On Pathologizing Grief

2021

A found poem responding to Empirical Arguments for Complicated Grief Disorder

The symptoms distinctive of grief are now

considered normal; an acute biological response

to reality’s continuous forward motion, a sharp object

hitting the body with force.

Researchers have offered

proposals, categories, diagnostic criteria,

empirical answers to this syndrome.

Surely mourning must have a trajectory

of recovery? Something has gone

wrong with the process; we are caught

in a loop of chronic longing

for the past and its light, that lost world.

We want to hear/see/touch the self

that has died, a complicated bereavement,

the desperate pathology of change – Instead there is

a numbness (i.e. an absence, i.e. disbelief

at the loss: not even a bruise

after history has broken open?)

There is no cogent rationale for this.

Who would remain persistently grief-stricken,

we question, and infect their future

with their own bitter hands? But we all would.

We still do. The fact is:

The individual is an interminable wound

that will not heal, breakdowns in tissue

with no function, frozen at the time

of death, not heading for mending.