Geometry of Grief: Reflections on Mathematics, Loss, and Life - Tapa blanda

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Michael Frame retired in 2016 as adjunct professor of mathematics at Yale University. He is coauthor of Fractal Worlds: Grown, Built, and Imagined and coeditor of Benoit Mandelbrot: A Life in Many Dimensions.

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Late in my eleventh year, Ruthie got sick. Hodgkin’s lymphoma, survivable now but not so much in the early 1960s. She was treated with the chemotherapy drug Mustargen, I believe, but lived only a few more months in some misery and died early in my twelfth year. I visited Ruthie when she was sick, but I couldn’t do much. I stood beside her bed, rested my little hand on her forearm and tried to talk with her. But I couldn’t think of anything to say.

At home after these visits, Mom hugged me, stroked my hair. I knew I should have talked more with Ruthie. She had done so much for me, and she needed me now. She needed me to talk with her because I was her favorite. Later I understood that Mom was working through her own grief. She knew the situation far better than I did, knew this disease would win and Ruthie would lose. Dad began to talk with me about his sister’s illness. He was straightforward: Ruthie was going to die. I appreciated his honesty. No nonsense about Ruthie going away, or—worse—going to live with the angels. Her life would end, and soon. “This isn’t fair. There’s so much more for Ruthie and me to do. She promised we’d get a telescope to look at the planets. I’ve saved my allowance for six months already. This just isn’t fair.”

“Son, life isn’t fair. Ruthie isn’t sick because she did anything bad. She just got sick. Sometimes good things happen, sometimes bad things happen. All we can do is try to make a few more good things happen and a few less bad things happen. But a lot of things that happen to us, we can’t do anything about.”

“Dad, that’s really scary.”

“Yes, son, it really is.”

That night I thought of a plan. I’d work very, very hard. Study all the time, no more hide-and-seek or listening to silly stories. I’d finish high school years early, go to college, then graduate school and medical school, become a medical researcher, find a cure for Hodgkin’s lymphoma, administer it to Ruthie, and save her. In one version of the fantasy, I flew in a helicopter from my university laboratory to Ruthie’s hospital. I was so pleased with my plan...

But Ruthie died. Dad was at the hospital with her, holding her hand, when she died. When he came home, his expression told me all I needed to know...

Dad didn’t want us kids to go to the funeral. Mom and Dad went while we stayed with Mom’s parents, Burl and Lydia Arrowood. I found a bag of balloons in Gramp’s workshop. Gramp was a jeweler and repaired clocks and watches. Because he used a gas torch to melt some alloys, his workshop had a gas jet. I filled a balloon with gas, tied it off, walked into the front yard away from the trees and let the balloon fly. The symbolic content of this was melancholy: it represented all the experiments that Ruthie and I had planned to do, that now were lost forever. It represented the closing of a door.

Later that year, I read a supplementary problem in my algebra text. For much of the weekend I tried all sorts of tricks. Eventually I found a solution, but it was clunky, mechanical, inelegant. It worked, but I knew it wasn’t the solution the author intended.

After math class on Monday, I asked my teacher. She smiled, said she was happy I tried the problem, then wrote the simple, beautiful solution.

At that moment, my world folded in on itself, disappeared, and I knew what I thought was a different flavor of grief. The solution used only tricks I knew but applied them in a clever way that hadn’t occurred to me. At that moment, I began to suspect I was not bright enough to be a good scientist. Determination and hard work would get me into the tribe of scientists, but would life as a supporting character be enough? Choosing that path carried the real risk that from the end of life, where I am now, a backward look would reveal decades of steady work punctuated by very few moments of modest insight. To be sure, those moments have been amazing. The pleasure of understanding some bits of the architecture of ideas is ample reward. But I wanted to do so much more....

For me, the path I choose—exploring some structures of math—has afforded new perspectives on grief. I believe grieving exhibits some similarities to doing math; we’ll find echoes of each in the other. Wrestling with mathematical questions has helped me to parse my own episodes of grief. That is my subject here...

Grief is a response to an irreversible loss. A corollary: there is no anticipatory grief. To generate grief rather than sadness, the thing lost must carry great emotional weight, and it must pull back the veil that covers a transcendent aspect of the world. Breathe out to push the fog away from a brilliant pinpoint of light. We’ll focus on these three aspects of grief: it is irreversible, it carries emotional weight, and it is transcendent. Grief is not the only experience that exhibits these properties...

The initial “aha” moment, when first we understand something, can occur only once. If the thing understood is important to us and hints at deeper mysteries, we can grieve the loss of this moment, which, once we experience it, is lost forever. Beauty seen in a mirror reflects grief. This is the key to the connection I’ll make between geometry and grief....

• All moments of our lives are immensely rich, with many— perhaps infinitely many—variables we could notice.
• We can view our lives as trajectories, parameterized by time, through story space.
• We can never simultaneously view all of the possible variables; rather, we focus on a few variables at a time, restricting our attention to a low-dimensional subspace of story space.
• Our trajectories through these subspaces are the stories we tell ourselves about our lives; they are how we make sense of our lives, but always they miss some elements of our experiences.
• Irreversible loss appears as a discontinuity, a jump, in our path through story space.
• By focusing on certain subspaces, by projecting our trajectories into these spaces, we can reduce the apparent magnitude of the jumps, and consequently find a way to confront the emotional loss and perhaps reduce its impact...
• Moreover, grief is self-similar: the grief of losing a parent contains many “smaller” griefs. No more conversations, no more comparing memories of times good or bad, no more quiet walks together. Each of these is a scaled version of the response to the loss of a parent, a smaller copy that can act as a laboratory to find effective projections. Projecting outward, grief can point to actions that can help others. My most optimistic thought is that some of the energy of grief can be redirected in this way. Small steps or large steps, but steps all the same.