Thoughts on Grief

“We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.” ―Joan Didion

Recently, I became interested in the idea of grief as an inheritance. There is an ongoing conversation about Black Americans carrying the DNA of former slaves. I am a white, second-generation Irish American, whose father was placed in an orphanage for a year as a child, whose grandfather, whom I never met, was described to me, or at least as I can remember through the mysterious prism of childhood, as dying in an alley. He was an alcoholic, his charm reported to be boundless but whose thirst killed him alone and penniless. My father was a brilliant, funny, loving man whose personality was transformed when he drank to excess into a violent, angry, and cruel man. He suffered deep guilt but did not stop drinking and that was our family’s shadow. 

photo by Pradhumn Mittal

Further back, one million of our ancestors starved in the Irish Potato Famine, followed by immigration, and discrimination which he somewhat eradicated with a Harvard PhD, teaching at Universities like Princeton, Rutgers, and Harvard and a multitude of literary achievements. Still, he grieved. I, as his daughter, grieved for that little boy and then later for the sudden loss of my best friend followed by the even deeper wound of losing my beloved sister.

As we continue to deal with the stunning losses caused by the global pandemic, the ongoing revelation of consistent racism, wars both declared and undeclared, a country led by people who see their mission to strip away every value of kindness, empathy and freedom that the United States once cherished, I look back and forward at writing about grief. I read my father’s exquisite first novel, Sisters and Brothers, at age eleven. I discovered a secret history, the anguish of my father’s childhood and the sadness of poverty and alcoholism. He had told me, the youngest, none of it but his past was a mystery until it wasn’t. He wrote about it. I write about mine.

At twenty, I hit bottom as an addict, reached out to my best friend only to lose her to sudden death. Returning to my parent’s home, I attempted to tell my mother I was suicidal and she yelled at me until I left the house and spent the summer housesitting a sad dog and a pool, floating around in the suburban heat smoking pot and crying. I had also broken up with my boyfriend who told me he didn’t want to watch me die. I got a job at a local store that sold dance clothing and foundation garments, now called shapewear. I helped skinny little girls choose leotards and overweight women find things to squeeze them thinner. At the end of the summer I left for Ireland, ostensibly to spend a year at Trinity College but planning to disappear. Surprisingly, distance provided a respite from all the unbearable events of the previous year, and I found happiness with new friends. 

Returning to finish my senior year of college, there were no tragedies and I started to believe the pain from the loss of my wonderful friend would gradually lessen. I tried to stop drinking, started to attend Twelve Step meetings and began to hope life would spare me from additional tragedies. But then a drunk driver hit and killed my eldest sister. After she died, after a brief, violent, bad marriage, I started to write novels. Until my sister’s death I was always writing but did not take myself seriously. Punctuated by thoughts of suicide and deep mourning, my first novel was about grief and loss, the second less so, the third about survival and acceptance.

This fall I will publish a fourth novel about motherhood and the refusal to disappear. Like my father, I drank and transformed, but unlike my father, I stopped, worked a Twelve Step program, and yet the grief I carry in my body remains like one of the fading scars received from a childhood accident. I embrace this part of myself because it can’t be denied. This is what we do, move forward despite the lure of the dark truth that grief is as real as happiness and as inevitable as death.

Molly Moynahan