A paradox: The days that really live in our public memories aren't birthdays, they're death days. These are the days we're talking about when we say Where were you when. . . ? Each of us of course has indelible memories of personal joy or triumph – successes in love and work, marriages, the births of children, special festivities. Yet our communal history may be most deeply shaped by memories of collective trauma that are at least as powerfully inscribed in our minds as the official holidays that mark the turnings of the calendar year. A whole generation of people over seventy remembers where they were and what they were doing when Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbor. Several generations of people over fifty know where they were when John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas while most people over twenty have similarly vivid recollections of the day Princess Diana died in a car crash in Paris. And now masses of people over, say, the age of ten know just exactly where they were and what they were doing when the twin towers of the World Trade Center, along with a wing of the Pentagon, were destroyed on September 11, 2001.

Why is public pain so lastingly woven into the fabric of our remembrance? It seems likely that confronting terror together at impossible-to-forget times, we experience as a society, if only for a moment, what the French philosopher Georges Bataille called "disintoxication," a brief awakening from the "projects" of love and work that function, thought Bataille, like "narcotics" to help us repress the consciousness of our own mortality.¹ On these occasions, in other words, the fearful knowledge that we're usually (and rightly) good at evading erupts into our dailiness as death's door swings so publicly and dramatically open that we can't look away.

That door, and the shadows it casts on our private lives as well as on our collective memory, will be at the center of my thoughts here, as I examine what seem to be distinctively modern ways of dying, mourning, and memorializing that have evolved in the course of the last century. This book began nearly a decade ago as a project meant to return me to the practice of literary criticism after a long period of preoccupation with a grave personal loss. Invited in 1996 to deliver a special lecture on my own campus, I decided that I'd attempt to theorize contemporary renderings of the elegy and its close cousin the grief memoir, two forms to which I'd devoted most of my energy following the unexpected death of my husband in 1991. I drafted and delivered a talk on late-twentieth-century elegies and laments titled "The Handbook of Heartbreak," then developed my ideas further in a prospectus for a book that was to be called The Fate of the Elegy: Mourning, Modernity, and Poetic Memory. Here I proposed to consider a number of aesthetic and cultural issues as I addressed a central question in recent literary history, namely, how do poets mourn in an age of mounting theological and social confusion about death and dying?

As I explained to various granting agencies, I planned to argue in a fairly traditional academic mode that the fate of the elegy as a genre has been significantly affected by the cultural forces that have constructed what Wallace Stevens called "the mythology of modern death," and in doing this, I expected to explore the revisionary laments with which poets have for more than half a century responded to both "modern death" and modern modes of mourning while tracing some of their strategies back to at least the nineteenth century. My book, I told myself and others, would analyze texts by writers from Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Walt Whitman to Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, and others, contextualizing them with analyses of the crises bred by the disappearance of a traditional God, the testimonial imperatives fostered by the traumas of global warfare, the privatization of death associated with the increasing medicalization of dying, the new technologies of film and video that allow the dead to "live" on-screen, and the male/female dialectic out of which modernism itself was in part constituted.

When I started to research and write the book I'd outlined, however, I soon found myself in the midst of an enterprise that was, on the one hand, more autobiographical than the one I'd planned and, on the other hand, more ambitious in scope. I'd always realized that my interest in the poetics of bereavement was rooted in a need to reflect on my own practice as an elegist, and I also understood that my concern with the cultural was as personal as it was literary. Yet I was, and still am, somewhat startled by the continuity among the personal, the poetic, and the cultural that has infused both the style and the substance of what was an ostensibly impersonal professional project.

To explain how my meditations on the poetics of bereavement originated in musings on my own practice, I should begin by noting that I hadn't been able not to write the poems of grief that I collected in a book of elegies for my husband, nor had I been able to evade what I experienced as an urgent responsibility to draft a memoir about the medical cataclysm that ended his life. And I'd had to write both books with a testimonial passion that took me by surprise. Thus in the memoir I became a witness as well as the commentator I'd have been in a literary-critical work; in the poems I became not just a witness, as poets often are, but a journalist of my own sorrow, carefully dating and placing a number of my verses as I rarely had in the past. Why and how had my own writing been redirected in these ways? And if, as I supposed, I wasn't unique but at least in some respects representative of many contemporaries in my literary responses to bereavement, why and how was I representative?

Through the process social scientists sometimes label "introspection," I came to speculate that the insistence of my need to formulate the loss my children and I had suffered while producing a detailed narrative of the events in which our pain had originated was at least in part a protest against what I then only half realized were a set of social and intellectual commandments "forbidding mourning," to quote from the title of a famous poem by John Donne.² I think I felt driven to claim my grief and – almost defiantly – to name its particulars because I found myself confronting the shock of bereavement at a historical moment when death was in some sense unspeakable and grief – or anyway the expression of grief – was at best an embarrassment, at worst a social solecism or scandal.

