Although The Casebook of Elisha Grey is science fiction/fantasy (or speculative fiction if one takes it as an alternate history), the events and characters who experience them are influenced by "real life" (whatever that actually is....) -- in other words, what happens between them is built upon the adage "write what you know."
Over the years I have come to realize that the process of grief is one of the most humanizing, even though it is painful and the resolution of that grief can take much longer than those who stand by wondering why we still bear the weight of it. Here's an essay I wrote on that very subject, and it goes to a recurring theme in Casebook: how do friends express their grief when someone they love is taken from them suddenly?
Why does the song “Kiev” by Renaissance make me cry – and I’m drawn to listening to it repeatedly?
A friend’s comment about how the song made her cry so she couldn’t listen made me think a while.
As a person who grieves, I’ve become aware that the process of grieving has opened my soul and heart more to others than it was before. As an empath, this is a challenging spiritual road which I welcome despite the moments of discomfort. Within the discomfort is the profound recognition that deep affection and connection to another changed me forever – and still does. (Both Kiara Ptolmai and Kamay Pellay are empaths.)
The key lyric in this song is a two-fold problem: it’s not just about the death of a father, but also about how the son never shared the love he had while his father was alive, so upon his father’s death, his grief was doubled. To not share our love with another is to die even while we are still living.
An old man stands by the side of the grave
And this man's heart is too heavy to pray
For he is numb with the pain
Of the love that he couldn't share
Until he died there in Kiev today
James McCarty & Betty Thatcher, lyricists
In my working with my personal grief, I’ve become aware that grief is the emotion that makes us the most human we can be – it connects us to our community on a profound level. It opens our heart to being more sensitive to others.
The challenge is this: in modern American culture, this awakening of our most human, graceful, loving selves through grief is confronted by a culture that doesn’t encourage, or recognize, meeting each other as human beings, but as things.
Love is reduced to sex or craving. People are reduced to commodities (a notion that Elisha Grey has mentioned in the story about "The Missing Daughter"). Individuals are more engaged with their own ideas than they are with any impetus to genuinely know another human being as a human being – rather, another human being is only a means to an end.
Life is a temporary and terminal proposition. Our time here is ephemeral. The best part of ourselves – the ability to love someone truly and deeply within the framework of a mutually agreeable relationship, whether collegial, fraternal, or familial; whether that between friends, lovers, or life partners – is defined, finally and ultimately, by how we grieve.
We live in a culture, in modern America, where grief is not allowed. It is misunderstood. It makes others uncomfortable. It has been defined as a mental disease – as if it was an unnatural state. Many cultures throughout time and across the globe would disagree on that count. Homer even recounted in The Iliad the custom in wartime of allowing each side to take the evening to build funeral pyres for their fallen comrades so they could put pennies on their eyes to pay Charon to take their souls over the River Styx to Hades. This was a ritual that wartime wouldn’t interrupt. Yet in our culture, the rituals are cursory, the recognition of grief is ignored, and when that happens, the awareness of our deep, rich capacity to genuinely love one another as human beings is ignored as well. (The culture of Atlantis has more in common with America than one might think...which makes these stories, in part, cautionary tales.)
And so, our grief is compounded by the very callousness of the culture that surrounds us. Grieving over loss – whether it is the death of a loved one, the loss of health, of livelihood – is what makes us most human. For those of us who recognize that we grieve, we remain confused about why those around us don’t want to step into the true, heart-centered human condition that is there waiting for them. With great sorrow comes great joy. Without sorrow, joy is hollow.
We are not things. We are souls with hearts housing spirits that can soar to the heights, dive to the depths, and then rise again.
At this turning point in Atlantean culture, during the Second Age, there is a collision of two worlds: the world of those who recognize that traditions that make a community are important, and the world of those who are willing to dispense with community for the sake of their own immediate gratification.
In the spirit of Gene Roddenberry, who brought many ethical/moral issues to light in the original Star Trek series, I strive to do the same thing. With our cultures' increasing inability to recognize or accomodate grief -- which includes honoring the dead, a concept that the ancient Chinese recognized that, when it was being abandoned was the sign of the destruction of their civilization -- I consider it a subject that not only has an ethical/moral premise for us as individuals and as members of a community, but as one that can deepen our souls' understanding of why we are here.
