On Grief, It’s Complicated: And I Shall Say Goodbye Till It Be Morrow

OK, I (partially) stole the title of this posting from another posting about a paper in Psychology Today about complicated grief and bereavement, how it doesn’t respond to antidepressant medications, and how it is important to incorporate the loss at a dead level of meaning.

OK, I meant deeper level of meaning. But I am going to leave that little ‘slip’ in there for a while while I think about what it means.

You see, some people say that I tend to intellectualize things rather than feel them on an emotional level. It’s called a defense mechanism, or at least that is what Sigmund and his daughter Anna liked to call it. But sometimes that can be a barrier. So I am working on trying to feel emotions, rather than thinking all the time.

People who have been reading the Drug News and Health Safety Blog for a while (e.g. “The Ups and Downs of the Dow Jones Industrial Average Interpreted from a Personal Perspective, Literally”) know that my mother died suddenly when I was four years eight months old (I have gone over those numbers so many times I might as well be precise, since invariably when I was a kid someone would make an insensitive comment about how it is good that I was too young to remember it happening, which certainly was not true).

Anyway (or substitute anyhoo per your personal preference) I definitely did not incorporate my mother’s death on a “deeper level of meaning” for many years. It was more like a fragmented splinter, or a secret wound I tried to conceal from others. When I was in college one of my favorite quotes from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was:

Goodnight, goodnight, parting is such sweet sorrow,

That I shall say goodnight till it be morrow.

When I went to write this post that quote just sort of popped into my head, so I threw it in there, and thought that I would try and figure out what it meant later. Anyway back to my tail (oops, tale, back to that one later too), Although I tried to wrestle with mother in college days when I was finally out “on my own”, I wasn’t very effective, so I went back into the mode of blocking her out of mind completely, more or less. And not coincidentally I rarely cried, about anything. And I couldn’t watch movies with unhappy endings. Kind of limiting.

Until a couple of years ago I focused on finding her biological family (see “A Brief History of Bastards“) and learning more about her life which culminated in a ceremony we had for her on October 4, 2008.

What does all this have to do with drug news? Well I thank Hoffman La Roche Pharmaceuticals and my dispute with them about whether their acne drug Accutane can cause depression for: 1) deposing me 16 times; 2) calling me a lier); 3) attacking my professional reputation; 4) suing my university; 5) trying to get me fired from my university; 6) trying to get my paper on the effects of Accutane on the brain retracted; 7) accusing me of fraud to the Editor (yes, Robert Freedman MD) of the journal where the paper was published, which led to, more inquiries at my university. All of which came to nothing as it was frivolous, which makes it so amazing that there is so much real fraud going on in pharma and their physician allies, and real questions about potential problems coming from non pharma sources get ignored by the journal. Anyway all of this was a jolt on my psychological foundation and I felt I had to go back and find my mom. Literally.

OK back to ‘I shall say goodnight till it be morrow’. Some people have said that I should ‘get over it’, or pay some attention to the living instead of just thinking about the dead all the time. Maybe delaying the ‘final goodbye’ is an excuse for not moving on? Or maybe it is like the Africans who believe that people who are still carried in someone’s memory belong to a special category of existence? Or maybe it is like a friend and neighbor said that her astral shell still inhabits our old house on Puget Sound? What do you think?

This quote actually popped into my head cuz I was thinking about a recent post called ‘Good Bye to You Too, Arianna’ (Later, ‘A Tail of Two Ariannas’) in which I was narcissistly bitching about how Arianna Huffington was slow to publish the posts I wrote there and didn’t pay for content so I was gonna take my laptop and go play by myself. And I compared her to our cat of same name.

Which gets to the ‘point’ (if you want to call it that) of the current post, which I have obviously been trying to avoid. Only a day after I wrote that post Arianna was tragically hit by a car on the busy street in front of our house. I feel guilty about it cuz I had gotten in the habit of walking the dog (a Cavaliere King Charles Spaniel, named Julius) at night in the park across from our house, where in the past year many early memories of my mother came back to me, and which I actually recognize as being a forest that was in a dream I had as a child where I saw my mother. The cat sometimes like to ‘trail’ us although as my son pointed out in his essay on her she was usually careful about the road (we had another Cavaliere named Lydia hit and killed on the same road five years ago). Anyway Arianna was trailing us and she shot ahead of us and in front of a car and was knocked off the road right in front of my eyes. She ran away and the next day I found her under the deck of a neighbor, dead, apparently of a head injury. We had a simple ceremony where my eleven year old son read his essay he wrote for her called “Arianna is the best cat in the world!” and buried her on the side of the house. It did cross my mind that I was doing better at helping him with the grief process, unlike with Lydia where we immediately went out and bought a carbon copy of her. We also had problems with rabbits getting eaten by dogs years back. Anyway Mrs. Bremner says that pets always die and it is such a painful process to go through that it is better not having them. My son wants another cat being a “cat person” but I saw we should observe a mourning period for Arianna.

Arianna Vaccarino Bremner, 2001-2009

Arianna Vaccarino Bremner. Best cat in the world!

You can visit her web site here.

We miss you Ari!