Abstract
Reviewed by: Jeffrey Berman, University at Albany, State University of New York, USA
At Home With Grief opens with an intriguing question: What would you say to a deceased loved one if they could come back for one day? The question raises another. Can we remain connected with the dead while simultaneously moving forward with our lives? If the answer is “yes,” how do we do so in a death-denying culture?
The title of Blake Paxton’s book has a double meaning. Can we become comfortable with grief not simply in a church, temple, or cemetery, where we customarily reflect on the dead, but in our homes, where we dwell most of the time?
Paxton is an assistant professor of communications at Saint Xavier University in Chicago. His mother, Ann Elizabeth Paxton, had a rare form of pituitary cancer but appeared to be doing well when she suddenly died of a pulmonary embolism in 2004 at age 40. Blake Paxon was only 18 at the time, and both his father and younger brother Kyle were devastated. His father felt irrationally guilty over his wife’s death, though there was nothing anyone could have done to prevent it, and he withdrew into himself. Kyle refused to talk about his mother’s death. But Paxton couldn’t stop thinking about his mother, seeking her presence everywhere. In graduate school, he came across a theory that changed his life—and his professional work.
The theory formulated by Klass, Silverman, and Nickman (1996) in their influential book Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief suggests that contrary to conventional wisdom, the bereaved can maintain a relational bond with the deceased while forming new bonds with the living. Continuing bonds went counter to Freud’s (1917/1957) thesis in his essay “Mourning and Melancholia” that “mourning impels the ego to give up the object by declaring the object to be dead and offering the ego the inducement of continuing to live” (p. 257). Based on Paxton’s own experience of bereavement, “holding on and letting go are not diametrically opposed” (p. 3). But how does one prove this viewpoint?
Paxton pursued ethnographic research, an interdisciplinary approach that combines the humanities and social sciences. He interviewed 16 people, including his relatives and his mother’s close friends and hair salon clients, and asked them a series of questions about their feelings about her life and death. The questions were personal, but he maintained a double role, that of a son struggling to learn more about his mother, an enigmatic figure in his life, and an academic seeking as much objectivity as possible. Paxton was, in short, a participant-observer doing qualitative research. “Autoethnography,” he writes in the Appendix, “connects the personal experience of the researcher to cultural phenomena” (p. 152)—in this case, the phenomenon of death. He uses the expression “re-membering” to indicate a more active term than reminiscing. The insights derived from re-membering and sometimes “dis-membering” can lead to the “re-storying” of our lives.
Paxton’s research produced many surprises. He never disclosed to his mother what was for him at the time a dark secret, that he is gay, and for this reason, he was stunned when one of his mother’s friends and clients, “Sarah Morgan” (a composite character, as we learn from the Appendix), told him that his mother suspected his sexual orientation. “Your mom said that if she were here when you decided to come out, she’d fight for you,’ Sarah says. ‘But she worried about how your father would take the news’” (p. 101). Paxton was also shocked when his father confessed the fear that he thought his wife didn’t love him, a fear his son thought was groundless.
Another surprise occurred when Paxton visited a psychic, Marguerite, who told him that his mother is “at peace and around you all the time” (p. 63). Paxton knows as an academic that some readers will be skeptical about communion with the dead, but he remains open to this possibility. In one of the most emotionally charged moments in the story, he recounts his aunt Susie’s story about receiving a sign from her deceased sister. While driving home, she and her daughter heard Sister Sledge’s song “We Are Family” and then saw a car with the license plate ANN1122—November 22 was Blake’s birthday. “I feel the hair on the back of my neck stand up” (p. 84). Some readers will be convinced; others will not.
Researching and writing At Home with Grief led to noteworthy insights for Paxton and his research subjects. Paxton’s brother agreed begrudgingly to view a photo slide show of their mother, reluctant to expose himself to painful memories. He cried while viewing the slide show, but the viewing had a cathartic effect on him, and afterward, the brothers hugged each other, feeling renewed closeness. Paxton’s fraught relationship with his father also appeared improved.
Paxton acknowledges that the jury is still out about the value of continuing bonds. He cites Klass’s resistance to the “causality” thesis: the belief that maintaining continuing bonds with the dead results in a healthier adjustment to grief. Paxton concedes that it may not always be possible or healthy to maintain a bond with the dead. He learned from his interviewees that his stepmother, Kelly, seemed uncomfortable whenever he mentioned his mother’s name to her. Talking about the dead may evoke the same tensions as talking about an ex-husband or ex-wife. “Some of these challenges may have less to do with the deceased individual than they do with how family members treat the new spouse” (p. 126).
Writing a book about his mother’s death elicited a variety of responses from interviewees. Paxton appreciated when an interviewee stated that the book was a tribute to his mother, but he felt uncomfortable when others told him that the project must be “therapeutic” for him, a “great way” to cope with her death. “These comments undermined the project” (p. 123), he asserts, without elaboration.
I find the remark perplexing. After my first wife Barbara died of pancreatic cancer on April 5, 2004, at age 57, I began immediately to write a memoir about our life together from her diagnosis to her death 20 months later. I would have written the book even if it felt like I was banging my head against a wall, but instead I found the research deeply therapeutic. Unlike Paxton, I would have agreed without hesitation that writing Dying to Teach (Berman, 2007) was an act of self-healing. After Barbara’s death, I began to teach courses and write books on love and loss and death education. My students have responded enthusiastically to these courses.
Paxton’s students also welcome topics on continuing bonds. In one assignment, he asked each student to bring a photo or item of someone who had died or whom he or she had lost contact with and then introduce that person to the class. The conversations that result after the presentations have been astounding. Students will discuss common experiences of loss, and they will state how it feels good to know they are not alone in their experiences. Others will discuss how the activity might prepare them for future experiences of loss. (p. 141)
I recommend At Home with Grief to anyone who rejects, as both Paxton and I do, the “tyranny of closure” (p. 2). One need not believe in an afterlife to agree with an interviewee’s statement that Paxton’s mother will “live on through your gift” (p. 102). Paxton’s book is, finally, a gift to his readers.