The Last Word On Nothing

I have some unfinished business with an article I wrote. It was about grief, and it got a lot of questions and comments and though I’ve answered some already, I need to answer one more. The answer turns out to need a science metaphor. Science, which goes about its orderly business of sorting out the universe’s every detail, occasionally uses a phrase that turns out to be a metaphor useful for sorting out our own disorderly lives. I have a small, harmless obsession with science’s metaphors.

The question/comment comes from people who are grieving but aren’t sure they’re allowed to. Psychology calls this “disenfranchised grief.” My father died, these people say. Then they remember that my son died and they say, what I feel doesn’t even compare, does it, isn’t it so much worse for you? Or they say an old aunt died but she was very old; or a neighbor’s husband died but we weren’t that close; or a colleague from work died or a dog or cat died; or they’ve divorced or a child won’t speak to them; or a friend they’ve had for years died but he was just a friend. Except now they feel so sad, their lives are darkened, they keep thinking about this loss but they’re not sure whether they can even tell anyone about it, does it even count as grief? Psychology does have answers which involve checklists of symptoms and their severity from 1 to 5, etc., and the upshot is what you already know: yes, some losses are harder to carry than others and yes, what you’re feeling is grief. But chemistry has an answer too, and I like this one better.

I’m calling this particular metaphor, the ideal gas, but not quite correctly. Ideal gases are just regular gases like hydrogen that obey the ideal gas laws. Or more accurately, the ideal gas laws were made up to describe what ideal gases were already doing on their own. Which is, the higher their temperature, the higher their pressure and the higher their volume. I may have that wrong but never mind because it’s not the metaphor. The metaphor is a property these ideal gases have, it’s something they just do: they expand to fill the space available.

The gas is thin? it expands to fill the space available. The gas is hot? it expands to fill the space available. High-pressure? same. A lot of space? the gas expands to fill it. A tiny space? the gas expands to fill it. No matter how much gas there is or what space you’ve got, like air or smoke or fog, thick or thin, in the kitchen or all outdoors, the gas expands to fill the space available.

Grief hurts enough for anyone, it hurts as much as you can hurt. No matter whom you’ve lost, no matter how distantly or closely related, no matter what the loss, grief hurts. Grief is grief and it expands to fill the space available.

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photo: Amadvr via Wikimedia Commons