Explaining and Understanding Grief
It feels impossible to write for publication in Santa Barbara without acknowledging the sorrow and suffering occasioned by fire and mud and to make an attempt to offer some form of solace.
This is especially true for this column in which a major theme, perhaps the major theme, for the last six years has been the characterization of divorce as a psychological event.
And that event is grief, which is not merely similar to the grief experienced after loss by death or experienced in anticipation of one’s own death; it’s the same thing.
From time to time I’ve offered descriptions of Grief-in-the-Context-of-Divorce and, occasionally, what can be done about it. Today, I’ll leave remedies to others, and I’ll tell you about what I encountered the weekend of Jan. 13.
It started with the receipt of an evening email from Kelly Kamowski. The message began by acknowledging a fundamental basis of my practice — grief.
Then, she described her work with cartoonist Stephanie Piro to create Compassionate Cartoons about Divorce, which is available from Amazon for $4.99.
From the email, I understood that the premise of the book of cartoons about a solemn subject was that an image and a short line of text can often describe an unfamiliar or uncomfortable human experience more effectively than lines and lines of text.
The description then becomes available for communication to others. If the communication works, the experience of suffering can be shared and, to a certain extent, diminished.
I’ve written thousands of lines of text about difficult topics that communicate far less effectively than I would like, so I know there is plenty of room for improvement — and briefer is probably better.
The last time I redecorated my office, I spent lots of time and hundreds of dollars selecting New Yorker cartoons about divorce to hang on my walls. The New Yorker cartoon bank is easy to use and many of the cartoons are about divorce.
For me, the best cartoons were clever and snappy rather than compassionate.
For example, one of the cartoons I selected for framing shows two women from ancient Greece listening to an ancient Greek man say: “Agamemnon and Clytemnestra have decided to separate amicably.”
Is it more clever than funny? Is it deeply cynical? Or is it simply obscure? Opinions will differ, but I doubt that many would say that it, or any of the other cartoons I selected, are “compassionate.”
[Curiously, of the hundreds of people who have been in my office since the cartoons were hung, I don’t recall anyone making a point of looking at them, and I’m sure that none has laughed.]
Nevertheless, for a mere $4.99 I immediately ordered the Kamowski and Piro book from Amazon. It will arrive shortly after this column is published.
At breakfast the next morning, I passed the first section of the Sunday New York Times to my wife Alice, and kept the editorial section for myself.
There, occupying two-thirds of page four was something called Op-Art titled, How to Speak Grief, under which there were 20 cartoons about grief.
Here, for example, was a definition of Clutterstruck: “The inability to remove dead loved ones’ seemingly meaningless items for fear they might later prove to be surprisingly irreplaceable.”
I was astonished by the Extreme Marketing that managed to send me what seemed to be a somewhat personal email from the author — the day before her book was featured on two-thirds of a page in the Sunday Times. How was that done?
It’s both amazing and scary. Alice, who knows about Internet marketing, and wishes I knew more, said something like, “That’s what they can do, what do you think is surprising?”
At the risk of exposing my cyber-naiveté, I interrupted breakfast to send an email reply to Kamowski. I expressed admiration for the cartoons in the Times and the marketing effort that sent the email to me 12 hours before her work appeared in the nation’s newspaper.
I’m afraid my email interrupted Kamowski’s Sunday breakfast. She reported back to me that as soon as she read my email, she rushed to the closest library to check it out for herself.
En route, she was exhilarated about being featured in The New York Times but, since she had never had contact with the Times, someone else must be using and claiming her work as their own. That made her exhilarated and furious.
Alas, it happens there are two books of cartoons about grief published by two different pairs of women authors being published at the same time. The cartoons in the Times were taken from Modern Loss by Rebecca Soffer and Gabrielle Birkner.
The book won’t be available until Jan. 23, so the piece in the Times publicizes a product not immediately available. When this book of cartoons does become available, there will be an audiobook version — an audiobook of cartoons?
The next column will be about the lawyer, Stephen Adams.
If you are divorcing in California and have “conventional representation,” your case (and fate) is affected more by the lawyering of Adams than by your own lawyer’s lawyering.
I’ve heard a recording of Allen Ginsberg saying that T.S. Eliot set poetry back by at least a generation because Eliot was “so damn good.”
I’ll say the same about Steve Adams. He set back the practice of family law for several generations of lawyers because he was so damn good. But he wasn’t good with clients, the people would be most affected by his commercial enterprises.
He was good with law on the printed page; he was good with binders and printed tabs; he became good with law as expressed in digits; and he got judges and lawyers, both reluctantly, to start using personal computers.
The net effect has been that conventional representation in a divorce uses the same legal tools that are used when Amazon sues Microsoft. It generates fees where the central issue is usually some version of division by two.
Adams knew more about the law of divorce than anyone else in the state, but he knew almost nothing about divorcing families.
Only those who are particularly well-informed — readers of this column — have a chance to avoid the ongoing effects of his erudition and ignorance.
— Brian Burke is a certified family law specialist practicing family law and mediation in Santa Barbara. A researcher and educator in the field of divorce and family conflicts, he also is the creator of the Legal Road Map™. Click here for more information, call 805.965.2888 or e-mail brian@burkefamilylaw.com. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.