Which is to love one another.
Art: Frederic, Lord Leighton, "Electra at the Tomb of Agamemnon".
Over the years I have come to realize that the process of grief is one of the most humanizing, even though it is painful and the resolution of that grief can take much longer than those who stand by wondering why we still bear the weight of it. Here's an essay I wrote on that very subject, and it goes to a recurring theme in Casebook: how do friends express their grief when someone they love is taken from them suddenly?
Why does the song “Kiev” by Renaissance make me cry – and I’m drawn to listening to it repeatedly?
A friend’s comment about how the song made her cry so she couldn’t listen made me think a while.
As a person who grieves, I’ve become aware that the process of grieving has opened my soul and heart more to others than it was before. As an empath, this is a challenging spiritual road which I welcome despite the moments of discomfort. Within the discomfort is the profound recognition that deep affection and connection to another changed me forever – and still does. (Both Kiara Ptolmai and Kamay Pellay are empaths.)
The key lyric in this song is a two-fold problem: it’s not just about the death of a father, but also about how the son never shared the love he had while his father was alive, so upon his father’s death, his grief was doubled. To not share our love with another is to die even while we are still living.
An old man stands by the side of the grave
And this man's heart is too heavy to pray
For he is numb with the pain
Of the love that he couldn't share
Until he died there in Kiev today
James McCarty & Betty Thatcher, lyricists
In my working with my personal grief, I’ve become aware that grief is the emotion that makes us the most human we can be – it connects us to our community on a profound level. It opens our heart to being more sensitive to others.
The challenge is this: in modern American culture, this awakening of our most human, graceful, loving selves through grief is confronted by a culture that doesn’t encourage, or recognize, meeting each other as human beings, but as things.
Love is reduced to sex or craving. People are reduced to commodities (a notion that Elisha Grey has mentioned in the story about "The Missing Daughter"). Individuals are more engaged with their own ideas than they are with any impetus to genuinely know another human being as a human being – rather, another human being is only a means to an end.
Life is a temporary and terminal proposition. Our time here is ephemeral. The best part of ourselves – the ability to love someone truly and deeply within the framework of a mutually agreeable relationship, whether collegial, fraternal, or familial; whether that between friends, lovers, or life partners – is defined, finally and ultimately, by how we grieve.
We live in a culture, in modern America, where grief is not allowed. It is misunderstood. It makes others uncomfortable. It has been defined as a mental disease – as if it was an unnatural state. Many cultures throughout time and across the globe would disagree on that count. Homer even recounted in The Iliad the custom in wartime of allowing each side to take the evening to build funeral pyres for their fallen comrades so they could put pennies on their eyes to pay Charon to take their souls over the River Styx to Hades. This was a ritual that wartime wouldn’t interrupt. Yet in our culture, the rituals are cursory, the recognition of grief is ignored, and when that happens, the awareness of our deep, rich capacity to genuinely love one another as human beings is ignored as well. (The culture of Atlantis has more in common with America than one might think...which makes these stories, in part, cautionary tales.)
And so, our grief is compounded by the very callousness of the culture that surrounds us. Grieving over loss – whether it is the death of a loved one, the loss of health, of livelihood – is what makes us most human. For those of us who recognize that we grieve, we remain confused about why those around us don’t want to step into the true, heart-centered human condition that is there waiting for them. With great sorrow comes great joy. Without sorrow, joy is hollow.
We are not things. We are souls with hearts housing spirits that can soar to the heights, dive to the depths, and then rise again.
At this turning point in Atlantean culture, during the Second Age, there is a collision of two worlds: the world of those who recognize that traditions that make a community are important, and the world of those who are willing to dispense with community for the sake of their own immediate gratification.
In the spirit of Gene Roddenberry, who brought many ethical/moral issues to light in the original Star Trek series, I strive to do the same thing. With our cultures' increasing inability to recognize or accomodate grief -- which includes honoring the dead, a concept that the ancient Chinese recognized that, when it was being abandoned was the sign of the destruction of their civilization -- I consider it a subject that not only has an ethical/moral premise for us as individuals and as members of a community, but as one that can deepen our souls' understanding of why we are here.
Which is to love one another.
Art: Frederic, Lord Leighton, "Electra at the Tomb of Agamemnon".