What Time Teaches Us About Absence

TWO of my favourite writers are Kafka and Dostoevsky. Even though their views on almost every subject seem to belong to different sides of the equation, I find great value in examining each side. Kafka once wrote, “Time teaches us to live without them,” but then Dostoevsky came along and said something that reached deeper into the wound: “You do not really move on from somebody you have loved. You learn how to carry their absence without letting anyone know how heavy it is.”

Somewhere between those two thoughts sits the uncomfortable truth about grief. We have become very fond of telling people to move on: give it time; you will get over it; you have to be strong; life goes on; etc., etc.

All of these things contain some truth, but grief has a wicked little habit of refusing to behave according to our schedules. The human heart does not receive a calendar and politely agree that, by the sixth month, the third anniversary or the next birthday, it will have completed its assignment. I have come to think that perhaps the problem lies in the phrase itself. Maybe we were never meant to “move on” from everyone we have loved. Maybe we are meant to move forward while carrying what they meant to us. There is a difference, you see.

Psychology has gradually moved away from the old idea that grief follows one neat sequence and ends with acceptance. The work of grief researchers Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut, particularly their Dual Process Model, describes something much closer to the way ordinary people actually experience loss. We move between confronting the loss and attending to the business of living. One day, we are deep inside the memory; the next day, we are paying bills, going to work, cooking dinner or laughing at something ridiculous. Then the grief returns. Then life pulls us forward again.

This is not failure; this is grief. You can miss someone terribly in the morning and still make lunch at noon. You can cry in the bathroom and then walk into a meeting looking perfectly composed. You can have a wonderful day and suddenly feel guilty for laughing. You can also have a terrible day five years later. None of these things means you have gone backwards. It means the relationship mattered. And relationships are precisely what make absence so complicated.

When a parent dies, you do not lose only a person. You lose the person who knew your first stories. When a spouse dies, you lose a companion, but you may also lose the rhythm of ordinary life: the morning conversation, the familiar footsteps and the person you automatically turn towards when something happens. When a child dies, the loss can reach into the future itself because so many imagined tomorrows disappear along with the person. When a friendship ends, whether through death, betrayal or distance, there may be no funeral at all. Yet something can still die. Divorce carries its own peculiar grief because the person may still be alive. The marriage ends, but the face remains, the voice remains, and sometimes the children remain as living reminders of a life that once existed.

Recent psychological work on what are called continuing bonds has challenged the idea that healthy grieving requires us to sever our emotional connection with someone who has died. Researchers increasingly recognise that people often maintain an inner relationship with those they have lost. They remember them, speak about them, keep photographs, preserve possessions, repeat their sayings and carry aspects of their personality forward. I find something deeply comforting about that because maybe love does not disappear; maybe it just changes form. The person leaves the room, but the relationship does not necessarily leave the heart. A mother may still hear her son’s favourite song and smile. A widower may still reach for the other side of the bed before remembering. A daughter may still hear her father’s voice when she is about to make a difficult decision. A friend may still make us laugh years after the funeral because we remember exactly what they would have said. These are not signs that we are refusing to accept reality; they are signs that the person became part of our reality.

There is also something practical we need to understand about grief: we have to learn how to live again while we are grieving. It sounds simple enough until you have actually lost somebody. When grief is fresh, ordinary things can feel insulting. Someone tells you to eat, and you think, “How can you possibly care about food right now?” Someone tells you to sleep, and your first thought is, “My entire world has changed, and you are telling me to sleep?” Yet the body still needs food and rest. The children still need breakfast, the mortgage still exists, the office still expects you on Monday, the dog still needs feeding, and the garden still needs watering. Life continues its irritating little insistence on being life and, strangely enough, those ordinary things can become part of healing.

