Review of A Grief Sublime by Beth Robbins
a grief sublime. By Beth Robbins
(Great Barrington, MA: Keats & Company, 2019. Pp. 11, 300.)
The word liminal is from the Latin word limen, which means a “threshold, cross-piece, sill”; with sub, meaning "up to,” it creates the word sublime, the expression of being in the presence of a force which you cannot know. In her sparse and poetic memoir a grief sublime, Beth Robbins explores the liminal spaces offered by grief after her husband, Steve “Sproutman” Meyerowitz dies suddenly one evening in a car accident. Beginning just before she learns of his death from two officers at her door, a moment she calls the “fracture,” her book navigates her journey in and over the threshold to the experience of life after death, an encounter with the sublime. In its sparse presentation of the text (despite being nearly 300 pages, it is a quick read), the book represents what Robbins wishes to convey about the voids left after death, and the ways these voids function as presence and absence. Through her exploration of words as we define them (she relies frequently on etymology) and by invoking the prose and poetry of Shakespeare, Whitman, Dickinson, Melville, and her favorite, Keats, she tells us that these words are, at once, sufficient and insufficient. Robbins shows us that crossing the threshold between life and death is not a linear journey for the dead or living.
The nonlinear structure of the memoir mirrors the meandering ways we experience grief after a loved one dies, an experience too often reduced to its five stages. Instead of five stages, a grief sublime is divided into twelve chapters, which allude to in name and number the twelve stages of Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey.” Each chapter is subdivided by headers (almost one per page) written in a handwritten font in brackets, usually a representative word: [bereaved], for example, or an idea such as [you saved me, yet unawares, part first]. These headers sometimes reappear to represent recurring themes, pushing the original sentiment further. In [you saved me, yet unawares, part second], for example, she reimagines the path to her own salvation; without Steve, she urges herself “out of the grotto” to save herself. The headers outline the winding valley of her own reluctant hero’s journey (“I am the fool. I am the hero of this journey, whether I want to be or not,” she tells us), a journey that is never quite finished.
Since much of the book’s meaning is represented in it’s structure and materiality, the expository passages provide a solid framework for her exploration from the known world (here, the [preamble] and [before], the moments before the fracture) to the unknown world without Steve which she now inhabits. It’s in these detailed moments where Robbins describes her experiences with Steve, their children, and the cruel bureaucratic aftermath of death where the memoir inhales and ultimately prevails. The specificity of these moments allows space for her briefer and more subtle gestures of communication. These gestures are beautiful and persuasive, but they could otherwise suffocate the narrative with ambiguity. One such section, for example, called [life] works because it follows a relatively long section in which she describes in detail her loneliness after having an abortion, an “excavation,” the result of a love affair with a man who subsequently abandoned her; it consists of just a sentence, an exhalation, “A month later you met Steve”.
As such, a grief sublime is a nascent, but powerful effort at reconciling the lived experiences of life, death, and grief with the words more often used to describe those experiences, a therapeutic effort for the bereaved canon with C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed. In his work, Lewis journaled his observations of his grief in real time after the death of his wife, at times earnestly questioning his faith in God and the inadequacies of that faith as a palliative resource. Robbins, like Lewis, chronicles her grief in short passages, but rarely questions her experience or the spiritual insights it offers. Writing is, in itself, a spiritual practice: words give shape to our experiences and then sometimes fail us, as all powers do. In the section called [writing as a numinous act], for example, she tells us:
The word nostalgia originated in the late eighteenth century: A longing for something that once was a part of you but now is not. This word appeared because of a need to name something. The separation between the self and the other, for example.
Words have meanings and Robbins inhabits them. Through her words and actions, she conjures the mystical (tarot, symbols, visions, and dreams), confronting the unknown with acceptance of the unknown. Most notably, she resurrects the words of famous dead writers to validate her experiences, “the scaffolding” of her work. For example, when she says, “Grief doesn’t mark us in any obvious way,” she follows it with a passage from Emily Dickinson, “Heavenly Hurt, it gives us — / We can find no scar, / But internal difference — / Where the Meanings, are —”. By reconciling her experiences with Dickinson’s words, she tells us that meaning of her internal pain lies within the pain itself and the words she can use to express that. Words, like the voids the dead leave behind, can leave us bereft and yet they can be enough for our salvation.