Kvetch IV

I certainly don't want to give the wrong impression, here. There is much to rejoice. Even if one's lover/spouse is more likely to ask how one is ... checking on whether one has survived the joys of cardiac arrhythmias and bedroom frolics ...  more likely to ask those questions than to wax poetic, even so, there is laughter and playing in the Last Quarter. Indeed, before a screening of a rather heavy film on Freud, Jung and one of Jung's patient-mistresses, Sabina Spielrein, a friend had a laughing jag at the tony restaurant we were sullying with our Fourth Quarter sillinesses. Life still can be a hoot. But more of that, later .... for now, back to Sadness ....

Sadness (continued)

There is no one in the land who has taken a breath and who has not breathed-in sadness, though there are many who cannot, thereafter, hold their breath and savor this feeling and allow it its natural course. Many are those who develop an allergy to sadness and cover their feeling with anger or even rage, unjustified optimism, haughtiness, or the numbness of depression.

Our culture and our language value the hiding of sadness more than they do its experience. The culture mirrors our fear of the vulnerabilities that are part and parcel of sadness. It has become more acceptable to rage in daily interchanges than to cry. It is common for us to greet the mourner with silliness, such as: “at least he didn’t suffer” or, if he did, “at least you had ample opportunity to say good-bye.” It is an everyday occurrence for those who suffer debilitating or life-threatening illness to hear near and dear commend the use of positive thinking. And parents throughout the realm may be heard chiding their children about their unhappiness: stop that crying or I’ll give you something to cry about. The equation of unhappiness with sadness is, itself, a communication that depreciates sadness by limiting it to the absence of glee and pleasure.

My interest in sadness must, indeed, predate a first remembered encounter with attempting to discuss the potential fallout from avoiding the experience of sadness. I was, perhaps, fourteen years old and a student at a school of biblical studies. We were studying the Book of Genesis, particularly the story of Abraham immediately following the accounts of the expulsion of Ishmael (Gen. 21) and the attempt to respond to God’s call to slaughter Isaac (Gen. 22). Sarah dies and scripture reports: “And Abraham arrived to eulogize Sarah and to cry for her.”

Curiously, the text in each scroll written over two millennia or more uses the single Hebrew biblical word v’livkosa (and to cry for her) with one letter reduced in size — with no satisfactory explanation offered. (Note the curiously superscripted letter on the last line.)

While a variety of commentaries had their explanations for this miniature letter (the letter Koff which curiously has the meaning “palm of a hand”), I suggested to one of my mentors that perhaps scripture was hinting that Abraham was incapable of deeply experiencing sadness. (Simplistic? maybe but cut me a break, I was 14.) I went on to wonder if the troubles that befell Abraham’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren (the major characters of the drama that is Genesis) might be explainable as a consequence of this absence of feeling in the patriarch. My teacher’s reaction was to become enraged and to grant a two-week furlough from school, a moratorium that was intended to afford the author of this blasphemy time to consider his deed and fate and a welcome return to Mom's cooking.

In the years that followed and the clinical work that has occupied my adult interests for more than thirty five years, I have often fascinated about the centrality of sadness in my own life and in the lives of those who have occasioned my office. Searching the literature for studies on sadness proved frustrating though there was no dearth of writing on such matters as pathological mourning, depression, and melancholia. Sadness was of interest, if at all, as a symptom of disease. Furthermore, the visitors who occasioned my office, themselves, seemed to equate sadness with both the absence of happiness and with  depression.  Many a person has arrived at my office with bottles of pills, complaining of depression when indeed they were sad about life, about loss, about saying goodbye to children and grandchildren or to parents and were embattled from the inside by a compelling need to deny these feelings.

Need I add that most of us Players in the Last Quarter are orphans! If there is no other reason to experience Sadness in the Fourth Quarter, the accumulated losses ... the good-byes .... they suffice.


I'm thinking I should think about how Joy interweaves with Sadness in a potentially sweet dance, next.