ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND JFK-- LEARNING TO GRIEVE

“... great conceit is required in making the Eye, which either by the dulnesse or lively quicknesse thereof, giveth a great taste of the spirit and disposition of the minde … as in drawing a fool or an idiot by making his eyes narrow and his temple wrinkled with laughter, wide-mouthed and showing his teeth. A grave or reverent father by giving him a dominant and lowly countenance, his eye beholding you with a sober cast which is caused by the upper eyelid covering a great part of the ball and is an especial mark of a sober and stayed brain within.”

Henry Peacham (1634)

As quoted by Simon Schama in Rembrandt's Eyes

I don't think we as humans are able to express grief when we are born. Perhaps we have the neurological template already in place but lack its full expression. The full expression of grief at losses is probably a cumulative process that begins with disappointment or sadness at the disappearance of a favorite toy or pacifier and develops over time into the fully understood grief that comes with maturity. The fully developed grief has its roots firmly planted in mortality and the bonds of belonging. One of the greatest burdens of being a human being,if not the greatest, is to know that at some time in the future people we love and we ourselves will die from this earth. While it is a burden for most people, it is also a challenge with some positive benefits. One of those benefits is to acknowledge that death is our only common experience as human beings but, acknowledging this, we are offered the knowledge that we are still alive in this life and able to experience all its riches. And, perhaps, it is this full experience of living that we can in some way pass along to those who follow us.

If we mature into a concept of mortality and loss, then how do we develop the facility to grieve? I think helping others, especially the young, to understand how to grieve is one of the greatest gifts we can offer, because it facilitates the expression of what is most meaningful in someone's life. If we can grieve a loss, then we can see the magnitude of the grief in terms of the magnitude of the loss and its deepest meanings. It is also possible to help someone get to the shore beyond grief (and to mourning and a new morning, perhaps) and an ongoing life of healing and wholeness. How does one facilitate such a transformation? How does a community repair losses experienced in civic life?

It may be obvious that to help someone in such a state of loss and grieving one must first know these states within oneself. One must do some inner work of exploration and emotional archaeology to first come to some awareness of how one faces losses in one's own life. This is a lifetime process because not all losses are of the same magnitude and most losses, whether anticipated or not, come as a shock, because the rending of bonds of belonging are always traumatic and carry with them the sense of an ending, a certain finality in one way or another. So, loss and trauma are companions much of the time. Both lean on grieving to bring some degree of acceptance and comfort. There is within the grief process the gift of safety, even if what brings you to grief is generated by circumstances of unpredictability, chaos, and even violence. One is thrown back on oneself even in the darkness of grief to a place where one's emotions can be surrendered to the broken heart. In the case of great trauma and great loss, all of us begin again in grief. These observations don't really give any specific ideas about how we learn to grieve and how to express grief in its full dimensions. How do we learn how to grieve?

I am looking at two portraits. They are images from my own youth and I think they hold some answers to the last question about how we come to know what grief is and how to express it. If it is true that we develop an ability to grieve, then perhaps we pick up clues from the world around us and layer them onto the template that is already present in our brain, mapping them as we evolve. I would imagine that those clues come from the people around us as well as from the influences of society in general. One of the portraits is of Abraham Lincoln, a photograph by Alexander Gardner taken in April of 1865 and believed to be the last photograph of Lincoln. The other portrait is an oil painting of JFK done by Jamie Wyeth in 1967, four years after his death. Both of these men were presidents and both were martyred by an assassin's bullet. Both portraits bear the mark of grief and both have helped me understand what grief is and how to express it. Each represents a teaching about grief.

To fully understand how I learned about grief it is necessary to describe the path to that understanding. One of the side paths is related to an obscure course I took in college called “Kingship and the Law.” One of the texts we studied was a book on kingship in the Middle Ages and examined the evolution of what it meant to become “head of state.” There were confusions about the divine right of monarchs and the power of the religious authorities. But the overall effect was to give to the monarch some, but not all, of the religious prerogatives and some of the secular authority. It was then as the designated leader of the community that he was encased with moral authority and a touch of divinity. What we explored in the course was to what extent our own concepts of leadership (the presidency was a good example) included the secular and the divine. We found that it was very difficult to separate the two streams of authority (moral and pragmatic or political) within the context of our own form of democratic government. This was not so much a reflection of the parameters of democracy as it was how leaders of government take on the ancient mantle of ancestral roles. It seems to me that taking on the mantle is considered an obligation expected by the people who grant it and a responsibility by those who accept it. This is the deal and the ideal.

