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From The Times

May 16, 2008

Jeanette Winterson looks to books to shed some light on grief

I TOOK MY OLDEST FRIEND, recently bereaved of a sister, to see The Year of Magical Thinking at the National Theatre. Based on the book of the same name by Joan Didion, and performed as a monologue by Vanessa Redgrave, I wondered if the bestseller on loss, death, denial, grief and coping would help my friend and, just as importantly, open up new territory for our conversations.

Wittgenstein said that “death is not an event in life. We do not live to experience our death”; which is strictly true but not emotionally true. My own feeling is that death is integral to life, but lost to language. When death approaches, when death happens, that event falls outside the scope of what can be said. To write about it is a kind of magic - an evocation, an invocation, a re-membering of what has been dis-membered. The scattered life, now returned to so many atoms, becomes what atoms are - empty space and points of light. I suppose the writers who find a way of saying what resists all saying find a way into the empty space and the points of light, allowing death to be both the wholly private and personal experience it must be, and yet a collective happening.

C.S. Lewis, whatever you think of his Christianity or his politics, achieved this beautifully in A Grief Observed. It is not simply a matter of understanding one's own situation, but a matter of finding the words to express the human situation, without platitudes or patronising. So when Lewis begins: “No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear”, we are with him, and he is with us.

I have to admit that I struggled with The Year of Magical Thinking because I felt remote from Didion's experience. Vanessa Redgrave is a profound actor, but I found the text too limited - both parochial and sentimental, and lacking in poetry. I am not sure that death can be done without poetry. By which I mean that an intense experience needs an intense language.

And yet, another friend of mine was really moved by the play. It may be that if anything maps closely on to your own experience, then it works. Poetry, I think, does not depend on shared experience, but on shared emotion, the emotion shared between writer and audience. A fabulous actor can pull anything into being, but as a writer, I suppose I ask for the language itself to be authentic - it is not enough that the experience is authentic. Much is deeply felt, but how do we express it?

I came away wishing I had been given one single line as powerful as “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life and thou no breath at all?” But then I need such lines to carry around in my invisible pockets.

I went home and read Tennyson's In Memoriam, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rosetti, certain passages from Wuthering Heights. We all have our own list, I guess.

Outside of the poetic text, which is the place for emotional meditation and release, I have found some very helpful nonfiction, both for those who are grieving, and those coping with the idea of death in a society that is so bad at dealing with it.

On Death and Dying, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's 1970s classic, established the five stages that most people seem to experience around death: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. Of course, this is useful stuff for smaller deaths too - being divorced, getting fired. Kubler-Ross laid the groundwork for John Bowlby's later classifications in his Separation and Loss trilogy - again, well worth reading as insight into experiences at once so common and yet so isolating.

I am a fan of Sogyal Rinpoche's The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, not because I am a Buddhist, but because I have seen that people who live by the consciousness of an inner, as well as an outer life, cope better with death - their own, and the deaths of others.

It might be better to avoid The American Book of Dying, (an astonishing title), whose phoney “insights”, banal instructions, and tepid comforts demand a stiff drink and a bracing dose of Jessica Mitford's wise and funny The American Way of Death. A gentle counterblast to Mitford is offered by Thomas Lynch's The Undertaking, a book both forthright and consoling. If you have a fit of black humour coming on, then head for www.wisdom-books.com, offering “books about dying at discount prices”.

I steer clear of internet poetry sites, finding the selections a bit too tea towel for my liking - but if you have any suggestions, for books or sites, do send them. The best comfort, as ever, is wide reading, so that when you need that poem, it is already there.

There is an antology, The Oxford Book of Death, from the 80s, with some astonishing extracts and quotes, in subtitles such as "The Hour of Death", "Suicide", "Mourning", "Love and Death", etc. Both poetry and prose are widely represented. Both grim and humourous.

Bjorn Kohlstrom, Jonkoping, Sweden