What Does Ecstasy Have to Do With Grief?

In this spring season of graduations, my husband and I just got back from a family celebration of what we called our “memory lane” motor tour—12 hours of driving time each way to Springfield, Missouri for our 25-year-old granddaughter Victoria’s graduation with a Ph.D. in physical therapy. We stopped along the way to reminisce; the Ohio State University campus in Columbus, where my husband spent four years getting his undergrad degree; the now “historic street,” Bardstown Road in Louisville Kentucky where the elementary school I attended still stands, along with the church where I spent half my life during high school, teaching and taking dance classes in their gymnasium.

Driving back after all the festivities, I felt an afterglow, so grateful to witness this milestone in my granddaughter’s and our family’s lives. There had been a heightened sense of joy and excitement in the weeks leading up to this occasion, and now along with joy and gratitude, tears came to my eyes. Given the back story of this occasion, for the elders in the group, the experience is heightened. We knew this happiest of occasions would bring with it the sorrow of missing a significant person unable to attend.

Tori’s mother, our daughter Corinne, was a physical therapist who loved her work and died of breast cancer when she was seven years old. Tori remembers visiting her mother at work, and she admits this may have influenced her to look toward that field for her career. She had not been aware of my conversation with Corinne when I accompanied her to M.D. Anderson for her treatment. “When all this cancer stuff is over, I’m gonna get my Ph.D.”

Fortunately, we know that you can feel more than one feeling at a time, which might seem opposite to one another on the surface. Catching up with Tori and her two brothers, learning more about their lives, and getting to know the mature adult people they are becoming heightens again the most profound appreciation for their father, who has raised them by himself for the past 19 years.

As I search for the name of what I am feeling, as I sometimes stand outside myself, moving about in extreme happiness and sorrow, I know some would call it “ambivalence” and others “bittersweet.” But I prefer to call it ecstasy. Without the side effects of the drug by that name, it is an altered state made possible by the extremes sometimes present in a grieving situation.

In preparing for this celebration, we looked for a way to bring Tori’s mother into the experience, to give her a place of honor. I looked to art, the art of jewelry making, and consulted a neighborhood jewelry store. Their daughter had a laser process that could inscribe the symbol for the Doctor of PT on one side and a photographic image of Tori’s mother on the other. Moist eyes made their presence during the collaboration in the store, again when I picked the necklace up, and again when we gave it to her at the family dinner. When she wore it to her graduation and the luncheon afterward, smiles and tears continued. An image lasered into my memory is of the necklace lying on the kitchen table the next day, beside the flowers that had been a gift from friends. Turned over on its side to the view of Corinne’s picture; she was there in the rented condo for us all to see.