Why Some Stories Should Not Be Tidied Up

There is a shape we have been trained to force onto suffering, and it goes like this: the terrible thing happened, and it was hard, and yet — and yet — something was learned, someone grew, a silver lining was located, a meaning was extracted, and the whole business resolves into a story about resilience with the loss safely converted into a lesson. You have seen it a thousand times. The memoir that finds the gift in the diagnosis. The news segment that ends on hope. The eulogy that insists the death was not in vain. We are so used to this shape that we barely notice it is a shape, and we apply it automatically, to everything, including the things it does not fit, and I have come to believe that this reflex — the compulsion to tidy every grief into a meaning — is one of the small dishonest cruelties we routinely commit, and that resisting it is a real form of respect.

Because some stories do not have a lesson in them. Some losses are not secretly gifts. Some deaths are exactly as pointless as they appear, and the person did not die for anything, and nothing good came of it, and the survivors were not ennobled, they were only wrecked, and to arrive at that grief with your tidy shape in hand — to insist on the silver lining, the growth, the meaning, the everything-happens-for-a-reason — is not comfort. It is a small violence. It is lying about the loss to make yourself, the observer, more comfortable, and it does the one thing you should never do to a genuine catastrophe, which is to make it smaller than it was, to fold its bottomless wrongness into a manageable moral so that you do not have to stand in front of the actual size of it.

The insult of the reason

I want to be careful here, because meaning-making is not always wrong. People who suffer often do make real meaning from it, and that is theirs to make, and it is a genuine and hard-won thing when it comes from inside the grief. The violence is in the imposition — in the observer, the outsider, the audience, arriving at someone else’s catastrophe and demanding that it resolve, that it teach, that it uplift, that it justify itself by producing a lesson, because a story with a lesson can be closed and a story without one cannot, and we would so much rather close it.

Everything happens for a reason is the purest form of it, and it is, when said to a grieving person, one of the more quietly monstrous sentences in the language, because what it actually says is: your catastrophe is a plot device in a larger story with a happy ending, your dead child is a lesson someone needed to learn, the worst thing that ever happened to you was arranged, on purpose, for a payoff, and you should be able to see the payoff if you would just stop being so sad. It is meant as comfort. It is an obscenity. It takes a meaningless horror and, rather than sit with the unbearable fact of its meaninglessness, insists on a cosmic tidiness that reduces the dead to an instrument and the grief to an ingredient. And people say it, kindly, constantly, because the alternative — that some things just happen, and mean nothing, and cannot be redeemed — is a thing our whole narrative machinery is built to refuse.

The honesty of the open wound

So here is the discipline, and it is the same discipline as leaving a mystery unexplained and leaving a case unsolved, and it is the through-line of a great deal of what I believe: some stories should be left untidied, on purpose, as an act of respect for the truth of them.

To tell a tragedy straight — to say this happened, and it was terrible, and nothing good came of it, and here is the person we lost, and here is the hole they left, and no, there is no lesson — is far harder than tidying it, and far rarer, and far more honest. It refuses the silver lining not out of despair but out of accuracy. It keeps the loss its actual size. It lets the dead be dead rather than conscripting them into a moral, lets the grief be grief rather than an inspirational arc, and in doing so it does the mourners the one real service available to an outsider, which is to not lie to them about what happened. The untidied story says: I see how big this is. I am not going to make it smaller so that I can feel better. I am going to stand here in front of the full unredeemed size of it with you, and not reach for the reason, because there isn’t one, and you know there isn’t one, and everyone who has offered you one has been, however kindly, insulting your loss.

That is why I distrust the redemption arc, the located silver lining, the meaning extracted from the wreck. Not because meaning is bad, but because most of the time it is being imposed from outside, on someone else’s catastrophe, for the comfort of the imposer, and it makes the loss a lie. Some stories should not be tidied up. Some griefs have no lesson, and the honest thing, and the respectful thing, and the hardest thing, is to leave them exactly as ragged and pointless and enormous as they actually are, and to sit with them in that state, and to refuse, however gently you are asked, to close the wound with a moral that was never true.