In the inaugural two-part episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Commander Sisko who is grieving over the death of his wife Jennifer and grappling with single fatherhood as he takes command of the war-torn space station, encounters the spiritual leaders of the Bajoran world: the Prophets. They are an alien species that lives in a wormhole, and unlike humans, they exist outside of time in a non-linear fashion. They experience past, present and future in a non-linear manner.
The episode deals with grief and trauma, exploring how Sisko’s loss has anchored him in the past. He tries to explain to the aliens how linear existence works through the example of a baseball game that proceeds from inning to inning. They counter his example by repeatedly showing him the death of his wife. In pain and frustration he shouts “Why do you keep bringing me here?” and they explain that they aren’t bringing him there, or as they put it “You exist here.” He finally has an epiphany when the aliens observe repeatedly that his grief is “not linear.” They reiterate “You choose to exist here. It is not linear.”
The Prophets (the wormhole aliens) don’t understand why a being who lives in linear time (Sisko) would be anchored to one moment that is in the past. Their confusion reveals something profound: we often live in moments long after they have passed. Grief distorts time, preventing us from healing. We must each decide to move on when we are ready to heal.
This year has been unexpectedly stark. In addition to the death of my mother, I also just lost my mother-in-law last week, followed the next day by another death that was unexpected. That same day one of our employees also lost two people close to her. Even when death is not traumatic, it can feel like an anchor.
My daughter once asked me if I thought, when I visited my parents, that it could be the last time I would see them. I said that since they were so much older (in their 40s when I was born), I’ve basically thought that every time I visited them. Maybe I was just prone to rumination, but they have had age-related complaints my whole life, just like everyone over age 50 has. When I was at my mother’s funeral, it occurred to me that this could be the last time I see my dad, but that it might not. You never know what the future holds.
When I lost my father-in-law 15 years ago, I found that I sometimes dreamed he was still with us at family events, making jokes, enjoying the relationships we all shared. I recently dreamed I was on vacation, and I rounded a corner and there was my mother, wearing her striped swimsuit from the 1980s. She had a smartphone (this part must be fantasy) and was showing me some things she found out about online. We chatted and walked together like we sometimes did when I was a teen and she would let me play hooky so I could go to the city with her when she had a doctor’s appointment.
Someone once said that by the time you move out, you’ve already spent 85% of the time you will ever spend with your parents. After that, it’s usually just visits (unless you move home or they move in with you). And after my mother’s death, it also struck me that my memories of her life still exist. They haven’t gone away. They are still in my head. I still have the stories she told me about her life. One more time with her would only add one more pebble to the pile of stones, but it wouldn’t change what is already there.
In the movie Coco which revolves around the Mexican Dia de los Muertos, Hector says “If there’s no one left in the living world who remembers you, you disappear from this world. We call it the Final Death.” Remembrance is a form of immortality. Spirits in the afterlife continue to visit the Land of the Living so long as they are remembered. Death is not just physical–it’s the loss of identity and connection. It’s why we should continue to talk about those we’ve lost, not to mourn them or focus on the trauma of the loss, but to celebrate them and to maintain our connection to them.
While I hold no illusions that anyone will ever want to read any of my journals after I’m gone–I don’t even want to read them now!–I treasure parts of my parents’ written personal histories. It’s one thing that the church has encouraged that is very valuable, in my opinion–writing down things that are true to us as individuals, that capture our ideas and thoughts, our feelings and beliefs, our stories, our relationships. I once had a mission companion who was very skeptical of my journal-writing, assuming I was trash talking her in its pages, and also not wanting to write anything down that would cast her in a bad light. She wanted to white-wash her stories. I laughed and said “Do you really think your family members won’t know who you really are, regardless of what you write?”
I find myself constantly referring to those who have passed on in the present tense. In my mind, they are still who they always were. They exist here, in my mind. They are part of my mental community. They haven’t gone anywhere, not really.