I don't mean here to complain that my family didn't receive sympathy and support in our sorrow. It's hard to imagine that mourners could have encountered a more compassionate community of friends than the network surrounding and sustaining my children and me for months, indeed years. No, I'm thinking, rather, of a persistent, barely conscious feeling that I had throughout the worst days of grieving, a feeling that in my sorrow I represented a serious social problem to everyone except my circle of intimates, confronting even well-wishers with a painful and perhaps shameful riddle. I didn't at the time realize that this sense of embarrassment, even disgrace, was fairly common among the bereaved. It wasn't until several years after I'd entered my own tunnel of grief that I encountered C. S. Lewis's 1961 confession of the curious public anxiety that beset him when he was mourning the death of his wife, Joy: "An odd byproduct of my loss is that I'm aware of being an embarrassment to everyone I meet.... Perhaps the bereaved ought to be isolated in special settlements like lepers." Yet these words exactly described an important aspect of the mystifying oppression that had settled over me in my bereavement.³

I was wounded, yes, by my loss, and grieving because I was wounded, but at the same time I had a strange and strangely muffled sense of wrongness – "of being an embarrassment" – as though I incarnated something people would indeed like to isolate in a "special settlement." It was thus in reaction against my intuition of a pervasive social imperative to silence, isolate, or forbid mourning that I was driven to assert my grief, to name and claim my sorrow and my children's pain and above all my dead husband's suffering. And I believe other contemporary elegists have written out of these same impulses.

Precisely how, though, are literary responses to bereavement affected by barely spoken strictures against mourning? And how are such repressive forces, along with the elegiac gestures of defiance they elicit, related to the historical phenomena I'd all along meant to consider (though in a subordinate way) in my book: the crises bred by the disappearance of a traditional God, the traumas of global warfare, the privatization of death, the medicalization of dying, and so forth?

These questions turned me not only toward work that scholars in my own discipline have done on the elegy but also toward more general studies of death and dying, bereavement and mourning in Western cultures, especially the United States and other Anglophone societies. That the poetry of grief – exemplified most famously in the prestigious subgenre of the pastoral elegy (for instance, Milton's "Lycidas," Shelley's "Adonais," Arnold's "Thyrsis") – has changed radically since the mid-nineteenth century is a point that's been explored in scrupulously nuanced volumes authored by such critics and literary historians as Peter Sacks, Jahan Ramazani, Gail Holst-Warhaft, and Melissa Zeiger. And that our (Western) cultural attitudes toward death and dying, bereavement and mourning have also been radically transformed, perhaps especially in recent centuries – that, as I myself will put it here, history makes death just as surely as death makes history – is a phenomenon that's been investigated by a range of historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, including most notably Geoffrey Gorer, Philippe Ariès, and Zygmunt Baumann, while certain significant continuities have recently been examined by the literary scholars Robert Pogue Harrison and James Tatum.⁴

Whether or not the twentieth century was an age of "death denial" is, to be sure, an issue much disputed among journalists, social scientists, medical workers, and literary historians. Yet certainly there's consensus that by the second half of the century procedures for grieving were at the very least blurry and confused while cultural attitudes toward death and dying were so conflicted that in the 1990s a number of major social organizations began addressing the issues surrounding what both PBS and the Soros Foundation called "Death in America." By the year 2001, in addition to the usual self-help books by pop psychologists, television spiritualists, and other media "personalities," a number of serious volumes on dying, death, and bereavement had gained considerable attention. They included Sherwin Nuland's best-selling How We Die, Jerome Groopman's The Measure of Our Days, Marie de Hennezel's Intimate Death, and Studs Terkel's Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: Reflections on Death and Dignity.

Yet despite this new, multifaceted attention to death and bereavement, I was persuaded, as my research advanced, that no one had yet examined in depth the intersections among the personal, the cultural, and the literary that I was struggling to understand. Some literary critics had enriched their textual analyses with cultural observations, a number of social scientists had considered the impact of class, faith, and ethnicity on the expectations of the dying and their mourners, and a few of those who investigate death and bereavement had acknowledged that changes in elegiac modes are among the symptoms of sociocultural metamorphoses. But few thinkers had sought to synthesize different generic and disciplinary approaches to the emotional, aesthetic, metaphysical, and societal problems posed by what in the course of the twentieth century came to be called the "end of life."

