Since my mother died in 2004, I have been very interested in grief and mourning customs. So I jumped at the chance to read the article on "
Good Grief" in a recent
New Yorker. Most of it was old territory for me, and I'd recently pretty much thrown the "stages of grief" out the window after reading
this blog post by a birthmother. But one paragraph was like a door opening:
"In the nineteen-seventies, Colin Murray Parkes, a British psychiatrist and a pioneer in bereavement research, argued that the dominant element of grief was a restless 'searching.' The heightened physical arousal, anger, and sadness of grief resemble the anxiety that children suffer when they’re separated from their mothers. Parkes, drawing on work by John Bowlby, an early theorist of how human beings form attachments, noted that in both cases—acute grief and children’s separation anxiety—we feel alarm because we no longer have a support system we relied on. Parkes speculated that we continue to 'search' illogically (and in great distress) for a loved one after a death. After failing again and again to find the lost person, we slowly create a new 'assumptive world,' in the therapist’s jargon, the old one having been invalidated by death. Searching, or yearning, crops up in nearly all the contemporary investigations of grief. A 2007 study by Paul Maciejewski found that the feeling that predominated in the bereaved subjects was not depression or disbelief or anger but yearning. Nor does belief in heavenly reunion protect you from grief. As Bonanno says, 'We want to know what has become of our loved ones.'"
Eureka, as we say in California. I have found it. Yearning is pretty much my constant life state, and it drives my near-compulsive web-searching. (Isn't it interesting how search is the key to the web? Yearning seems to be so common - is grief a near-universal state?)
I also think this idea has such relevance for people suffering from adoption loss. Adoptees and birthparents speak of this yearning for each other and invest great energy in seeking each other out. They even cite basic attachment research and describe the "primal wound" of being separated from your mother. And the final quote in the paragraph could be a perfect echo of what they say about their need to find each other, to be reunited.
Our adoption is fully open, which means that we share all identifying information and communicate regularly in letters, emails, photos, and videos. We haven't visited yet, but we want to. It's only been 18 months, so it's very hard to see any benefits for Baby E from this openness, but I work very hard to maintain the relationship. I don't want E to feel like he has to search out for answers, but I see now how unrealistic that is.
Even with all the information we can provide, there are no easy answers to the question "Why?"