Although the episode The Emissary is a caution against being too focused on the trauma of the past, maybe our existence is not really linear. Yes, we can get stuck ruminating on the wrongs done to us or the bad experiences or the criticisms, words we can’t take back, things we never said or did that we regret, but we also grew, survived, laughed and cried, and became the people we are now. There were times we felt joy, purpose, acceptance, and there are values we gained from our experiences. We move on, but we carry the gifts of the past with us.
Church leaders sometimes like to say that you can leave the Church, but you can’t leave it alone (ironic in cases when outreach to former members can be intrusive or overly insistent). While this is usually intended as a critique of the one who has left, it shouldn’t be any surprise. Every relationship that ends remains with us. We ruminate. It’s how we make meaning and process our grief. It can go too far or be negative if we focus solely on the trauma, like Sisko returning to the violent death of his wife, but it can honor our growth if we accept all parts of the past, take the gifts and move on.
- Have you experienced personal loss like this? How have you processed your grief?
- What advice do you have for others based on your own experience with grief?
- Do you find yourself talking to the dead or thinking of them in the present tense?
Discuss.
Wheat & Tares 
Fascinating post! The thought I had while reading it is that events are linear, but we are not. We carry the past with us, we drag the future into the present by worrying and planning. We are past-present-future all in a bundle, coping and reacting to events that are fixed in time. No wonder we struggle so much!
Recently, I’ve been reflecting on the holes in my memory. I’ve been listening to Mormon Stories. John Dehlin always starts his interviews with questions about childhood and what family and Church were like. I don’t really know anymore. I can tell you some things about my childhood; some things I can piece together. I don’t quite trust my recollections of my childhood. And like you, I don’t want to go back and read my childhood journals either.
My grief, and the greatest losses I’ve experienced, are all connected to trauma. Trauma does strange things to memory. Not just memory, trauma has a huge impact on how we handle things in the present. That’s what it means to be triggered. Something in the past overwhelms your ability to cope with a present event or a current relationship. Like Sisko, we are anchored to the past and it shows up in the present. It also poisons the future, due to the fear of always being like this.
My Mormonism is a bundle of past, present, and future as well. It’s connected to my trauma, it’s so present in my extended family that some of the reason I avoid them is because Church is so pervasive. I’ve accepted that I’ll never really “get over” being raised Mormon. Instead, I’ll learn to someday peacefully co-exist with its impact on me. Maybe someday it will crumble away into the same memory holes where much of my family of origin is, disappearing out of my present as I try so hard to let go of my past enough to be happy in the present.
My efforts to live and find joy are not linear. This post really has made me think. I meditate and carve out time to remind myself to anchor in the present. It’s an effort to stay in the present. It’s less effort than it was, and I hope it gets easier. But there’s a price to that. It costs me some memories; it costs me relationships with people who remind me too much of the things I must forget. For example, there’s a woman at work who is friendly and fun, and I avoid her because she reminds me too much of someone I need to forget.
What a beautiful and thoughtful post. Thank you. And my condolences to you.
Time travel and time loops were a big part of various Star Trek plots. One that has stayed with me was a scene from the Next Generation movie Insurrection, where the woman Anij had the power to slow down and almost freeze the passage of time. She did so in a garden scene with Picard, freezing and extending that “perfect moment.” Which made me reflect on “perfect moments” or experiences with various family members. Those are good memories, good moments, to identify and hold tight.
Speaking of triggering…. I’ll come back to how Hawkgirl triggered my trauma.
When I was struggling to process, understand, and root out the damage of an abusive childhood, my counselors had listened. My bishop jump down my throat over and over for “wallowing in it.” He told me I was worse that my abuser because I was “unforgiving” and forgiveness was not the problem at all. Refusing to get angry at my father and blaming myself was the problem. But my bishop could not stand for me to even approach anger at my father because dear bishop was identifying with my father rather than with me. He was, after all, a father to daughters he loved and he could not stand the idea of that kind of anger directed at any father. So, he carefully did not let me go near any anger at the abuser, but somehow was just fine with me blaming myself.
