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.
Taken from Should Prolonged Grief Be Reclassified as a Mental Disorder in DSM-5? by Jerome C. Wakefield, PhD.