Feeling Grief and Grieving: A Discussion of Suhrida Yadavalli’s “Mourning and the Capacity to be Alone: Cultural and Existential Rituals in Loss”

Abstract

I would like to thank the Journal Editors for presenting me with the opportunity to discuss this paper and in particular, I want to thank Suhrida Yadavalli for writing such a beautifully human account of both the grief and grieving she encountered in the loss of a dear friend. In her paper, Yadavalli brings us to questions concerning what it is about the universal problem of loss that makes some people find the strength to persevere through the adversity entailed in profound loss while others give up in the face of such adversity. She wonders with us about what certain subjective experiences might compel some individuals to reach the point where they would contemplate or, at times, even act on ending their life. And finally, in facing her own horrific loss of a deeply well-loved friend, she wonders how it is that we are able to proceed with our lives in manners that move us toward the capacity to continue to make meanings in our lifelong journeys despite such profound losses. She eloquently describes, in an unpretentious manner, the experience of personal loss that we, our patients and all human beings must face at different moments throughout the course of our lives. Very early in her paper, Yadavalli draws us into her own world of experience, telling us of having made friends with a group of fellow immigrants from diverse countries of origin. It is a touching story of a group of people forming friendships in the common experience of what Robert Heinlein (1961) so aptly termed being “stranger(s) in a strange land”. How fortuitous, adaptive, and richly grounding it was that this group of people were able to come together and create a shared experience which, at least for Yadavalli, had aspects of what being in a good family feels like. We have the sense that for Yadavalli, this was not an equivalency of her family of origin. Rather, it contained aspects of some of the good parts of her good enough family of origin experience: a shared sense of commonality, the sense of acceptance of who she was as an individual, and the partaking in the ritual of meals shared among warmly and highly valued others. I found Yadavalli’s manner of personal storytelling compelling, touching, and evocative, particularly the experiences of late adolescence/early adulthood in which we move out into the world, both emotionally and often physically, away from our families of origin. Along with those earlier strivings I was also reminded personally of the inevitable losses we can feel later in our lives when the deaths of loved ones become more frequent occurrences. Returning to her paper, we are brought into Yadavalli’s own personal experiences with her friend Federico as she described the tenderness that overtook her as she noticed the suit he had worn to her casual dinner party. The underlying reason for her tenderness for Federico is not clearly known to us, and, in some way, the deeper reasons for her attachment to him are curious but not as relevant to us as the stage it sets for the loss she experienced upon hearing of the sudden ending of his life. We hear of his privateness and the difficulty reaching him in the days prior to his death. We hear snippets of information regarding contributing factors to his death. However, the actual causes of his suicide are