Hamlet was grief-stricken, and so are we

Grief and mourning suddenly seem all around me, from relatives with incurable illnesses to friends losing elderly parents. Fortuitously, this morning I came across a column by Meghan O'Rourke, which explains Shakespeare's "Hamlet" in terms of grief. It's an insightful column, full of verities about grief and intriguing in its credible explanation about what was troubling young Hamlet. How could I (and the teachers and professors who led me through Hamlet years ago) have missed something so obvious?

Grief is a universal emotion that is as individual as each person who experiences it. I tend to face my grief stoically, the way my mother taught me and how she modeled correct grieving herself. When she died, and my wife and I scurried away on separate long drives to join my siblings and make funeral arrangements, I became irrationally concerned about our dog. I was adamantly, almost hysterically, determined that we would not leave our dog locked up in the kennel, but there was no place to put her if we took her with us. We finally made arrangements to take her with us and place her, for part of our trip, in a kennel there, and that seemed to relieve my concerns. Only later did I realize that my worries about the dog were merely a transferral of my grief for my mother, who spent her last years in a nursing home that seemed at times not unlike a veterinarian's kennel.

When we grieve, we look for comfort and sometimes are able to find it in the sincere words of compassion and concern at funerals and wakes. These words do not relieve the grief, but they often do provide some degree of comfort. Now this practice has been digitized with Internet message boards linked to funeral homes, newspaper obituaries and hospice facilities. The messages left are often triumphant assurances that the dearly departed has "gone to be with Jesus," is "wrapped in the Savior's arms" or is now with loved ones who died earlier. Although I have taken comfort in the Bible's assurances of eternal life and eternal love, I am less credulous about the rejoicing over death that these platitudes imply. The implication is that if we're not overjoyed that Mom has gone to heaven and is now "with Jesus" and her departed parents and siblings, then we're just being selfish and faithless. That does nothing to assuage our grief.

And although the survival of our souls and personalities into an afterlife is reassuring, the Christian Bible is not very specific about what that realm will be or even when it will be. The faithful will be called to heaven on Judgment Day at the end of time, according to most accounts, but Jesus assured one sinner that "today you will be with me in Paradise." The promise of just when the dead will reach heaven seems conflicted. And whether we will be reunited with loved ones also is unclear. Jesus told the Sadducees, who did not believe in an afterlife, that (Mark 12:25) "when the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven." This seems to suggest that we will not be reunited as family or recognize earthly loved ones. That passage is not popular at funerals, for if we cannot maintain the loving relationships that we enjoyed on earth, what joy can there be in the hereafter?

I don't suggest that religion is not an adequate comfort for our grief. It's the only comfort we have, and life has little meaning without religion. But neither life nor religion is simple, and the simple platitudes that are cast before the grieving like funeral bouquets are, ultimately, neither satisfying nor enlightening. Like Hamlet, we must be allowed to express our grief, not hold it inside, in sometimes irrational and inappropriate ways.