CHAPTER III

BEREAVEMENT

When we reflect on what actually happens in cases of bereavement, we shall find great diversity in different situations. It may be that the deceased person has led a worthless life, and that the grave is allowed to close over him without much regret. Nevertheless, the honor due to worth that _never appeared in him_ ought to be shown. In the worst cases we may not treat human beings like animals. Besides, there are generally one or more persons who seem to have an unreasoning natural affection for the wretched being, and so he does not go wholly without the tribute of tears. Others, like sufferers from cancer, pass through days, weeks, months of acute pain before they die. In their case it is said that death comes as a relief, and often the final relief from the suffering obscures the loss.

Again, in most men’s lives there is an upper and an under side. Though the public career of statesmen, poets, artists may be dazzling, yet their faults or obliquities are probably well enough known to those who have seen them at close range. Obituaries are seldom truthful. Sometimes, however, the reverse happens; men whose names are held up to public obloquy are not always as black as they are painted. Their worst side becomes known to the public, yet they sometimes possess wonderfully fine traits.

Very pathetic is the mourning for a baby, and its unfulfilled promise, or for a defective child, long a burden, yet strangely grieved for when its feeble little flame of life is extinguished.

The most poignant sorrow is that which cannot be communicated to others or shared by others, because the tie severed by bereavement, like that of husband and wife, is between two only. The loss by death of a beloved life companion is apt to lead to an inconsolable state of mind, because in this relation, when finely interpreted, the empirical and the spiritual appear almost to coincide. The ethical rule, Live in the life of another, live so as to enhance to the highest degree the possibilities of another, seems almost no longer a counsel of perfection but an actual experience. Hence the utter grief into which the sundering of the tie is apt to plunge the survivor. On the other hand, Jonathan Edwards said on his deathbed to his wife: “Our relation has been spiritual, and therefore is eternal.” And there is indeed an element of eternality in marriage, only it is not the sex relation as such that is or can be conceived of as eternal. It is not man and woman in their empirical form to which this attribute belongs. Marriage is the sign; the spiritual relation that which is signified.[48]

It may be objected that marriage being a tie strictly between two, one can hardly think without repugnance of an equally intimate, nay, far more intimate, relation with all spiritual beings whatsoever. Yet the spiritual relation is one in which the ethical being is conceived to be in touch with each of the infinite beings that comprise the spiritual universe, pouring its essential life into them, and receiving theirs in return. Is not then the sign incompatible with and contradictory to the thing signified? But it is not of the multitude of mortal men and women surrounding us that we think when we speak of the eternal hosts. From this surrounding swarm of mortals, we retreat, taking refuge in the inmost privacy which we share with one other only. Yet this very inmost intimacy, so far as it is pure, is the emblem of that pure intercourse of essential being with essential being in which we are related to all.[49]

Following up the subject of bereavement, we find the following consolations employed:

The first to be mentioned is, “Bow to the inevitable.” I include this because frustration is inevitable, on account of the discrepancy between the finite and the infinite order, and because we are to use inevitable frustration for the purpose of experiencing the reality of the ideal. But without this use in mind, the inevitable presents itself as a mere blind necessity, in which we can see neither right nor reason, a hostile doom that simply crushes us. The psychological effect of the thought of an event as inevitable, it is true, is in any case calming, but the tranquillity thus induced is a heavy and hopeless one. And those who accept the inevitable in this stupefying manner often become meaner in their way of living. The light of life is for them extinguished. They put up perhaps with creature comforts, or with work that merely keeps the mind occupied, and prevents it from fretting the wound, thus allowing slow time to cicatrize it.

There is, however, a larger way in which a materialist may regard the inevitable. The world in his view being a vast machine, he may, as it were, identify himself with the machine, and thereby rise in thought superior to the injury it inflicts on him. But though we can imagine someone thus deadening his feelings when he himself is the victim, we cannot well conceive of the same remedy applying when a beloved person, say an only child, is being crushed under the Juggernaut car of the world-machine. _The great test of one’s philosophy of life is whether it helps us in the case of those whom we love, rather than in the case of the sufferings we experience in our own person._

A second consolation is: Remember the universality of sorrow. Look around you, behold the vast multitude who are suffering like you; remember the countless generations who have suffered in the past, think of the generations to come that will suffer in like manner. Such are some of the consolations of the choruses in the Greek tragedies. Latent perhaps in this mournful view of the facts of existence is another aspect of the matter, namely, the uprising from frustration toward ideal realization. And in so far as this other uplifting view is indeed latent or suggested, the thought of the universality of sorrow has an ennobling effect. On the other hand, without the explication of what may be regarded as implicit in them the consolations of the Greek choruses are inexpressibly saddening.

A third and active variant of the former consolation is: Seek to mitigate the sorrow and trouble of thy fellow-sufferers. Appease the passion of thine own grief by compassion and the works to which it leads. And by as much as activity of any kind is better than passivity, or mere feeling, by so much is this third kind of consolation better than the ones above mentioned. But at bottom the same criticism applies to it. It leaves still unanswered the question, To what end this suffering both of others and of oneself? Not Why? is the question, but To what end? How bereavement may be used so as to bring it into relation with the final end of life?

