Articles Worth Reading: Grief as Shattered Glass

Over at Pscyhe, Joshua Thomas, who is an associate philosophy professor at St John’s University in Queens, New York, published a thought-provoking article last month: "Grief is Not a Process with Five Stages. It is Shattered Glass."  Thomas describes in detail how his mother died at age 75 from pancreatic cancer, in spite of a promising early diagnosis.  A few months later, while preparing dinner, Thomas drops a drinking glass on the floor, shattering it.  He breaks down sobbing as he gets a broom to clean up the mess.  Money quote:

"Puzzled and decentred by this bizarre flare of emotion, I redirected my attention to the task of cleaning the mess so I could resume cooking. A few minutes of focused effort and the broken glass was satisfactorily cleaned – ‘but not completely’, I thought to myself. Can you ever clean up broken glass completely? Spiky slivers that dashed across the countertop may be lurking unobserved, waiting to stab someone innocently setting down the mail or picking up their keys... As the thought crossed my mind, I considered: had my grief taken the same shape as the glass shards?"

Thomas then goes on to use the metaphor of broken glass as how we experience grief: the broken glass scatters everywhere, spilling into multiple areas of our lives.  It can come back and hurt us in times and places when we don't expect it. Like our grief, we wonder if we can ever completely clean up the mess and move on from it. It's a very well-written piece. You can read the full article here.