Numbering Grief
What could be more abstract than a number, less rich in color or feeling? But pair the number with a date, say September 21st, and it loses a part of that abstraction. And if September 21st happens to be your birthday, the date becomes particular indeed, like hearing your name called out in a crowded room whether the person being called for is you, or not.
In a 2019 podcast conversation between Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB46h1koicQ), Colbert speaks of his grief over the death of his father and older brother in a plane crash when he was ten years old. He also speaks of a family reunion with his surviving siblings, decades after the plane crash, and of telling them about marking the day on which he had surpassed his father in age. His siblings didn’t bat an eyelash, he says. They had done their own counting for themselves.
I know such numbers. Here are a few:
—The day I passed my father in age.
—Jesse and I talking about how old we’d be in 2000, 2010, 2020. (He died in 1995.)
—The day my son, Daniel, passed Jesse in age. The day my daughter, Cassandra, did.
—The day Jesse had been dead longer than he’d been alive.
It’s good to stop counting sometimes, as well. Count ‘too much’ and your sacred numbers will turn abstract again, become just numbers, to count yourself to sleep with. Counting is one way of remembering. It expresses a living fact. But it can become a dead one.
Numbering is also a way of seizing control over fate. In his novel Revolutionary Road, Richard Rhodes refers to ways of putting a pin in time to stop it for a moment, as in soldiers synchronizing their watches with their commanding officer as the bullets fly over their heads.1
With grief, though, the pin in time refers to stop-time for the person who is gone, suggesting to your secret mind that if the one whose loss you grieve would have been so many years old on such and such a date, perhaps she is. Which the unimaginative call denial, stopping thought with a truth that only scratches the surface of the ‘denial’ experience, keeping a lid on things.
You’re here. The one you grieve for was, too.
1. Rhodes, R. Revolutionary Road. NY: Vintage Contemporaries, 2008 (1991), 226.
