On understanding grief ....
Thu Aug 23, 2007 at 07:45:48 AM PDT
I recommend The Aeneid, specifically the death of Dido.
What makes this of current interest is that the press seems at a loss for a proper way to cover the grief of people suddenly caught up in the tide of events.
In Columbine, mention was made of grief counselors to comfort the survivors. In the World Trade Center attack on 9-11-2001, grief counselors were mentioned, and some months later I remember reading a jarring report that post-event measures of the effectiveness of grief counselors, which was that their effect was nil. The massive grief of Katrina was given shorter shrift by TV than seemed warranted. (Jump)
By now, it is infamous that the Bush administration and the Pentagon refused to allow photographs, and especially TV images, of the flag-dreped caskets of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The drematic effect of Cindy Sheehan over the death of her son Casey has made a mark on politics that the mainstream media still hasn't come to grips with.
Then there is the shock of Abu Ghraib, Guantanomo Bay, and the country's realization that we are officially engaged in torture, shattering America's usual self-image of holding the moral high ground.
The grief of what appears to be deaths approaching, if not surpassing, one million in Iraq (post the estimated 500,000 in the 10-year embargo preceeding) gets the most miniscule of coverage.
So let us turn to the pages of the Aeneid, as translated by Patric Dickinson, in a Mentor Classic; 1961, for a look at Dido's anguish:
O cruel Love, is there an uttermost limit
To your hounding of mortal hearts? (p.28)
Trying to cope, Dido says:
Only I ask for time, a neutral time
A rest and a breathing space for my love to learn
A way to grieve ...... (ibid.)
After which she prayed for death, and plotted her own suicide, is as dramatic a fashion as possible.
She drank some wine laced with blood and poison, then uttered a permanent curse on Aeneas, to be sealed by her death on a funeral pyre. On the firewood, she stacked the armor Aneas left behind (an extremely prozed possession of a warrior), so that it would burn up with her, and in effect, seal with her blood the curse she just put on Aeneas. And the fire was timed so that Aeneas would have to see it himself, as the fleet departed from Carthage, on his way to complete the journey to found the new kingdom of Latinum (Rome). While on the pyre, she raises herself up three times, so that she might capture a last glimpse of Aeneas, presumably to make sure he sees the fire.
The death process lasts so long that Juno sends down one of the Fates to cut the final string.
Dido was dying:
Not
In the course of Fate, or a death deserved, but in grief
And before her time, in an excess of passion
Her lock of hair was cut, and it ends with this:
All vital power was ended
Her life was gone with the wind.
Thus Vergil offers some insight into the depths of grief, and the price people paid for the founding of Rome.
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