So, our guy in Star Trek was not “stuck”. He didn’t need to let it go. There was something he needed to figure out. So, he was pondering looking for something. Now, knowing how survivors of a loved one’s death react, he was probably looking for what he could have done differently to have saved her. The answer is most likely nothing. But it is important to know if you are making a mistake and allowing others to be killed. But sorry, humans go back and review until they figure it out. No amount of nagging, shaming, or suggesting they move on will change it. If you really want to help, do *not* suggest they stop wallowing in their misery. But help them figure out what they need to learn, then help them learn it. Those weird nonlinear aliens had it right by going WITH our Star Trek hero into his past and reviewing with his how his wife was killed. It is called complicated grief and you don’t even start to really grieve the person until you get over your own misplaced guilt that you should have somehow prevented it.
So, Hawkgirl triggered that trauma of the bishop shaming me for returning to the past by suggesting we humans get “stuck” and really should just choose to move on with life. NO! Not until you figure it out. Denial does not work. When people “can’t” forgive, or can’t move past a violent death, it is Not. A. Choice. You are stupid to try to just go on with life when blaming yourself. For your own mental health, you need to figure out what it is you need to figure out. Now, for our Star Trek hero, it was probably that when the aliens sat with him, calmly watching through what happened, he was able to see that really he did all he was capable of. He actually protested to the aliens about “why do you keep bringing me back here?” He did not want to go back. But he needed to in order to see that he did everything he could to save her. Funny, as a rape victim counselor that was what I did. I went back with them and we carefully examined whose choice it really was and if she did everything she could. And funny, but the victims who really had done something high risk then knew that taking a guy home after having too much to drink was pretty stupid and not to do it again and then they were on the road to recovery.
People never choose to dwell on miserable or traumatic memories. They don’t decide not to forgive. They are looking for the lesson they need to learn to prevent *that* from happening again. Or they are looking for what they did to deserve what happened. Or they are trying to get angry at the correct person. They are stuck, not because they are bad, but because they are trying to heal the injury.
oh, yeah, I had rape victim clients who had gone on with life as others told them to do, and 30 years later, they were still hurting because they had been too afraid to go back and really look at the past. The tragedy is that other people almost demand that you not “dwell” on things like that. They want to push you through too fast before you have time to process because they are too damned selfish to go back with you. So, they tell you to “move on” and “don’t dwell in the past” and “what is done is done” when it’s not really done at all. All they do is force you back into denial or pretending nothing is wrong.
So, trigger all processed by going back to a male bishop who could not put himself into a woman’s pink moccasins. See, I went back to the past and figured it out instead of yelling at Hawkgirl.
I like Dave B’s thought on perfect moments. I have learned that when I feel joy, to take a mental photo. I purposely put it in permanent storage, rather than just let it pass. One, was at the top of the world’s tallest gothic Cathedral, looking out at the view with my family in Germany. One was on a camp out in Utah’s mountains while I was cooking home grown summer squash and my in laws were playing with my children. One was when I was alone in the desert of Arizona, with no sound but the wind. Then, carried on the wind, I heard the sound of a Native American flute. Going back in memory to these perfect moments can bring back the feelings of love, wonder, beauty and the more details you can remember, the better to recall the feeling. For a few moments, my father in law is pushing my son on a high swing out over a creek.
Thank you for a timely and well-crafted post.
In the past nine months, I have mourned the loss of three beloved friends. Each was close in age to me and, in my mind, passed far too young. Such events naturally give pause as I contemplate my own mortality. In that context, I perceive life and time as being linear – i.e., from a beginning to an end. It is as if our unavoidable destiny is to be placed in a flower adorned box, wheeled to the front of a nondescript room, and ultimately be forgotten.
I find myself yearning for the ability to engage in just one more of the soul-baring conversations often unique to close friends. Time has accelerated and become a specter of wringing every opportunity to foster relationships with friends and family – knowing this existence will end.
St. Augustine captured my troubled mind well:
“What is time then? If nobody asks me, I know; but if I were desirous to explain it to one that should aske me, plainly I do not know.”
Or perhaps Jack Handey did have a real “Deep Thought”:
“I hope life isn’t a big joke, because I don’t get it”.
