A brief reflection over the mourning

Perhaps there is no greater pain than the pain of mourning. The mourning, as Freud explained in Mourning and Melancholia (1917), brings up feelings like anger, hopelessness, disability, fear, and guilt, feelings that interchange or appear all together, in such a way as to create the illusion that is possible to go back, distorting the crude reality of the loss, trying to explain it, or overcast it, or deny it.

In a different way that the profound inner world, the external world processes the mourning quickly and brutally, without giving whom is suffering the same rate of affective metabolism. Hopelessly, the person who loses someone or something tries to defend him/herself. This defensive despair is noisy; it belongs to the normal elaboration of mourning, and has to come to an end someday. The emptiness of the silence continues to exist. The painful fight against the inescapable reality of the loss is finally over. In the course of time, with an aid of the mourning elaboration, it is expected the person could apply affection to other things beyond the loss. The bereaved one may, after a long time, lower the head, take a breath and start over. The world, which seemed gray, becomes, once more, a fertile field of interest.

The pain that used to hurt sadistically the mind of the bereaved person until crushing it, will give rise to a deep scar, which, in the future, will bring back those hard remembrances to the conscious. The serene memories of what is left behind and is not possible to bring back, remains, in the end, as a tattoo. The bereaved soul must back to live.

Despite the obvious, it is hard to perceive that the loss is more devastating to whom survives. The acceptance of the loss hurts more than the real loss. Living in mourning is harder than die. Somehow, you die with the lost object. You lose a piece of what is or was essential at some point. You lose something that was a subjective part of yourself and that goes on to be important.