Jean Piaget formed a theory of cognitive development that included the idea of “schema,” or basic building blocks of knowledge. We know things, we have ideas, and we categorize this information into boxes that make sense to us. When new information comes along, it either fits into our schema (we “assimilate”) or it doesn’t fit, and we have to “accomodate” by expanding our schema.
For example, a young child has a dog at home and learns the word “dog.” She goes out into the world and sees other dogs, bigger, smaller, and they are all “assimilated” into her existing schema, and called “dog.” When she sees a horse for the first time, she may well call it “dog.” But at this point, the adults in her life will laugh and tell her this is a “horse.” They’re helping her “accomodate,” to expand her schema to include new categories.
Galway Franciscan Priory, Ireland
Death busts a whole bunch of schema.
I think a whole lot of the psychic pain that we experience around death is exactly because of this: the schema we have constructed are not adequate for the new reality that presents itself to us.
We have to restructure our entire inner life. This is not a quick or easy process.
Just this last week, I was pondering over this whole idea of our schema being broken by death, how everything must be rebuilt and accomodated into new schema, and how difficult this work is, right when you have so little emotional energy available for the task.
I was thinking about the fact that one of the ways we can identify schema is by the language that surrounds them: is it a dog, or a horse?
When we come across new information, and we have language for it, that makes creating a new schema almost automatic.
This is why we give children language for their emotions: we’re teaching them that their experience, while it may be difficult, is normal for humans. We know it, we name it, we have shared experience, we create community. “You’re crying, you’re sad, yes, I feel that way too sometimes.”
And then I realized, we literally have no language as a culture for some of the new schema around death.
We have language for some of it, for the death experiences our culture deems normal, expectable.
If you lose your parents, you are an orphan.
If you lose your spouse, you are a widow or widower.
Both of these experiences are terrible, painful losses, but they are normal to human experience. We can expect to lose our parents, and very often a spouse, simply to the ravages of time.
Here’s the thing I realized last week.
If you lose a sibling, there is no word.
If you lose a child, there is no word.
This experience that totally defines my life now? It has no word.
The lack of language to categorize oneself in connection to this enormous loss is one more isolating factor in an experience of traumatic devastation.
My experience is so threatening, so off-limits, so outside of what anybody wants to talk about, that there is literally no word for it.
A sibling, that person who intimately shared our childhood with us, whose DNA is almost exactly the same as our own, who was supposed to share the burdens of old age and the joy of lasting memories with us.
Who am I without that person?
There is no word.
A child, my arrow to the future, that part of myself that was meant to send my own light out further into the universe after I was gone.
Who am I without my child?
There is no word.
The loss of those relationships is so deep that there is no word to define the person who survives it.