Crushing grief: Ten years of Fish in Exile

How grief pushes us to learn

In 2017, a few days before my birthday, I bought Vi Khi Nao’s Fish in Exile from Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop in DUMBO. I was taking a class with Geoffrey Olsen (who I am forever indebted to for introducing me to this book), and the book was required reading. I think the class was on poets writing prose. The other book we read that Spring was Leslie Scalapino’s Dahlia’s Iris, a subject for another essay.

Brooklyn has its shiny, quirky, look-at-me-while-you’re-here-you-wont-see-this- anyplace-else places, but Berl’s was truly a fairy in a land of stick figures, as the only poetry bookstore in all of NYC. Now gone after 14 years, Berl’s, along with what DUMBO once was, is something to grieve for.

I reread Fish in Exile this month and the above-the-clouds elevation of the writing, the prismatic thinking, the uncanny empathy, the cinematic visuals, and the surgical details dazzled even more than the first time, if that is possible. This is a book of so many unexpected edges, and still I felt gently guided by arm through the deeps, for nowhere was there a pratfall. In all its absurdity, it makes so much sense.

Before I read Fish in Exile, my favorite novel (if anyone asked me) was The Trial by Franz Kafka, because of its originality, its absurdity, its refusal to connect any dots, and its stickiness. Fish in Exile is the August selection for the Weirdosphere book discussion group, known as Scrolls, based on my recommendation. If you’re not familiar with the Weirdosphere, it’s the online alternative academic arm of The Weird Studies Podcast. We’re reading books that are “zonal” this year. I really didn’t know what that meant at first, but I do think that that Nao has created a type of zone in Fish in Exile. It’s a liminal dreamlike zone that Ethos and Catholic share along with the sea and the fish who live in their home.

I love reading books a second time as more details, more flourishes, and more depths become apparent than the first time through. There’s such an absurdity and quirkiness to this book that makes the ache of loss so much more poignant and real. The jellyfish and bread that Ethos keeps in his haversack, the letters that Ethos writes to Moscow and the State of Connecticut are happily weird and perfectly normal details for a man that has lost his mind after losing his children.

Nao shattered the pattern of the grief novel, splattering shards of her characters lives across its pages. Grief is always profoundly new when experienced, and Nao conjured so many beautiful moments: the daisies that fall out of Ethos’s pants during an intimate moment with his wife (who he hasn’t been intimate with in forever) and Catholic watching Ethos build the aquarium: “I watch Ethos genuflect before the sheets of glass and the tubes of silicone, watch him run the blue tape around the body of the sheets, bundling them together like dynamite.” There’s no discussion of the ache, or the sense of loneliness, it’s all embodied; it’s all enacted through strange behaviors and the bizarre collaboration that they have getting the fish, naming the fish, dressing the fish, walking the fish, and building the aquarium.

In 2022, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth edition, Text Revision (DSM-5-TR) added Prolonged Grief Disorder or PGD to its long list of psychiatric diagnoses. To be distinguished from acute grief, the symptoms need to last longer than 12 months in adults or 6 months in children and adolescents. There are a number of other criteria, to be sure, and lots of research on what might cause some people to be more susceptible to a longer duration of grief.

This update was rather controversial, so much so that the Lancet published a letter titled, “DSM-5-TR turns normal grief into a mental disorder.” In it, the authors emphasize the variety of factors that impact grief, including cultural norms, support systems, trauma, history of losses, and other stressors. It’s a very passionate letter, written without much concern for blowback and clearly very human-centric. I would recommend reading it in its entirety to see what powerful professional advocacy can look like.

There is no uniform expiration date on normal grief. This is particularly true when the relationship with the person who died was very close or the death was catastrophic, such as deaths by suicide, homicide, or accident, or the death of child. Cacciatore and Frances 2022.

We form attachments as mammals, and in our minds those attachments are forever. They need to be, since we are social creatures who come and go. We need to have the stability of our primary attachments. If they go missing, we go into panic mode, with our stress hormones spiking, which motivates us to find the missing beloved.

“Bonding is like a cocked gun, and separation pulls the trigger.” O’Connor and Seeley 2022.

Yet, upon death this mindset of permanence comes into conflict with the reality of loss. At the time when we most need support, our support system is gone.