Great post. Grief and loss reshape us and reform us and it’s sometimes hard to the tell the difference between the natural process of being shaped by grief and “holding on too tightly” to the past. I was not close to my parents, who were responsible for a great deal of the stress and alienation I experienced growing up, so I did not mourn their passing. However, I did mourn the loss/break up of my family after my ex made a series of unfortunate and hurtful decisions. Not the same as mourning a death, of course (my kids are great, my ex is alive and well, etc.), but it did teach me a bit about dealing with grief. I’m not very good at giving advice on this, because we all grieve in our own way, but I guess I’d say the following:
I’ve also noticed (no offense to folks who believe or who feel that God/Jesus helped them through loss) that no-one and nothing can help you. Processing grief is a lonely road, one that has no companions. I think you can talk through things with people, and that’s helpful, but no-one can take away your pain or your despair or your sense of having lost something incredibly important. There’s no way through but through, as they say.
On leaving the church and not leaving it alone. I have heard from many ex-Mormons about the church not leaving them alone. Also, for many who leave the church, they still regularly interact with loved ones who are believers and active in the church. The church still surrounds many people even though they leave it. The church simply doesn’t like handling criticism.
On grief, I’ve lost my brother and that gave me unexpected grief. Unexpected because we weren’t close. I hadn’t been in much contact with him for years. But I was devastated to learn of his death.
Break-ups and divorce are a source of grief as well. There was a girl I was dating in my 20s and we were extremely close. So close I thought we would marry. Our relationship veered into instability and ended in an extremely catastrophic way that left me in a horrible emotional state. That was 20 years ago. Honestly I’ve never fully gotten over that. The trauma of that break-up still reverberates within. It isn’t even that I would want to be with her or marry her at this point. It was simply how it ended. The thing is that I’ve experienced other break-ups. Some I initiated and others the other person initiated. But I got over those. It is hard to be so close to someone on so many levels and then have that person completely reject you and treat you like a pariah. I didn’t even do anything traditionally “wrong” such as cheat or lie or verbally abuse or anything of that sort. But relationships are complex and they can reach points of no return. But from a grief perspective, it was that break-up that has left me with trust issues with people in general, anger issues as well. Individuals can be your everything and then turn on you in an instant and want nothing to do with you. It has made me generally wary of relationships in general. Mentally I am always prepared for the moment a close person might turn on me and work to accept well in advance the possibility of being alone.
When I was a child, I loved legos. I would build all sorts of spaceship-type things with the random legos we had (no fancy sets). One time, I built this cool little spaceship and was playing with it at the top of the stairs. It, of course, fell down the stairs – and I could not figure out how to rebuild exactly what it had been. But, in trying to rebuild it, I actually was able to build something more streamlined and better (in my child-mind).
I thought of that experience when reading Brother Sky’s comment about not being able to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. I agree that it can’t be ever put together exactly how it was again – whether that be Humpty Dumpty or other source of grief and loss. I think the “beauty for ashes” can – emphasis on can – come from putting together something else with some or all of the pieces. Sometimes, it will be better, like my lego spaceship. but perhaps other times, it will just be different. But whatever the case, I feel that one of the beauties of being human is that we can, and do, rebuild our lives. The resulting, rebuilt life takes on a beauty all its own, just like the Japanese art of kintsugi (mending pottery with gold). Is it stronger? More efficient? More attractive? No idea. But it is ours, and it is beautiful for its own qualities.
I feel that stirring emotion as I write this, though I – like every single one of us – carry grief that I have not resolved yet. Which still anchors me at the most inopportune of times. But I still hold on to the hope of growth and perspective, because I still believe that this life has meaning and purpose.
And any post that uses Star Trek DS9 or TNG as inspiration/allegory/example is a winner in my book.
Anna: “They are stuck, not because they are bad, but because they are trying to heal the injury.” Yes, a perfect way to encapsulate the experience of trauma in our past. My mother spent a lot of her time relitigating the past, grievances about the difficulties she experienced growing up. The people she was mad at were long dead, and they did wrong her. I’m not sure she ever fully got over the past. I’m sure I am also still carrying past traumas. It’s one thing that bothered me about the episode, although the other aspect of the episode that they were addressing is that the beloved Captain Picard was the one responsible for his wife’s death and also the one who gave him the new assignment. We viewers, fans of Next Generation, knew that Picard was also a victim, but Sisko’s grief and lack of relationship with Picard cast the relationship in a strictly one dimensional, negative light.