How we think about leadership (and how that relates to the loss of it and the grieving that results) is encased in legend and so is susceptible to idealization. The legends of King Arthur, of Camelot and the Knights of the Round Table, were popular in the Middle Ages and featured a king who was most surely not a historical character. But the idealization of him as both moral and political authority became the ideal for all future kings, queens, and heads of state into our own times. It isn't a surprise that the ideal of a Camelot where the political and spiritual welfare of all were a high priority and peace reigned over the land became a metaphor for the enlightened monarch and his people. Kennedy's administration was often referred to as Camelot and it was this ideal that was popularized in a Broadway show of the time (“Camelot” was adapted in 1960 from T. H. White's Once and Future King ). We continue to have high expectations of our leaders and assume that they will balance their different roles of authority. When they are dismissive or indifferent to their roles as arbiters of morality (or politics), then we perceive a diminishment of responsibility, a disappointment bordering on loss, and we move in different ways to restore the moral/political order. I think every leader is measured against the ideal.

When leadership failed in the Middle Ages and monarchs were overthrown or died, they were effectively removed as the head from the body of the body politic. Metaphorically, this is the separation of the monarch from the public in common. Surely, there must have been shock and trauma associated with such an event and, surely, there must have been some form of grieving, even it it was a celebrated occasion, for to lose a symbol of order and authority and constancy was a loss. When King Arthur died, his Knights and the Round Table collapsed into disorder and profligacy. But the “head of state” authority was eventually passed along to someone else. We have similar rites and rituals in the relationships between the heads of state and the bodies that are united with them. We continue to imbue our leaders with similar high expectations of the ideal state of the body politic. (In some ways, in England to this day, Queen Elizabeth represents the stability of leadership, both moral/spiritual and political, no matter the rotation of political parties in power.) I suggest that something happens in most large and small communities where leadership is important. Perhaps this is also an aspect of being a parent in a nuclear family. There is the assumption that there will be moral as well as pragmatic (political) guidance. Somehow, it seems a natural aspect of any leadership role.

It is with this concept of authority and some awe that I came to perceive the two leaders whose portraits I studied. My experience with JFK's death was deeply personal and a shock that I can only describe as a trauma. I was in chemistry class in high school that November day when the announcement came over the intercom. Everything stopped. Time stopped. No one moved. It was the way my dad described hearing about the bombing of Pearl Harbor or others have described the events of 9/11. If there is a way to carry such specific trauma, fear, and rupture in an embedded way, then this is how it worked its way into my memory. It was different with Lincoln. Of course, his death was about a hundred years before that of JFK, but there was something of the events of it that I incorporated into my memory from reading of what happened that night at Ford's Theater. It was as if I had been there, so vivid were the recollections of those who had been present. I think this was the case because I had learned about trauma and loss and about grieving by then. I had known of the deaths of a few family friends and had observed my mom and dad in their grief. In the case of Lincoln, I remember reading about how Mary Todd Lincoln had become hysterical, another shocking response. I remember seeing the sketches made at Lincoln's deathbed. In the case of JFK, I had my own trauma but I also observed what it was for an entire nation of millions to grieve their loss. There was the little boy saluting his father's casket and the horse with boots reversed in the stirrups and the playing of the Navy Hymn. There was the entourage of luminaries from all over the world walking (yes, walking to honor the dead) behind the horse-drawn caisson. These were the pieces of what it was like to grieve, in solo and as a community. It wasn't until later that I understood better what it was to lose a “head of state.” Is it too far-fetched to think of the bonding and love we have for a parent in the same vein as the regard we have for our leaders? Can we suffer the same degree of loss and grieving for those to whom we are not related except as a member of the body politic?

So, here before me are two portraits, two images of the heads of assassinated leaders. And what do I observe? It took me a long time to tease out what it was about these two particular portraits that captivated me. I learned about how humans express emotions from the work of Paul Ekman, a psychologist who developed a Facial Action Coding System based on his experimental work with anatomically based microexpressions. He identified many hundreds of different facial muscle combinations that unconsciously express emotions of disgust, approval, doubt, pain, etc., and including grief. (Is it any wonder that sophisticated facial recognition is now being used to identify individuals in security surveillance?) Looking now at these images of Lincoln and JFK, I think I understand better why they helped me learn about grief. We know one another by facial recognition and the uniqueness of combinations that make one person so different from another. We focus on faces and not on many other features of another person's body. Fingerprints, for instance, identify us as unique individuals but we can't recognize and “read” one another by them.

