Out, out, brief candle!

For crying out loud, you know I love you...

Who of us has not lost one we loved?

We all understand the shock and pain of grief.

It’s a personal response, a private struggle.

Yet human behaviour can astound us with its shabby ‘enjoyment’ of others’ sorrow.

We have to endure TikTok onlookers without tact or decent human empathy, endless social media speculation, analysis of facial expression, jibber jabber on whether the bereaved display ‘correct’ levels of grief.

And then there is the polar opposite response: denial, not wishing to discuss or share, not dare/not care to mention the lost, remain respectfully silent, battle inwardly.

No wonder we struggle when we see loss in others, when we feel it ourselves.

Shakespeare instructs us, as always.

“My grief lies all within,

And these external manners of lament

Are merely shadows to the unseen grief

That swells with silence in the tortured soul.” (RII, 4.1.)

Those words, that swells with silence in the tortured soul, exactly capture that overwhelming, silent pain suffocating from within.

Will’s writing on loss was profound. How exquisitely does he express Lord Capulet’s despair on seeing his young daughter, Juliet, suddenly and inexplicably dead:

“Death lies on her like an untimely frost upon the sweetest flower of all the field.” (R&J, 4.5.)

Shakespeare reveals his extraordinary understanding of a parent losing a child in King John, when Constance, believing her son to be dead, says:

“Grief fills the room up of my absent child.

Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me.

Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words.

Remembers me of all his gracious parts.

Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form.

Then, have I reason to be fond of grief.”

(KJ, 3.3.)

The awareness of the empty room, the remembrance of the child, his movement, speech, manner, all capture so poignantly the longing to keep the memory alive, as if they still breathed and held your hand.

Isn’t that beautiful? Isn’t that enough to make you weep?

That is compassion.

That is truth.

Opinions flit back and forth as to whether Shakespeare wrote that passage following the death of his own 11 year old son, Hamnet, or whether it was written before the tragedy.

As if he couldn’t possibly comprehend a parent’s loss without personally experiencing it.

I disagree.

When you consider the extent of his understanding of the human state, most of which he didn’t himself go through, it doesn’t really matter when it was written. It just captures so delicately and achingly the raw wound that is the longing for the lost child.

Shakespeare ‘gets’ what it is to love and lose.

In Hamlet, the King, on seeing Ophelia losing her mind, observes that she suffers: “the poison of deep grief.” (4.5.)

Henry VI despairs “what is in this world but grief and woe?” (Henry VI iii, 2.5.)

We are surrounded by it. None of us is untouched by loss.

And one of the toughest challenges is the grindingly long process of accepting it, becoming accustomed to the emptiness.

So what else can we take from Sweet Will’s words of wisdom and empathy?

Macbeth may well be a tyrant and butcher, but as he hurtles towards his own terrible fate he is confronted by the loss of his wife.

Ok, she is the almost the darkest, toughest, violently focused of all Shakespeare’s women, (Tamora in Titus Andronicus wins the ultimate devil-woman crown) but Lady M’s death knocks the wind utterly out of her husband’s sails.

"She should have died hereafter," he comments, adding

"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time . . . ." (M, 5.5.)

Macbeth is, despite his murderous descent, human, and here he stares down the long, draughty corridor of the rest of his life without his dearest partner-in-crime.

We understand that, at least. The crappy slow ticking of the clock as we attempt to adjust to life without the loved one.

He doesn’t have much time to mourn. Birnam Wood is on the move towards Dunsinane and a man-not-born-of-woman is advancing with a vengeful sword in hand. But just for that moment, Macbeth re-joins us, the rest of humanity, in his grief.

Richard II echoes this dreadful existence in a barren wasteland of endless time:

“Grief makes one hour ten.” (RII, 1.3.)

So, help us, Sweet Will.

How to crawl our way through this shadowy landscape of pain and isolation?

Malcolm, upon hearing of the MacDuff murders, urges MacDuff not to suffer in silence:

“Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak

Whispers the o'er-fraught heart and bids it break.” (Macbeth, 4.3.)

Speak what you feel, urges Shakespeare, and keep on doing so. Only when the words are said aloud do they slow down and ultimately stop crashing around in the desperate heart.

In Henry VI iii the young Prince Richard holds back tears because he wants to maintain the burning flames of vengeance and, he observes,

"To weep is to make less the depth of grief." (2.1.)

