I wasn't really sure what it meant to heal from grief until I took some time to think about the word "closure." What does that even really mean?
It doesn't have to mean anything; lots of words don't; that doesn't make them bad words. How many times has someone told you about a rough situation and you've answered, "It is what it is"? Or, the one I like even better, "Life's like that sometimes." You want to talk about two sentences that mean less than nothing? I used to think that whenever I heard a sentence like that said aloud, I should find a tree and apologize to it for wasting the oxygen it had worked so hard to provide me on such a ridiculous sentence.
But meaning is kind of overrated. Words don't have to carry a lot of meaning to bind people together -- or to serve any number of other purposes. My favorite on-screen romance that I've seen lately is a really ridiculous one -- Mike Wazowski and Celia, from Monsters, Inc. They call each other "schmoopsie-poo" and "googley-bear." Serves a purpose without being encumbered by a lot of meaning, doesn't it? Sometimes we use closure like that, in news casts or play narrations where, for pragmatic purposes, we're going to close that segment or movement and move on to the next thing. Hurricane Katrina moved in and crushed hundreds of thousands of lives, but FEMA came in, so now we'll start to find closure on that story -- now, sports!
After an injury, on a superficial level, you'd think closure meant healing. But injuries, real ones, usually don't heal all the way -- they heal to the point of literal closure sometimes, which is to say, they aren't spewing internal bodily fluids on the floor, but a serious injury doesn't get really resolved for years. I sprained my thumb last summer; I still can't close my right hand as tightly as my left. In the most literal sense imaginable, there's still no closure to that.
But closure serves a purpose for people on the outside of the situation, because at some point, they'd like to treat you again like the most important thing wasn't how damaged you were. So they talk about closure, congratulate you on your healing, and on some level, expect you to get back to normal.
Especially from grief, because we don't teach people what to expect from grief in life, it can be a little disorienting. I say a little, because grief itself is so massively disorienting, it's hard to imagine much more confusion on top of that. Having people expect that you're going to get better sometime eventually, that you're going to reach closure, that's just the cherry on top of the WTF sundae.
You do heal -- the way that a guy with an amputated limb heals; eventually, the imminent threat of death by blood loss is alleviated, and he learns to cope without the missing limb. Maybe he gets a wheelchair or a cane, or he gets a hook or a prosthetic, or his buddies start calling him Lefty, but somehow he figures out how to adapt. Not like a guy with a broken finger heals, where eventually he can type again -- like a guy with a missing limb heals, where eventually he learns to face every situation in his life while at the same time coping with missing his limb.
Closure. That particular situation doesn't close, does it? And it's only bearable because, when it happens to you, you realize that it puts you in an exclusive club of everyone whose ever lost someone he or she loves forever -- welcome to the entirety of the human race for all time. After a moment or two, you realize that it's a much more exclusive club that comprises the people who haven't known that kind of loss, and you want to hug one of them, because you know what they're almost inevitably going to have to go through soon enough. You'll find them pretty easily -- they're the people who are waiting for you to find closure.
Unrelated: I finished CS Lewis's The Great Divorce earlier, and I was really fascinated by some conversations about hurting and pity. Sympathy, etymologically, means feeling someone else's pain, and there's some philosophy about how there can be no joy while any yet suffer. It's a cool idea, because people do seem nice when they're sympathetic, but ultimately, Lewis felt sympathy or pity had to have its limits. If you've found great joy, how can you ignore that joy because others -- from foolishness, weakness, or determined attachment to their misery -- haven't joined you yet?
I grieved for B when I lost her; in my heart, I wondered often if she grieved for losing me, too. Lewis would suggest that she couldn't, that she wouldn't have had time -- she was too busy being immersed in the holiest joy and the purest love, the True Things of which the love and joy that we shared in life were just pale reflections. It's an ineffable question; no one can ever really know till you get there, of course, and then you've probably got other stuff to worry about.
Maybe that's the best way not to grieve -- you put aside the hurt because you've got other stuff to worry about. It would explain a lot of the decisions I made instinctively; I threw myself into bad decisions so that I'd have other stuff to worry about. I don't remember spending a lot of nights staring into the abyss; I mostly remember having stupid problems and getting drunk at bars. If it ever happens again, God forbid (sorry, Kimmy... I'm punching out first this time; you're going to have to outlive me)... well, if it does, I'm going to spend a lot less time anesthetizing myself over it. I'm too old to abuse my innards that much again...
