an amalgamation of excerpts from a 2014 blog entry about loss:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200720034003/http://allmyloose...
Vision - Westview, NJ, 2023
-- Nick Cave, https://www.theredhandfiles.com/communication-dream-feeling/
I came to the conclusion years ago that grief is just unexpressed, unshareable, uncommunicable, thwarted love. It's all the love I cannot give, all the words and touches and moments that fail to alight on the one I love but instead, missing its intended, affix me to the void.
So not merely entwined, I think grief is love itself unsatisfied.
So in summary, both are an excess of love not finding its goal.
Mourning, however, is active. It’s a choice to turn and face your loss. Grief is your body telling you that you aren’t doing enough to mourn.