I was twelve years old. I was old enough to know what was happening. I have some clear memories of the events that transpired. It was awkward and I wasn’t sure how to take in everything around me. The events of that week were not like the day to day life I was used to. My paternal grandfather had died.
Louis Kavar, Sr., my father’s father, is the man whose name I was given. I know a fair amount about him. But I really never knew him. Growing up, when I’d see him, he’d pat me on the head. Sometimes he’d give me a quarter. Mostly, he was someone who occasionally passed through my childhood home from time to time. When he died in a nursing home from health complications, everyone was very upset. I knew that. Because I didn’t have an emotional connection to him, or know him, or have a real relationship with him, I didn’t experience any deep feeling … other than the awkwardness of an awkward kid spending a few days around a funeral home.
Part of my lack of emotional response was due to my age. Having much more experience with loss and grief today, I understand that the lack of an emotional response to my grandfather’s death had to do with the lack of an emotional bond. When someone or something is significant to us, when we have a strong bond and it is lost, we experience the shock and disorientation that characterize the impact of grief.
This past week, two younger men whom I know experienced losses which have touched them deeply. I don’t think many people would view these losses as significant. My perception is that the experiences have impacted both men who are in their twenties in very real ways. One received news that the father of a childhood friend was killed in an accident. He had not seen the friend or her father for a few years. Yet, the impact of loss was real. The other young man’s high school had a fire and burned. While he graduated from high school five or six years ago and now lives in a different state, this is a very real loss to him. He’s now involved in raising money to restore the school.
These aren’t the kinds of losses for which someone sends a sympathy card or flowers. No one is getting time off work for bereavement. I’m sure that most people learn of these events and say, “How sad!” and don’t think about it again. However, social recognition of a loss doesn’t make a loss any less real or valid.
We experience grief and enter a bereavement process when something that’s been an important part of our life is taken from us. Many people experience the initial impact of grief as though it were physical, comparing it to having an arm cut off or being punched in the gut. As with the death of a loved one, a person experiences deep sadness. When something that’s been an important part of our life, like a place or an old friend we haven’t actually seen in years, is gone, our sense of loss is just as real as when someone died. What’s different is that there are no rituals to mourn the loss: no funeral or memorial, not a public announcement, and no wake. For these two men, what was lost was tied to formative experiences of their youth. It’s as though these youthful connections were taken from them. Perhaps for them, as for each of us, there was a realization that a part of life which was once important is now gone and can’t be recaptured.
Researcher and theorist on bereavement, Kenneth Doka, refers to this kind of grief as disenfranchised. He uses the term, disenfranchised grief, for those experiences of bereavement which no one talks about and which aren’t socially recognized. Like my two friends, one common form of disenfranchised grief is when we experience that something that was important and beloved from our past is gone. I’ve experienced it as something similar to the old saying: you can never go home again. I have very fond memories of times when I’ve lived in particular places and had certain people as friends. I’ve foolishly attempted to recover some of those connections, returning to those places and reaching out to old friends. But those connections are gone. The places and the people have changed — and I have changed. There’s no recapturing what once was. That realization is accompanied by a kind of grief.
For my friends, something important has been lost from their youth. It can’t be recaptured. There is a real loss. The experience of the pain of grief demonstrates the depth of connection, the bond that they had with what’s been lost. If there was no connection, no relationship, nothing significant, it wouldn’t hurt. But because it does hurt, because there is a kind of emptiness from the loss, there is an opportunity for a kind of personal memorial. We can never fill the place within us when something dear to us is lost, whether that’s a person, a time in our lives, or a place. Instead, we organize our experience in a new way. If we are wise, that reorganization includes creating a kind of psychic or spiritual memorial that honors what has been lost.
As for me and my paternal grandfather, while the opportunity for knowing him was lost decades ago, I have come to appreciate what I’ve inherited from him. He was a determined man with a deep strength which enabled him to leave poverty in Eastern Europe and immigrate to the United States as a young man. He found a way to make a way. I’m sure he’d be surprised to see how his determination was the foundation for the lives of his grandchildren … especially the one who bears his name.
Photo by Sergei Gussey on Fotoer.com/CC BY