“Death of a loved one poses a unique and rare challenge, since the stream of information from semantic knowledge (persistence of the attachment figure’s existence) now conflicts with episodic knowledge of the death of the person (e.g., memory of the death event or funeral). We propose the Gone-But-Also-Everlasting theory to emphasize the dissonance between those two sources of information.” O’Connor and Seeley.

These conflicting realities—they are mine forever and they are gone—challenge learning and adapting to a new reality. Combined with high levels of stress hormones and a loss of support structure, learning, which requires the formation of new neural connections, is extremely difficult.

“Learning requires experience, and avoidance of things that remind the bereaved of the loved one’s death or absence will prevent accommodation of the information. Only through learning does the integration of the loss experience enable the restoration of a meaningful life. Ironically, grief-related rumination may actually serve the same function as avoidance. Grief-related rumination focuses on the counterfactuals (what ifs and would’ve/could’ve/should’ve); all of which are virtual reality scenarios that end in the loved one not dying.” O’Connor and Seeley.

In Fish in Exile, the reader experiences the incomprehensible loss of two young children to the sea. The absurdity of the main characters’ drive to bring their children back in the form of fish, clothed and walked on strings in a tremendous aquarium that fills the entire house, embodies the confusion, disbelief, and magical thinking that O’Connor and Seeley describe. And yet, their story is bounded by real-life milestones like Ethos’s withdrawal from his job as a school principal, Catholic’s affair, and later her tubal ligation.

“Although my mind confuses eruption for euphoria and devotion for diaspora, it clearly distinguishes today from tomorrow and yesterday from today. Or does it? Perhaps it blurs yesterday and tomorrow with the present so that life is one extended breath, minced to calendric intervals. Perhaps we are fit to perform only one duty: exhaling. Perhaps in life and in language, one can substitute one word for another word like pouring water from one glass into another. And perhaps I would like to surrogate exhaling for a more fitting dualistic jab: expiring.” Ethos’ thoughts from Fish in Exile, Vi Khi Nao.

While the elegy has existed as a form for millennia, its focus as a form for expressing grief is only a few hundred years old. Traditionally, it starts with a lament, moves to praise, and ends with comfort. One of the most famous elegies, Walt Whitman’s elegy for President Lincoln, "O Captain! My Captain! does not, however seem that comforting at the end: “Walk the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead.” but it does express profound grief extraordinarily well. Rilke’s famous Duino elegies are thought to express grief that is more existential than personal—perhaps quite fitting for today’s circumstances. One of the most powerful works of poetry is Mary Jo Bang’s Elegy, which she wrote to lament the loss of her son.

No More

Goodbye to forever now.

Hello to the empty present and.

Goodbye to the orchids woven

With something that looks like a seed weed.

Hello to the day

We looked out through

The juniper smudge

Burned to remember the moment…

Excerpt from No more by Mary Jo Band from Elegy

I am no stranger to grief. I lost two friends while I was in college and my roommate and closest friend very soon after graduating. My adoptive mother died when I was 42 and my father five years later. I lost an exe to suicide. But that doesn’t come close to what my children have lost during the their young lives due to the opioid epidemic. I have lost count of how many of their friends, lovers, and acquaintances have died. I admire their resilience. I know I have much grief ahead of me should I live long enough. I do believe in absurdity, in the empathy we develop reading fiction, in the power of poetry, in ritual and in creative expression most of all. These things may be the only way through it all. After all, we are born, we live and love, and we die.

References

O'Connor MF, Seeley SH. Grieving as a form of learning: Insights from neuroscience applied to grief and loss. Curr Opin Psychol. 2022;43:317-322. doi:10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.08.019

Cacciatore J, Francis A. DSM-5-TR turns normal grief into a mental disorder. Lancet Psychiatry. 2022;9(7):e32. doi:10.1016/S2215-0366(22)00150-X

Nao VK. Fish in Exile. Coffee House Press; 2016.

Scalapino L. Dahlia’s Iris: Secret Autobiography and Fiction. Fiction Collective Two; 2003.

Bang MJ. Elegy: Poems. Graywolf Press; 2007.

Whitman W. O Captain! My Captain! In: Sequel to Drum-Taps: When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom’d and Other Pieces. Gibson Brothers; 1865.

Rilke RM. Duino Elegies. Snow E, trans. North Point Press; 2001.