At the funeral today a sister-in-law talked about how every person we know has a unique perspective of us. There are as many different versions of us as there are people we know. I thought this was another valuable perspective.
Brad D: “many who leave the church, they still regularly interact with loved ones who are believers and active in the church” So true. When I go to the place I grew up, I get together with my ward friends, none of whom remain active in the church. Whether they attended or not at this point is irrelevant. We were friends as teens, and those are bonds that can last a lifetime. We can pick up where we left off.
De Novo: Loving the Jack Handy quote! An accidentally deep Deep Thought. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
I am really enjoying everyone’s comments here, and I’m seriously bewildered by the downvotes. What up with that?
My brother died unexpectedly in October. I have reached the point where I don’t think about that every day. And yet I would say that at least once a week I have a dream where I am doing something with my brother and then I wake up and have to lose him again.
My father has been dead 30 years. We fought a lot when I was growing up. Things got better as I got older, but then he died and the stopped any further evolution of our relationship. I don’t think about that much any more, but there are times it comes up and it still makes me wish we could have figured more of a relationship out.
So I agree with Brother Sky, you can’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again. The wounds can scab and they can get quite calloused, but they don’t ever heal completely. And they can get torn back open. I wonder if we are the only species that holds the memories of our dead for a lifetime.
I was listening to an old Hidden Brain episode that interviewed a man who built an AI company with “virsonas” , basically a virtual persona chatGBT version of a person so you didn’t have to grieve their death because you could keep talking to their virsona. He did this so he wouldn’t need to grieve the loss of his mother. He said he thought it would be the greatest thing if we didn’t have to grieve. I realized I thought he was stupid. I am not saying grief is a good thing, but it is one of the things that makes us human. Yes I would rather never to have to grieve, but death is a reality and to hide behind some fake relationship with a LLM bot instead of grieving the loss of a very real person seemed like a disaster. Perhaps not surprisingly his marriage ended after that.
I do wish that one day we can reconnect with our loved ones. I don’t think that is very likely, but I do wish it were so. But in the mean time, I will carry the grief of loss with me and try not to let it overwhelm me but instead use it to cherish the family and friends I still have
My father died on the 6th of December (bleak midwinter indeed). A few months of intense projects at work, but I have had six weeks now for more introspection. And he was not very emotionally mature although we had some deeply meaningful moments together at his deathbed. My mom died in 2016 at a fairly young age. I do speak aloud to them in the present, regardless of my lack of faith in LDS Inc.
With a bit of controversy, the Salt Lake Bees minor league baseball team is opening a new stadium in the suburbs away from downtown. I will be there this weekend, using only one of my two tickets, with my dad’s favorite cap and baseball glove in the chair beside me.
Oh yes, DS9. They also killed off mirror Jennifer.
Last December I watched the dark comedy netflix series “Dead to Me”. The grief stricken mother keeps calling her son on the cell phone (I’m guessing she has a family plan). I’m like, yep, this must be a universal experience. I text a dead person.
I have no advice. I don’t think it’s rational to call dead people (damn stupid if you ask me), but humans aren’t rational.
Thought some more about this. Maybe cell phones have replaced talking to tombstones. Never saw the point of visiting graves or texting dead people.. Calls to mind the Verizon ad–Can you hear me now. Which brings up the Freya Ridings song from the animated masterpiece Arcane. “I can’t hear it now” which is sung over a funeral drawn in charcoal. The lyrics in part,
” And there is a silence so soft it’s only memory
Like the way your voice always sounds when you sing to me
But I can’t hear it now
Just tell me how to keep breathing while pretending I’m not drowning
I don’t know if I could
I watched a door close for good
‘Cause I couldn’t keep it open
I just watched as the door closed for good
‘Cause I couldn’t keep it open”
So as to the question of processing grief, perhaps that’s a function of music. It keeps us breathing while we’re drowning.