If we don’t follow Richard’s example, if we step away from stoking the fires of revenge, then let the tears flow and let the sting and fury flow out too – though it may take many hours, days, of tears.

There are those, Shakespeare observes, who pontificate on ‘getting over it’ without any sense of the depth and complexity of the emotions at play.

“...every one can master a grief but he that has it,” says Benedick in Much Ado. (3.2.)

Leonato later echoes Benedick by saying that only men who aren’t suffering loss themselves tell others to let go of their grief:

“…men

Can counsel and speak comfort to that grief

Which they themselves not feel; but, tasting it,

Their counsel turns to passion. (MAAN, 5.1.)

So talk it out, and talk it out again, with a good listener, a proper friend. One who doesn’t claim to have all the answers, but nor will tut and through gritted teeth suggest that you just ‘move on.’

Let time – your own good time - and friendship be balm.

And then something better happens. Through the talking and tears, the golden moments surface, the days of laughter and sunny nonsense return in memory.

This, this is the key.

"If you read this line, remember not

The hand that writ it, for I love you so

That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,

If thinking on me then should make you woe." (Sonnet 71)

Who wants to be remembered only with gut-wrenching misery?

I guess it's through the words, the talking and sharing, that the good stuff starts to emerge, that the person you lost steps back out into the sunlight of immortality, because in our minds and hearts and words, they are forever remembered and cherished.

“So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” (Sonnet 18)

I don’t know if this works for you, but I happily chat away to some of my dearest departed.

I feel that they are around, so why not talk to them?

And then, there’s music: that most powerful summoner of memories, soother of sorrows and companion in adversity.

“When griping griefs the heart doth wound,

and doleful dumps the mind oppress,

then music, with her silver sound,

with speedy help doth lend redress.” (R&J 4.5.)

As the Capulet household decends into shocked grief at the sudden apparent death of Juliet, the servant Peter has some banter with the musicians who were supposed to play for Paris and Juliet’s wedding. As was Shakespeare’s habit, to introduce a bit of comic relief just when the action gets a bit grim, Peter tries to get the musicians to play to ease his sorrowful heart.

The musicians reckon that, given the tragic events, it’s not the time to strike up.

But Peter has a point.

And the musicians do stick around, if only to get some of the food on offer. (Musicians never change 😊)

Claudio in Much Ado, lamenting the death of Hero, swears to lament at her tomb every night so that she lives for ever:

"So the life that died with shame

Lives in death with glorious fame." (MAAN, 5.3.)

Music, Will tells us, is central when dealing with grief. Not just at the funeral, though that is powerful and important.

Shakespeare's mourners are right: music can be essential to the process, help memories to flood in through the windows of grief, soothe, charm, heal.

Crying your eyes out as certain songs play allows pent-up emotions to have full expression. This isn’t indulging.

This is allowing the natural course of sorrow to run, from its source, to the sea.

I lost the ability to sing last summer, feeling myself in a joyless landscape of grief.

Except when I played Meatloaf.

I know, I know. What the hell?

But it can’t be helped – the man plumbs the depths and scales the heights of operatic emotion with some kind of raw humanity which tapped into my own sadness.

Driving constantly between my own home and Stratford-upon-Avon, backwards and forwards, over and over, I would constantly skip through my usual playlist, unable to find anything to soothe the endless miles of loneliness. Even my go-to calmers of a ravaged soul, Puccini, Offenbach, Vivaldi, Verdi, Chopin, had nothing for me but pain.

The only time my search paused and played was when that glorious vocal power let rip with Steinman’s genius songwriting.

Go on, give it a go...

As time wears on, singing has come back to me, but there are some pieces of music that will still ambush me with a sudden memory

or the lyrics have an unforeseen poignancy.

And I have learned to go with it, let the tears fall.

And the music ends, the tears slow and dry, and I take a breath and feel a step further out of the shadows.

My loved ones take another step into the sunlight of the immortality in which I hold them.

Take it from the words of the Bard: Accept. Allow. Speak. Weep. Breathe. Sing. Repeat.

It’s never going to be all bad.

“The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.” (AWTEW, 4.3.)

This is another bit of music that ambushes me with tears, then the next time I play it I'm just fine.

That's grief: a sea that washes in and out, overwhelms, then ripples gently, then disappears, then overwhelms...

I wish you all even tides, good friends, restorative tears, golden memories and sweet dreams.

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” (The Tempest, 4.1.)