The American Psychological Association notes that most people gradually adapt to loss, particularly when they have social support and maintain healthy habits. So, grief will never ask you to stop living; it will ask you to learn how to live differently. This may mean creating new routines, letting other people help, or talking about the person instead of pretending they never existed. It may mean keeping one photograph instead of packing away every photograph, or writing letters you will never send. No universal ceremony exists for the heart. What helps one person may irritate another. Some people need silence; others need conversation. Some need prayer; others need therapy. Some need to cry until they are exhausted; others need to work because routine gives them something solid to hold. The important thing is learning the difference between carrying grief and being consumed by it. The distinction matters because grief can become overwhelming and persistent enough to interfere with everyday functioning seriously. Mental-health professionals recognise prolonged grief disorder as a condition in which intense grief remains persistent and significantly disrupts a person’s ability to function. There is no shame in needing help. Sometimes a friend is enough, sometimes family is enough and sometimes a grief group becomes a lifeline. Professional help may also be necessary. Strength is not pretending that you are fine. Strength can be saying, “I am struggling, and I need somebody to sit here with me.”

I also think we need to stop being frightened of remembering. There is a peculiar pressure in modern life to look healed. We post photographs of ourselves smiling, return to work, attend functions and make jokes. People see us functioning and assume the pain has disappeared, but grief can become private. You learn to carry it beneath your clothes. You learn which stories you tell and which ones you keep. You learn that somebody can be absent from your daily life and still appear inside your thoughts without warning. You hear a song, notice a smell, see a photograph or a familiar road, remember a birthday or a particular kind of rain and, suddenly, there they are. For one beautiful, brutal moment, the distance disappears; then reality returns. That, my friends, is the strange mathematics of love. The person can be gone, but the love can remain.

This is why I no longer believe that healing means forgetting. Healing, to me, means being able to remember without being destroyed by the remembering. It means I can say your name and breathe. I can look at the photograph and smile before the tears come. I can tell your story without feeling I betray you by continuing with mine. I can love the life I have now while still honouring the life I had with you. This is where the wisdom of Kafka and Dostoevsky meets psychology. Time teaches us to live without somebody’s physical presence, but love teaches us that absence is not erasure. The people we lose can become part of the architecture of who we are. They can influence how we love, how we parent, how we speak, how we forgive and how we appreciate an ordinary afternoon. Sometimes, losing someone teaches us the value of the people who are still sitting beside us. It teaches us to make the telephone call, stop postponing the visit, say “I love you” while the person can still hear it, forgive the small things and put down the foolish pride because, eventually, every human being becomes somebody else’s memory. The most practical lesson grief can give us is to love while people are here, grieve when they leave, remember without shame and ask for help when the weight becomes too much. And, when you are finally able, carry the love forward instead of trying to bury it. In closing, here is a poem to honour their absence. Enjoy.

 

Weighting Their Absence

 

I felt it when Kafka said,

“Time teaches us to live without them.”

Then Dostoevsky came along,

And somehow made that feeling wrong.

I thought time would set me free,

Teach me to live without you in me,

Instead, it taught your absence to breathe.

 

I learned to wake without your name,

To laugh and still remain the same.

I learned to say, “I’m doing fine,”

Then miss you when the stars would shine.

I learned to carry on each day,

While keeping what we had away,

In some small room where memories stay.

 

Some mornings, I can hardly feel

The old familiar ache and seal.

Then comes a song, a scent, a street,

And suddenly our worlds can meet.

I hear your laughter in my mind,

Reach for the hand I cannot find,

Then watch the memory fall behind.

 

I thought forgetting meant release,

That time would finally bring me peace.

But love has roots beneath the ground,

It grows where silence makes no sound.

I buried pieces of you deep,

In places only dreams can keep,

Where waking hands can never reach.

 

I carry you beneath my skin,

In every place I have been.

You live within the words I say,

And find me in the oddest way.

I carry less of yesterday,

Yet still you wander through my day,

Then disappear before I say.

 

Perhaps I never learned goodbye,

Perhaps some loves refuse to die.

They change their shape, they change their place,

They leave a shadow, leave a trace.

I hold your memory more light,

Like a distant star at night,

Still far away, yet burning bright.

 

So yes, I learned to live without you,

But that was never quite the truth.

I learned to smile, to breathe, to stand,

With your absence in my hand.

I learned that love can still remain,

After the tears, beyond the pain,

And live inside me once again.

 

Romella Dasratt