A Grief Acquaintance (Sara Flores)

During the fall of 2024, I was watching a new documentary on Julia Alvarez, one of my favorite authors. At one point during an interview segment, Alvarez mentions her short novel Afterlife and describes it as her version of the book of Job. I was shocked I hadn’t known this before. Afterlife was first published in April of 2020, but I hadn’t gotten around to reading it. After finishing the documentary, I checked out a copy of Afterlife as soon as I could and read it. 

It wrecked me.

In the last 5 years, my family has experienced a lot of loss. I’m blessed to come from a large, loving family. But when you have a large family, death is never that far off. Prior to 2020, I had already been to many funerals for great-uncles, great-aunts, and cousins. I thought I was used to grief. However, grieving these more recent deaths (including 3 of my 4 grandparents) has been painful for me in ways I hadn’t experienced previously. I remember one semester telling my students, “I know this sounds fake, but another one of my family members has died.” I didn’t know what else to say. In the spaces between these losses, there have been several harrowing medical diagnoses and more routine, though still stressful, procedures, and it has all just felt like too much to process.

So if I had read Afterlife in 2020, I think I would have been ready for a story about a recently retired English professor dealing with the sudden loss of her husband. But I would like to think that the novel found me when I really needed it.

There are a couple of lines from the novel that I’ve found myself thinking about often. Part of protagonist Antonia’s grief process involves fielding the sorrow that unexpectedly arises when something reminds her of her husband, Sam. In one of these moments, “She recalls friends consoling her after Sam’s service, saying that the hole in her heart would heal with time. But Antonia suspects this is not quite what will happen. More likely she will learn to live with a hole in her heart” (97). 

When I wrote my 2020 Carver Connections post, I was just becoming acutely aware of how uncomfortable I am with expressing my emotions in front of other people. It sounds silly to me now, but I guess I thought I had achieved some level of adulting where taking care of myself meant hiding my messy emotions, not just in public with strangers or acquaintances but with trusted friends and loved ones as well. The last five years have taught me that pretending I don’t have a hole in my heart isn’t sustainable. 

This isn’t new information; I’ve listened to plenty of podcast episodes and read many articles and social media posts about the importance of expressing feelings in healthy ways, but for much of my life, I viewed complete self-sufficiency as a virtue. (I’ve joked that it’s the nineteenth-century Americanist in me—self-reliance and all that.) I think perhaps I’ve taken this too far, though, and equated seeking support from others with depending wholly on others. Maybe knowing when to ask for help can be part of self-sufficiency. 

Reading about Antonia’s grief journey and moving through my own has made me reflect on that incredible line from Isaiah 53, when the prophet describes the messiah as “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” It’s amazing to know that God knows how I feel. In this way I’m reminded of my nephews and nieces: they may be very little (and not exactly models of self-sufficiency), but they have big feelings, and they certainly are not shy about communicating how they feel in whatever ways they can. Maybe childlike faith involves saying how you feel and trusting that you’re loved and known even when your emotions are messy. Maybe being more open and trusting is how I learn to live with a hole in my heart. 

Afterlife offers an additional way, and it has stuck with me. Alvarez writes: “What, if anything, does it mean? An afterlife? All she [Antonia] has come up with is that the only way not to let the people she loves die forever is to embody what she loved about them. Otherwise the world is indeed depleted” (115). I love this. I love that this idea of afterlife encompasses both the lost and those living with loss, and it makes me feel hopeful. We can contribute to the world through our everyday actions and in doing so honor the memory of those we’ve lost. In this way, I feel like I can keep learning from their extraordinary, ordinary lives, no matter how long they were on this earth. To quote Switchfoot (still my favorite band), “I’ve got a wound that doesn’t heal,” but I’m so grateful for the loved ones, past and present, helping me learn how to live with it. 

Sara Flores is part of The Carver Project’s reading group for graduate students in the humanities and a PhD candidate in the Department of English at Washington University in St. Louis.

Read Sara’s previous article from 2020: “Hallelujah Nevertheless”