This Republic of Suffering [78]
In the South, Joseph Cross of Tennessee chose to speak “On Grief” in his funeral oration for General Daniel Donelson. He began by assuring the mourners that sorrow was no sin. “There is no guilt in tears, if they are not tears of despair. It is no crime to feel our loss…Religion,” he explained, “does not destroy nature, but regulates it, does not remove sorrow, but sanctifies it.” Christian faith and human psychology were in his view deeply intertwined, and each supported and nourished the other. Cross enumerated biblical mourners—Abraham for Sarah, Joseph for Jacob, David for Jonathan—to establish the history and legitimacy of grief. Acceptance of sorrow, he recognized, was a critical part of realizing death. It was important to suffer in the face of loss, not to deny or suppress it. “He that is not sensible of the affliction,” Cross warned, “will continue secure in his sin.” Survivors must feel “the stroke.” Cross counseled the importance of what we of the twenty-first century would call catharsis: “Grief must have vent, or it will break the heart…It is cruel to deny one the relief of mourning when mourning is so often its own relief.” Like Robinson—and, indeed, like Freud—Cross understood mourning as a process and promised his congregation progress through grief to some measure of recovery. Like Robinson as well, Cross offered shared suffering as solace: “Sorrow calls for sympathy. Compassion is better than counsel…Sympathy divides the sorrow, and leaves but half the load.”
But Cross worried about “excess of sorrow” and asked, “Where, then, is the proper limit?” Sorrow, he posited, was “criminal” when it obscured awareness of “remaining mercies.” Things could always be worse. Grief was excessive when it made the mourner forget the afflictions of others or become “indifferent to the public welfare” or neglectful of responsibilities to others or to personal health. Grief was “excessive, and therefore criminal,” he repeated, when it ignored God’s purposes and consolations. Like Robinson, Cross noted that there was a contained “time for mourning,” with a finite end, even though the “inward sorrow…may last much longer than the outward show.” The bereaved must work to alleviate their grief, attending to the solaces of friendship and religion. Robinson offered sources of comfort and help; Cross included with his consolations a series of warnings; both promised a gradual end to the agony of loss to be achieved through the work of mourning.46
Some mourners reported quite explicitly their efforts to manage grief, demonstrating a keen and self-conscious awareness of the process both Robertson and Cross described. Henry Bowditch, father of Nathaniel, who was killed in Virginia in March 1863, kept a careful record of his experience of loss, from his physical reaction—“like a dagger in my heart”—to the news of his son’s injury, to the consolations that ultimately liberated him from a world of pain.47
Bowditch “broke fairly down” when he was told of Nathaniel’s death. But “almost immediately,” he reported, “the divine influences of such a loss began to strive for mastery…& I thought that never was there a nobler cause for which he could have died.” Henry Bowditch assured himself that Nat, described to him as “brave and conscious to the last,” had indeed experienced a Good Death, had repeatedly professed his Christian faith and willingness to die during the three days after he was wounded. Nathaniel had certainly “died happily,” a fellow soldier assured the father. Bowditch embraced the very consolations that the ars moriendi offered and that Robinson had prescribed. From Nat’s death, he explained to his wife, he would derive even greater commitment to the doctrines of immortality, and these would sustain him in his loss. Just a day after Nat died, Bowditch wrote from Virginia of his determination “after as short