Unlike the study of physical medicine, knowledge of grief has not leaped with the centuries. You soon learn this if you attend meetings of the Compassionate Friends, a self-help group for people who have lost a child through illness, accident, suicide or murder. T.C.F. has more than 1,000 branches worldwide, one of them in Tasmania. While a gun blast has pretty much the same effect on anyone, grief penetrates us differently. Some people let it out, typically women.
Some people try to contain it, typically men.
For both, it can sit like a constant ache or recur in icy spasms. The poem from which those lines are taken was published almost two years after mother lost son. One of the misunderstandings of grief is that it runs for a set period, like a parking meter. Implicit is that they must forget. But grief desperately seeks memory, reaffirmation.