Unkillable Grief Monsters

Of late I have been getting very into the television show Yellowjackets, and also into the Locked Tomb books by Tamsyn Muir. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that I have been into the books for a while and have only recently discovered the program, but that I am currently getting similar things out of them. Both of these are series that assess grief very openly and in great emotional and narrative detail. The overtly fantastical setting of The Locked Tomb is built, cosmologically, on grief (for loved ones, for the natural world, for human societies), and in the superficially more normal but still demon-haunted world of Yellowjackets grief is the only thing that gives the relationships between some of the characters their longevity and meaning.

I’ve long been partial to what I call “unkillable grief monster” characters in art and literature. It could be argued that in the West this sort of character goes all the way back to Achilles, if we interpret the μῆνιν Ἀχιλῆος that the Iliad depicts as a form of grief. Key touchstones in non-Western, or at least non-Greco-Roman-derived, literary traditions might include the voice of the 137th Psalm (“by the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept and remembered Zion”), and even Prince Kaoru from Genji monogatari, who has what Dostoyevsky called “civic grief” rather than grief for a particular person or place. Miss Havisham’s permanent, moratorial state of jiltedness in Great Expectations is not quite the same thing, but it is similar; she too inhabits a permanent snapshot of a past blow to her heart. Dickens is not especially generous to Miss Havisham, but this has not, traditionally, prevented readers from finding her situation touching.

Fundamentally this is a type of character who is a tomb for someone or something else. The Locked Tomb and Yellowjackets both dramatize this in an unusually externalized way since both narratives contain cannibalism; think of Achilles eating Patroclus’ corpse in his μῆνιν or Prince Kaoru attempting to physically ingest the Japanese body politic and you will start to understand some of these more recent works’ themes even if you have not read or watched either of them yourself. The bodies of some characters in these narratives physically become permanent mortuary sites for loved ones whom they simply cannot or will not put to rest.

All of this is horrifying to most people, including most people who have felt grief that intense in the past, but I think there is also an element of wish fulfillment to it. Entering a permanent state of grieving, becoming grief oneself in this very body, can be a power fantasy of sorts. These characters are people who try to eternalize their loss as a way of expressing its importance against the idea that they ought to “get over it” or “move on.” People who were not “over” the Oklahoma City bombings in 1995 within an arbitrary two-week timetable were pathologized as depressed; one of my least favorite public figures in the world, the notoriously abusive Russian figure skating coach Eteri Tutberdize, was in Oklahoma City for an ice show at the time of the bombing, and ever since I learned this about her it has been difficult not to surmise that she was treated with the coldness then with which she treats others now. Even the more generous and humane mourning period of Victorian Britain’s middle class tapered off after a year or two. The Locked Tomb has characters in it who have been in mourning for ten thousand years; Yellowjackets has characters who might very well end up being in mourning into eternity. This grief impels them to do horrible things, but another way of putting this might be that the grief allows them to do horrible things. In these narratives, people who have undergone tremendous loss and heartbreak are not made to conform to other people’s standards, are not made to settle for less sorrow.