The Abraham Lincoln I see is compared to another photograph by Gardner taken in November, 1863, about the time of the Gettysburg Address. In 1863 he appears in full strength with a certain resoluteness in his eyes and a direct stare into the camera. In 1865 he is looking beyond the camera into some distance we can only imagine. He has seen the country through the bloody Civil War (approximately 750,000 men killed, compared to 400,000 in WWII and 58,000 in Vietnam). The right side of his face is in darkness and his left eye has caught a small glimmer of light in the background. His cheeks are hollowed out from weight loss and strain and his beard is sparse and roughly cut. His face seems to have collapsed over his lips, which droop at the corners. His visage is one of exhaustion and closure. I imagine that he has seen his country through great trials and turmoil but has come to some point of grieving and in that he has surrendered. His is a face of one man grieving for the dead and wounded on both sides of the conflict but also grieving for the gaping wounds left in the heart of the nation for all its losses. In his exhausted heart he has also lost one son when the boy was only 4 years old and another to the war just ended. He has accommodated life with a spouse who suffered mental illness throughout their marriage. He has visited battlefields and pardoned those deemed traitorous to the Northern cause. He has compromised and disciplined and commanded. He is only a few days from being killed. When that day arrived and the time came, the nation was thrown into another shock of grief after so many hundreds of thousands of losses. Their head of state had been murdered and the loss was grievous. Do we carry their grief and mourning? Is it possible that such deep trauma and grieving can be passed forward in many generations and recalled in future times of disorder?

In the Wyeth painting, JFK is at his desk with his right arm raised and his hand partially covering his lower face, exposing us to the appearance of his slightly opened mouth and his upper face. In this portrait, too, the eyes are staring over us as we look at him (do you notice that both eyes do not seem to be tracking in tandem?). He is focused on some distant place and one can only imagine Wyeth thinking that place might have been JFK's own mortality. This portrait was done in 1967 and so incorporates Wyeth's own responses to the great shock of the assassination four years before. But all other aspects of JFK's head broadcast vigor and even radiance the way the hair is highlighted against the background of the picture. His skin tones are rugged and ruddy. His face is full to the edges of the square jaw for which he was known. And it is this vigor and commanding posture that so many of us will remember about JFK. I was only 17 when he was murdered and so hadn't had much experience with death but I was inspired by Kennedy's own relative youth and his brilliant abilities to bring together the secular and the sacred. To me, he was the head of state I thought represented the possibilities and potential of life and whom I later grieved in the same great measure, but of loss. He was visible and vibrant and appealed to my own youthful promise. When he was shot, a great gap of knowledge was immediately filled with emotions I didn't feel I owned just yet. It was said at the time that the Camelot we idealized in his short administration as leader was forever lost. It took a long time before I could accommodate such trauma and, even today, I mourn him as well as the exhausted Abraham Lincoln. Much of what I thought about life's possibilities and the goodness of mankind were shattered and a less naive outlook became the condition of my maturity. It is by such strokes of reality that we grow into who we are and how we see the world before us. I believe this is one way we learn about losses and grieving. How do we help others with their traumas and their grieving? How do we teach our young to know the reality of loss? Do we support them as they suffer their own realities or do we make a lesson out of it? Perhaps knowing our own losses and grieving we are able to teach them by example. Are we open enough and vulnerable enough to do this? How better to serve the generations?

It is perhaps because we idealize our heads of state and those to whom we turn for maintenance of moral/spiritual and political order that we are able to eventually deal with the realities of loss and grieving in our individual and collective lives. We need the ideal as an aspiration of decent human behavior. We can begin with the romance of King Arthur and Camelot and perhaps this is the way we perpetuate what is grandest, most meaningful, and worth preserving about our shared existences. The gap exposed between the ideal and the reality of our lives is the space where we learn and grow. If we are shocked by loss and the trauma of it, then we are challenged to grow into what it is to grieve and to recover the best way we can. Human resilience is vast and we learn to adapt to even the greatest shocks. We learn from heads of state and from portraits of them how to process the losses we find so difficult to experience and to counsel others, especially the young. Is it possible to teach these things? Is it possible that how we think about mortality, loss, and grieving can change what we think of the experiences themselves?