Chris Haven
Associate Editor Molly Reid: Chris Haven’s “The Griefbearer” is a fable for our time. The premise is enticing: someone to experience our loss for us. Who wouldn’t want to escape the pain of grief, to be able to hoist it onto another person? Who wouldn’t want to, as the collective narrator says, “live a life without care”? But this transference, as Haven suggests, might lead us not into relief but into something far more insidious. Could our grief, our confrontation and ownership of our losses, be the very thing that makes us human?
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The Griefbearer
We didn’t know what to do with our grief. There was so much sickness in that time, so much death. Bodies were buried shoulder to shoulder, reminding us of our daily grief. Something had to be done.
The first was a volunteer, one who offered to bear our grief for us. This griefbearer was righteous, a young woman of only fourteen. We would bring her our burdens and she would take them. She knew each of our loved ones by name, and she grieved the loss not just of their names but of their gestures, the accents of their bodies.
The woman bore this living grief bravely. She walked among us every day and we saw the bend of her back, low enough to let us know she was doing her job.
We were lightened.
Because she walked among us, we could gather food, chop wood, pour life into our remaining loved ones. The arrangement succeeded until some felt the first griefbearer had borne too much, so a young man was compelled into service.
At first, he was eager to learn. The old griefbearer tried to teach him how to bear our grief since doing so did not come naturally to him. She must have been a good teacher because soon enough, many felt he was just as good at his job as she was, perhaps better.
When he walked through the town, he held his back upright. We trusted he bore these new griefs, but he carried them as if they were nothing. You couldn’t believe the joy we felt! Those who had no one to grieve longed for a loved one to die, just to experience the consequent elation of relieving the burden.
Only one of us suspected something was wrong: the old griefbearer.
She still walked among us, back bent. She shook her head and conveyed the danger we were in, but we didn’t listen and one day, the young man disappeared.
The girl told us what she had been telling us all along: The boy never listened to us, never knew our loved ones. He had not been bearing our grief. She had. She was the only righteous griefbearer, and all our grief flowed to her. If she didn’t get help, we would be back to bearing our own grief. And this time, it would be harder than before.
But the ones whose grief had been borne by the boy were as happy as ever. New mourners ignored the girl and continued giving their burden to the boy, even long after he’d disappeared.
The girl remained, her back lowering daily. She said we had lost something when we’d given our grief to her, that one person was never meant to bear so much. One day, we would feel this loss, she said. She spoke in such an old-fashioned language that we were embarrassed for her. Sad for her, really, for not understanding what it meant to live a life without care. To truly be free.
Chris Haven has other short prose in or forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Electric Literature, Jellyfish Review, Atticus Review, and Kenyon Review. He teaches writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.
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