I went to a funeral a couple of months ago.
7,000 people attended, either in person or by watching online, to offer their support to the family of a sixteen-year-old boy killed in a car crash three days before. The service was held so quickly because the day they chose was the sixth anniversary of his father’s death from cancer.
My dad asked me afterward how much being at funerals reminds me of my mom’s, and I said that there will probably always be some connection, but that wasn’t what was tearing me apart about this one. I can relate to my friend, their oldest daughter, when it comes to the loss of her dad. I haven’t lost mine, but there’s common ground there in losing a parent. I even feel like I can empathize with her mom a little, having watched my dad go through losing a spouse. But losing a sibling, or a son, is such a completely different beast. I didn’t know how to offer any support or comfort when I knew that my understanding of their loss went this far, and no farther.
So that’s always the question, isn’t it? How can I help when I can’t understand? Maybe that’s my own flaw, that I don’t feel like I have a place to offer comfort if it’s something I haven’t already earned for myself. I can be there, I can listen, but I can’t connect the way I can when I’ve been where they are. It feels like an invasion to offer anything I’m not confident will be useful, when I know firsthand that most of the things you hear while grieving are useless at best and harmful at worst. I’m sure there’s a more productive middle ground, but usually my course of action is to tell someone I love them, I’m praying for them, and then acknowledge that their grief isn’t mine and leave them alone.
Surrender, Dorothy is about the aftermath of a young woman’s early death. Sara dies in a car accident while on an annual summer vacation with her closest friends, who decide to stay and finish out their time there after her death, joined by Sara's mother. Most the conflict in the book comes from one question: who owns this loss? Her mother is her only remaining family, and she comes in expecting Sara’s friends to submit to her without question-- to know that she has suffered the biggest loss, and that her life is most affected. Her best friends, Adam and Maddy, take issue with this. Adam was with her in the car accident that killed her, and feels that no one respects his loss because he and Sara were never romantically involved. Maddy has been her best friend since college and arguably knew Sara better than anyone. They’re all mourning different versions of their friend, and they all feel entitled to grieve.
It seems strange to say it that way, but can certainly be how it feels when you lose someone close to you, particularly if it’s sudden or especially tragic. Of course anyone can be sad, but depending on how that's expressed to the closest of family and friends, it comes across either as kindness, we’re-all-in-this-together-ness, or as asking you to bear not only your own grief but that person’s too, as if yours was less important. These quotes from the text sum it up as well as anything:
“No one laughed. Finally Maddy said, “I can’t believe you’re making a joke now.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to say.”
“Then just say nothing,” she said, and the subtext was that Sara had been her close friend, not his, and that he ought to shut up forever.”
“Now she had the ability to tower over him in the monstrous bloom of her grief, could in fact kill him if she wanted to, and he would let her.”
I suppose on a base level, the question of who has the strongest claim to the loss is one of authority. If you’re in the most pain, other people will serve you, will respect you, will set aside their own feelings for yours. If, as in this story, several people are all fighting for that position, they are all going to feel as if they need that authority to grieve, and not getting it will make them lash out. Of course it doesn’t actually have to be that way, but mourning is not a logical thing, and during such a tenuous time, anything can upset everything.
A couple of years after my mom died, I asked my best friend how my mom’s death had affected her. We were part of each other’s families, and I knew she missed my mom too. But she didn’t have an answer. She had been focused on me and my grief, and hadn’t thought about what it meant to her. Conversely, I recently heard that a distant family friend I haven’t seen in ages hasn’t been to a funeral since my mom’s, because facing everyone she’s lost is too overwhelming. She doesn’t go to memorials anymore. I didn’t know what to make of it. I was surprised by who was and wasn’t suffering, once I had enough distance to notice.
The characters Meg Wolitzer writes in Surrender, Dorothy are not particularly likable. They are privileged, entitled and bored. But good stories don’t require nice people, thank goodness, and these characters create the perfect situation for some very important questions. Yes, grief is chaotic, but we impose structure on it because we need to. Someone has to be in charge, be the person everyone else gets their cues from. Who should it be, and why? What does that role entail, and what other roles must be played? What does it mean to own a loss when you can’t own a person? And finally, can grief ever be truly shared, or does it always end up being carried in different ways by different people?
-Lemon
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