Grief has shocked unprepared people throughout the entirety of human history because with life, comes the inevitable death. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross devised a system to categorize the unpredictable emotions spurred by loss, placing them into one of five stages of grief. Though her five stages have helped people with lost loved one put a name to their volatile mood-swings, the stigma around grief continues to propagate in today’s society. Especially controversial is the concept of self pity, which is denounced as psychological weakness and self-absorption by a modern society. Joan Didion, however, advocates a different perspective, arguing that self-pity naturally accompanies grief, highlighting society’s unjustified absorption with some intangible …show more content…
She introduces the multifaceted difficulty of the death of a loved one with the reference to a spider’s web, serving as a metaphor for “deep connections and the apparently (until they are broken) insignificant connections” that everyday life with a loved one spins. In addition, once the loved one dies, one gets stuck navigating the seemingly endless reminders of the dead, with every route leading back to the painful reminder of loss. She strengthens this image with diction of emptiness, explaining the frustration of having “no one to hear this news, nowhere to go with the unmade plan,” painting an entire existence punctuated by incompletion like a sentence abandoned in mid-thought. Once more, she references other writings to describe her own emotions, this time quoting C.S. Lewis after the death of his wife. The excerpt chosen features the extended metaphor of drawing a bow and arrow without a target to hit. The example reiterates the purposelessness felt after death tears a loved one away. Every instinctive action inevitably culminates in a reminder of the lacking left by death, and the frustrating confusion of grief is intensified by the lack of an escape. Every well-intended distraction eventually leads to the mind to the very emotion it was trying to escape, and grief can only truly end when one stops trying to escape