On bereavement and related matters

Dreaming of the dead. (1) - By Meghan O'Rourke - Slate Magazine

I've been meaning to mention the very insightful and well written essays appearing in Slate dealing with bereavement. The link above should take you to the first entry, in which O'Rourke writes:

Nothing about the past losses I have experienced prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me in the least. A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable. What makes it worse is that my mother was young: 55. The loss I feel stems partly from feeling robbed of 20 more years with her I'd always imagined having.

I say this knowing it sounds melodramatic. This is part of the complexity of grief: A piece of you recognizes it is an extreme state, an altered state, yet a large part of you is entirely subject to its demands.

That second paragraph rings very true. It is frustrating when undergoing grief to have a rational understanding of it, but still find that such knowledge doesn't seem to help at all with overcoming the emotional reaction.

I found a similar thing when, some months after my father's death, I began feeling a pain in the same location as where he first felt the effects of his cancer. It feels a little silly saying to a doctor "of course I know it is very, very likely this is a psychosomatic grief reaction, but the pain is still there."

O'Rourke's latest entry (number 5 in the series if that link stops working) talks about dreams of her late mother. Hers sound a bit different from mine. As far as I can recall now, most of mine were of the type where I found my father was alive, not dead after all, and that the news of his death had all been a terrible mistake. However, the effect of these on waking was mainly one of disappointment; not peaceful comfort. I suppose they are a little like the "visitation" sense that O'Rourke describes, but she also says that hers were comforting upon waking.

One thing they made me think about was whether such dreams were a plausible explanation for the origin of the belief in the resurrection of Christ. Did someone in his circle talk to a friend of being "visited" by Jesus during the night, and through a series of Chinese whispers it became a story of a physical occurrence?

It sounds plausible in an academic way, but it seemed to me after experiencing grief dreams to not be very likely. After all, people in Jesus' day presumably had more exposure to death in the family at a younger age, and therefore probably knew more of grief dreams than people do today. I suspect that this may have increased their skepticism of a report of physical visit of a deceased person, rather than making them more accepting of such a story.

I don't deny that it might have been a near universal belief then (as it still is for many people) that grief dreams are a real visit by the spirit of the departed. But the gospels spend a fair bit of time emphasising that it was not a purely spiritual body that was appearing. The conversion of a story of a spirit visit from Jesus during the night into a daytime bodily visit seems a rather improbable path to me.

This is not intended to convince any reader in any substantial sense, and of course I am aware of many of the other speculations on the origin of the resurrection accounts. It is just an explanation of my thoughts on the matter, perhaps of interest to a handful of readers.