The Rest is Silence

I’ve been watching every DVD that I own as part of the fruitless and often ineffective system of distraction that I’ve developed. In this process, I discovered that I had three copies of Hamlet. So I watched all three.

What I remember about Hamlet from my brief highschool obsession with it was that Hamlet, though a whiny bitch, had several excellent soliloquies regarding the meaning of human life. After all, it’s why this play is a masterpiece of English literature and, arguably, of human civilization itself.

But now, watching it from the adult perspective of a broken life, I saw everything with different eyes. I suppose that is the enduring appeal of great literature: to be able to return to it and have it still be relevant to you at any age. In highschool, I generally had the attitude of “Why can’t you just get over your father’s death?” Not surprisingly, I had this same attitude about Harry Potter in Book 5 after Sirius’ death. “Harry is so emo,” I would complain. Of course, now having come face-to-face with a grief so acute I still feel sometimes that it might kill me, I regard both Hamlet and Harry Potter (and, therefore, Shakespeare and J.K. Rowling) differently.

“It hath made me mad . . .”

There are ways in which Hamlet pretends to be mad and ways in which he actually is. For grief is a type of madness. You view everything and everyone as almost totally irrelevant to the all-consuming tide of what you are feeling and cannot stop feeling every second of every day. Just like there is a play within a play, there is madness within madness inside of Hamlet. He uses the pretense of insanity to get his uncle to confess to the murder of his father, but deeper, he is coping with the profound and abyssal depth of the irrationality of death. He cannot hold it in his brain; he cannot accept how death could have shattered life so quickly and so absolutely. This is grief. It is as though you are viewing everything from underwater, and the garbled and stupid meanderings of those on land mean nothing to the world of slow and exhausting movement that you are suspended in . . . and which is slowly killing you too.

“Get thee to a nunnery. . .”

I always saw Ophelia as the epitome of the weak and stupid female, obedient to a fault, allowing herself to be used by the king, queen, and her father. A girl who could go insane and kill herself because of verbal and perhaps physical abuse from a boyfriend seemed to be nothing short of contemptible to me. Somehow, I never took into consideration that she kills herself not only after Hamlet verbally eviscerates her, but after he murders her father. In the realm of messed up things to do, abusing your girlfriend and killing her father is pretty bad. And suicide in the midst of grief is eminently more understandable to me now than it ever was before.

In Hamlet’s defense, his entire “Get thee to a nunnery” speech to Ophelia is perfectly rational in the face of grief. He repeats this phrase over and over, saying “We will have no more marriages.” Why? Because marriage, women, and childbirth perpetuate a hideous, broken, and indescribably painful cycle of life. I struggled with this fact enormously right after losing Lizzy, and there are days that I still struggle with it. Why bring a child into the world only to die? Why bring a child into the world who will, at the very least, experience deep pain from the condition of living, get sick, suffer and die one day? As of yet, no one has made a strong enough argument to me about why we do it. And, for me, who has felt for so long that motherhood is my vocation, I feel utterly lost when I think about how badly I want another child. For Hamlet, the trite pursuit of love and marriage have become utterly irrelevant. All he can see in Ophelia is a waiting womb. And so he tells her to spare herself and the world the pain of perpetuating life.

“To be or not to be . . .”

There is a reason why this is the most famous soliloquy in English literature. Grief has caused Hamlet to mentally and emotionally masturbate with existentialism. It’s just what you do in the grips of acute grief. You cannot comprehend the unutterably thin line between life and death. You cannot stop wondering that if you just slit your wrists or put a bullet in your head, then you get to go to a place from which no one has ever come back. You begin to wonder what we’re preserving here. What we’re fighting for. Because you start to see how much of life is fighting. And work. How sheer existence is work. And suicide becomes tempting not only because it might end the fighting and the work and the pain but because, ultimately, it might be the most moral thing to do.

“The rest is silence . . .”

Right before Hamlet himself goes to the “undiscovered country,” he says, “The rest is silence.” The silence of grief is unbearable, sometimes to the point where you wish you could claw out your brain to stop the thoughts from burbling forth in volcanic misery. The silence of death, by contrast, may very well be “a consummation devoutly to be wished.” Death is the strongest silence we encounter in this life, and not a one of us knows how to rest in that silence. The only rest to be had is within the silence of death–when death has robbed you of all that ever made a sound, even those soundless thoughts that somehow still run, clamoring through your brain. Perhaps the only true peace is to be found within the silence of death. Perhaps the only true rest is to be found there as well. For those of us who grieve, it is only the ones we have lost that can–and can no longer–tell us.