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Experiences with death

Good grief
Forfatter: Shelley F. Knight Jon Hunt
Forlag: Publishing Limited, (England)
SORROW / This book pretends that we are together about something that every single human being is basically really alone about.




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

When my mother got cancer almost 20 years ago, she invited her family and friends into the death process. She did not try to spare either herself or us.

At first I could be heavy and sad when I visited her in different hospital rooms, or maybe a little cautious, groping. I had just had my first child. I was in my late twenties. She had cancer with spread. She knew she was going to die, just not exactly when, and she felt she had to comfort us who came to visit. Eventually she asked me to try to come to her with energy and buoyancy so it wouldn't be so sad, all together.

She felt she had to comfort us who came to visit.

Her feedback was important for me to change my attitude towards the last time with her. She made me participate, responsible, and I was given a clear task by her. It didn't take much to give her buoyancy. I could go for a walk somewhere she missed and afterwards tell about the trip, or describe in detail what I had eaten for dinner, how I had prepared the food, and she, who could hardly eat, got something out of the fact that I had eaten good food.

She wanted to help plan the funeral, and she shared with us that she was in so much pain that she didn't know how to endure. She said she had enough medication to kill herself, but that she wasn't going to do it, that we shouldn't be afraid of that. When I think about it now, it's as if the inclusion of all the details of dying, both the practical and the emotional, was what made the time until she died bearable.

Well meaning and careless

The experience has made me very positive about projects that try to talk openly about death and grief processes – so I get the impression that the book Good grief want. The author, Shelley F. Knight, is a long-time nurse and has extensive experience with death and dying people.

Among other things, she lists all possible ways to die; suicide, murder, abortion, sudden death.

But quite quickly the book feels general. Among other things, Knight lists all the possible forms of death: suicide, murder, abortion, sudden death, and as I read, memories of people I've loved who have killed themselves, an abortion I took as I regretted for several years, but the book just goes off to the next way of dying. I feel like ripping the author to shreds for her careless way of opening me up, without creating the space that allows me to read on and at the same time carefully look into myself as I read. The book reminds me of people I have met who touch me and say something important, and who point it out, who open something in me, who throw me into the air, but when I fall back down, they are no longer there.

Large parts of the book are written in first person, and the author is constantly addressing the reader. "Dear reader", she writes, and I can think of a doctor who could say to mum during visits: "How are we doing today, Liv?" She snapped back, "We?"

The possibilities of literature

We-et i Good grief is as provocative as we-et to mom's doctor. The book pretends that we are together about something that each individual is deeply alone about, and reminds me why I choose literature over self-help books. Good literature creates room for possibilities for the reader and can give courage to be in what feels impossible to stand in. If a we is written, it is not top-down, or well-intentioned, but perhaps rather honest, naked and confused. As in Naja Marie Aidt's exceptionally strong book If death has taken something from you, give it back (2018), about her 25-year-old son, Carl, who died in an accident in 2015. The book is written by a mother who is struggling. She is furious with grief, mute with grief, and yet Aidt formulates an attempt, a scratch, a gulp, a kind of gap in language: "We are no longer ourselves. We cannot contain ourselves. We are I-less. We have become we.”

In Sarah Selmer's poetry collection In the book of the dead (2019), the almost surreal expression of death is experienced as strikingly true in the face of concrete everyday details: "I remember they called and told me you were dead. I hung up and finished reading the adventure. The child said: How far is it to heaven? Can I buy a ladder?".

And in some rare books, simple, razor-sharp images of death appear, such as in Kari Saanum's poetry collection Sorrow song (2021): "Your last breath / hangs in my lungs."

See also Kari Saanum,
Sorrow Song, October 2021

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=263468332024737

Hanne Ramsdal
Hanne Ramsdal
Ramsdal is a writer.

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