The loss of a person who feels essential to us is a pain that alters us forever

The carved pumpkin on the doorstep is already softening to flaccid mush, its comic-grotesque face collapsing. The rituals of Samhain have long helped us to keep those who are gone present, or at least a little closer than gone. On the night when the veil between here and what follows was considered thin enough to pass through, you’d leave the door on the latch so that anyone who needed could walk back through it and come home.The loss of a person who feels essential to us is a pain that alters us forever after. And yet amid all its size and loudness, grief conceals a subtler horror which is also, punishingly, its great gift – the realisation that we can actually live without someone whose loss feels like the end of us too. At first, the grief is total and paralysing. Then, slowly – sometimes so slowly you think it can never happen – it recedes whether or not you give it permission to. You laugh suddenly – naturally and without thought – at something funny and feel monstrous. It occurs to you one day a few years in that you have passed an entire morning without thinking of them, and you are light, and you are heavy. You forget their voice. Their face returns only in partial memory, a movement of the mouth, a look in the eyes, the shape of their hands. We lose parts of them. We feel more capable. We feel guilty.READ MOREThen there is secondary grief – an internal crisis about the fading or perhaps changing of the pain. The pain is the living memory of their presence. Its recession takes them with it. So you pick at the scab to open it back up. Relisten to the old voicemails, read the messages, ruminate on where and how you could have said or done more. You cannot shake the feeling that on the other side of this closing wound is the person who has died.In Works of Love, Søren Kierkegaard considers different forms of love – the Christian conception of agapic love, erotic love and the preferential love we have for our family and our friends. He suggests that loving the dead is a purity test. Most love leans on reciprocity to fuel, it but loving someone who has died is something closer to faith. The person we miss is fixed in time and unchanging while we inevitably move further away from the self who had a living relationship with them. This is the tragedy of grief – the only source of change is the person left behind so, as we learn to live without someone, they must feel less constantly present in our minds and lives. The only source of that change is the living person, and that is why feeling better can register as a deep betrayal of love; an infidelity.In his 1917 essay Mourning and Melancholia, Sigmund Freud described grief as the laborious task of withdrawing our emotional energy from attachment to a dead person over time and redirecting it until we are capable of using it again – of moving on. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida believed this process comes at a cost. To successfully mourn a person in the way Freud suggests, he argued, is to disappear the dead person into oneself; to reduce them to our impressions and memories rather than a whole and complex person with a life we could never fully know. It is to take ownership of them.[ ‘I wish your mummy was still alive,’ my daughter says, before the conversation swiftly changesOpens in new window ]For Derrida, grief is not a neat psychological to-do list but rather an ongoing, demanding, ethical relationship to the dead, one that can become more complex with time. We owe them respect for their separateness so that we don’t shrink them to an artefact confined to our minds. Rather we become a vessel that holds a small part of them. It’s the part we knew, and we must simply struggle with the knowledge that each time we take it out and look at it, like an old photograph, we change it in the looking. It gets faded and creased and thumbed, and we can only be aware of this and try to minimise it. The person is not the photograph though. We know this. [ Grieving abroad: ‘Every Irish emigrant expects and dreads the phone call they know will come’Opens in new window ]Honouring the memory of the person is easily conflated with prolonging the pain of their absence. The first maintains a living connection (on our side) to who they were and who they helped make us. The second keeps us stuck and tokenises the person we loved – it maintains us in reaction to their death, robbing us of time to appreciate their life. This second kind is picking the scab, and it mistakes pain for love. For Kierkegaard, love is active, not passive. It is not a sensation so much as a series of decisions evidenced by our behaviour in the world. It’s in our willingness to keep their memory present and not in how much it hurts us when we do.We just have to leave the door on the latch.