A fourth consolation is the popular belief in immortality. This is a resort to supernaturalism, and the supernatural should ever be distinguished from the supersensible. Immortality as popularly held involves the continued existence in some empirical form of the essential, central entity in man. For the suggestion that new organs may replace the wornout terrestrial body does not alter the empirical character of the conception. The new organs are still conceived in some vague fashion as similar to those with which we are acquainted.

Finally, my own interpretation of consolation may be set forth in contrast to all these. Again I say that for the bereaved, as for the sick, there is business in hand, there is a task to be performed, a work to be done. What is it? Let me endeavor to explain. The spiritual nature of man is incognizable, only the plan of the relations between spirit and spirit being given. Yet to think of a relation at all we must think of entities or objects between which it subsists. Of the spiritual part of our fellow-beings, therefore, we are bound to fashion mentally a symbolic image, one that shall stand for the real object, the spiritual nature, though we are well aware that it does not adequately express it.

When the beloved person is no longer visibly present, the work we do upon the symbolic image of him is not to cease. We are to review, to summarize the whole existence of a departed friend, as we have probably never done while he was with us. We are to get the total perspective of his life, to see the fine qualities standing out more distinctly; to seize the net result of his existence so far as those character traits are concerned which in him were most analogous to spiritual traits. This image we can now ideally contemplate with the advantage that none of the actual infirmities of his nature can mar it, and that no future events can henceforth alter our impression. The work of clarifying the image of our friend goes on unimpeded. And our own activity in the process of purifying his image of all that was merely fallible in him benefits us in return. The effect of this activity of ours on the datum of his life is our permanent gain. Thus both what he was and what he was not is stimulative. While he lived we performed the function of elimination and concentration with a view of producing progress in him and in ourselves jointly. Progress, induced by us, so far as he is concerned, for all we know is at an end. Progress so far as we are concerned is assured by the activity we continue to expend as long as we live on his memory. And the memory, or the image, stands for the beloved person. There is real mental intercourse wherever there is a movement of one mind towards the outgoings of another, even though the retroactive relation be suspended. The beloved person benefits me, though I no longer benefit him, except indirectly so far as in my own life I possibly expiate his shortcomings and in so far as I bestow on other living persons the advantage I receive from my mental intercourse with him.[50]

What, then, is the business in hand? What is the work to be done? Plainly to tie anew the threads that were broken, to bring it about that the loss, infinitely painful though it be, shall lead to gain, to substitute for the mixed relation of touch and sight the purely spiritual relation.

One more remark must be made in connection with the above. There is at present a tendency to dishonor the past in comparison with the future. Interest seems to lie in what lies ahead. Hence a breathless, forward-urging mood. One consequence of this is that the dead are less honored than of old. Within a single generation, for instance, I have seen not a few eminent persons in the city of New York pass away who up to the time of their death and in their obituaries were greatly and justly praised. I have hardly ever seen their names publicly mentioned since. Already they seem practically forgotten. In our national history likewise only a few of the most eminent are remembered. In like manner in families, the names even of father and mother are seldom mentioned by their surviving adult children, and ancestors at second remove are barely remembered. Now excessive reverence for the past, as in China, is a mark of stationariness. A retrospective point of view is inconsistent with progress. Our face must necessarily be turned toward the future. And yet forgetfulness of those human beings whom we have known, and who represented to us while they lived much of the best that life had to give, seems inhuman and incredible. It is true that I have drawn a sharp distinction between the empirical selves and those spiritual selves which the former for a time enshrined. The empirical selves have now disappeared. The gleam of love in the eye, the luster of beauty, whether of form or of expression, that touched for a season the sacred features, have vanished. On the other hand, the spiritual self as a member of the spiritual universe is confessedly past knowing and past imagining. On what object then shall memory dwell? It may dwell on the empirical self in so far as it was the sign of the thing signified, in so far as the being we knew and loved was to us convincing of the reality of that spiritual world which itself is incognizable by sense or mind. The greatest boon any human being can confer on another is to serve him in attaining the end for which he exists; and the supreme end for us all is the realization of our interrelation with the infinite community of spirits. The woman whom we say we loved, we loved precisely because she revealed to us that spiritual galaxy—because she was a Beatrice, ascending with us, and opening to our sight the eternal expanses.

FOOTNOTES:

[48] In the New Testament, despite the preference expressed for celibacy, the relation of the bridegroom to the bride is used metaphorically to represent that of Christ with the church, and among the mystics the same figure represents the union of Christ with the believing soul.

[49] I call attention to the difference between the view here expressed and that of Emerson in the last paragraphs of his _Essay on Love_, where he says: “Our affections are tents of a night. Our warm loves are clouds that pass over the firmament of mind with its overarching vault, its galaxies of immutable lights. In the personal relations we are put in training for impersonal submergence and absorption in God.” In my own view the infinite community of spiritual beings that takes the place of God consists altogether of personalities. Godhead, if you choose to apply that name to this infinite society, is not a person but a community of personalities. Personality is not drowned in the impersonal. On the contrary, the individual becomes a personality through his relation to his associates in the eternal life.

[50] I have real intercourse with Aristotle and Kant, as the outgoings of their minds are still effectual in me—more vital intercourse than with many of those who surround me.