Then, of course, nine months into the new millennium, as the twin towers of the World Trade Center exploded, flamed, and collapsed with "a slow, building rumble like rolling thunder" that roared through millions of television sets around the world, death itself seemed to have drilled a black hole in the American psyche, a gaping wound out of which a new awareness of mortality and even some new ways of mourning emerged. The very subject I'd been researching was now in flux around me, and it would be almost impossible for me to think of this book as primarily an "academic" enterprise.⁵

Thus, even as I began to organize the material that emerged from critical reflection and scholarly research into the book I'd proposed, I found myself writing in an unexpected way, fusing memoir and meditation with exposition and explication. Precisely the same testimonial urgency that had inspired my earlier poems of grieving and my memoir of personal loss was still infusing my work; there was evidently no going back, no chance of a full-scale retreat from personal witnessing to impersonal commentary. Because not only I but many of my contemporaries were living with considerable public drama through the very dilemmas I was studying, I couldn't sufficiently detach myself from the pressure of immediate experience to be wholly dispassionate. The solution? Either abandon the project or attempt what would be, for me, an unusual melding of the testimonial with the analytic, the personal with the professional.

Finally, I've had to understand that the book you're reading now is in some sense experimental, mingling the techniques of different genres (autobiographical narrative, cultural studies, literary history) in an effort to ground my investigation of the poetics of grief in the complexity and richness of what, for want of a better word, I'll name "the real." Along the way, as I pursued this investigation, I saw that taken as a whole, my completed study could no longer be titled The Fate of the Elegy because it had broadened into an examination as much of contexts as of texts. I was not only analyzing the lamentations that mourners utter when they find themselves stranded at death's door but also exploring the rapidly changing beliefs and customs that shape such lamentations as well as my own experience of such beliefs and customs.

Although throughout this volume I use the techniques of the three different genres I just mentioned, each does to some extent dominate a section of its own.

Every chapter in "Arranging My Mourning," Part One of Death's Door, begins with autobiographical narrative, and all five meditate, in one way or another, on what seem to be timeless and universal aspects of grief and mourning: the common belief in death as a plausible place, the haunting persistence of the very idea of haunting, the special meaning of widowhood in many societies, the widespread need to commemorate the date(s) of death and mourning, the (probably) transhistorical, perhaps even transcultural desire to communicate with the dead, and, inevitably, the ubiquitous urge to question and berate death. Throughout all five I juxtapose reflections on my personal experiences of mourning with discussions of poems that have illuminated those experiences for me along with analyses of the fears and hopes that seem to be broadly shared in human confrontations with mortality.

If the chapters of Part One begin with memoir; those in Part Two, "History Makes Death," are predominantly shaped by the techniques of what scholars now call cultural studies, with each drawing on the insights of sociologists, anthropologists, and historians to illuminate the particular aspects of death and dying as well as the specific procedures for grieving that seem to be distinctively "modern," sometimes even unique to the millennial moment we inhabit. Nevertheless, throughout these five chapters I continue to illustrate my points both with autobiographical reflection and with readings of individual poems, while examining in depth some of the topics with which I'd originally proposed merely to contextualize my study of the elegy: the crises bred by the disintegration of redemptive religious faith in many quarters, the traumatic impact of global warfare, the medicalization of dying, the effects of film and video on mourners, and the evolution of burial customs from the communal rituals of the country churchyard to the electronic rites of the "virtual cemetery" and memorial practices from the traditional requiem mass to the currently fashionable "life celebration."

Finally, in Part Three of Death's Door, titled "The Handbook of Heartbreak," I employ literary-critical strategies to explore what I called in my original book proposal "the fate of the elegy" in our time. But even here, as I consider the ways in which modern and contemporary poets in Britain and America have reshaped inherited modes of mourning in verse, I've felt impelled to test my readings of elegies and laments on my own pulse, through memoir and meditation, while also situating major elegiac works in the cultural settings I've sought to analyze throughout this project. Perhaps poets aren't really "the unacknowledged legislators of the world," as Percy Bysshe Shelley so extravagantly claimed, but I think many readers will sympathize with my belief that the achievements of twentieth-century figures from Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon to Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, and a host of others really do respond to, and thus dramatize, a kind of half-conscious, communal "legislation" that the world doesn't fully acknowledge in the prose of dailiness.

Endnotes

¹ Georges Bataille, Inner Experience. Trans. and with intro. by Leslie Anne Boldt. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988) p. xxxii.
² "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning," John Donne, The Poems of John Donne. Ed. Sir J.C. Grierson (London: Oxford University Press, 1933) pp. 44-45.
³ C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1961) pp.12-13.
⁴ Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). James Tatum, The Mourner's Song: War and Remembrance from the Iliad to Vietnam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). The field of death studies has also of course produced professional journals (e.g., Omega: The Journal of Death and Dying), at least one book series (the Springer Series on Death and Dying), and a number of Web sites, including www.thanatology.org
⁵ "Rolling thunder": see Anne Cronin, "After the Attacks: The Voices; a Black CLoud. A shower of Glass. A Glimpse of Hell. Run!" (New York Times, September 16, 2001).

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