hamlet essay about grief

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FOR THE LOVE OF THE BARD

Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’: A Study of Grief

In my post about Sonnet 18 , I commented that Shakespeare very evidently understood grief.

Nowhere in the canon of Shakespeare’s work is this more evident than in Hamlet. In this play, we see a son struggling with grief for his father and anger at the circumstances of his death. In this one young man’s experience, Shakespeare demonstrates some crucial lessons about grief.

Grief is natural. It is an instinctive immediate reaction to loss. Nobody questions why Hamlet mourns his father, except for those who conspicuously do not mourn the late king.

CLAUDIUS How is it that the clouds still hang on you? GERTRUDE Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted color off, And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark. Do not forever with thy vailed lids Seek for thy noble father in the dust. Thou know’st ’tis common, all that lives must die, Passing through nature to eternity. Hamlet, I.ii

It is those characters who do not feel or express grief who are portrayed as unnatural and heartless: had they been loyal, Gertrude, Claudius, and Polonius should all have been deeply affected by the death of the king and observed strict protocols of mourning as his wife, brother and trusted advisor. Instead, Gertrude marries Claudius, Claudius claims the throne that rightly should have gone to Hamlet, and Polonius switches his service seamlessly to the new regime. It’s all very convenient and it’s all very cold— but that’s how it goes when one is only in it for oneself.

This scene also demonstrates that grief is enduring. Unlike his mother, Hamlet doesn’t just “get over it”. That is not how most of us are designed. While it may change over time, grief is something that never fully goes away. It doesn’t take much to trigger a memory that unleashes a fresh wave of emotion.

HAMLET   O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason Would have mourn’d longer—married with my uncle, My father’s brother, but no more like my father Than I to Hercules. Within a month, Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears Had left the flushing in her galled eyes, She married—O most wicked speed: to post With such dexterity to incestuous sheets, It is not, nor it cannot come to good, But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue. Hamlet I.ii

Grief is existential. Grief makes us question the meaning of life: what’s the point of it all? Why are we here? What am I doing with my life? Is it worth going on? These are natural questions that many of us ask in response to the end of life, although perhaps less eloquently than Hamlet did.

To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep— No more, and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to; ’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep— To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub, For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause; there’s the respect That makes calamity of so long life: For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of despis’d love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin; who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn No traveler returns, puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have, Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pitch and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action. Hamlet, III.ii

We often make observations like “life will never be the same” and that is essentially true. Grief often causes us to consider what is important and sort our priorities for life Thinking about the  changes that someone’s death makes in our life can  cause us to consider what we will do with the time, freedoms and opportunities that still lie ahead of us. This can be a time of significant decision making and resolution in response to the unavoidable change in our lives as a result of the death of a loved one.

Grief is pervasive. It affects every part of life, directly influencing motivations and willingness to meet commitments that all of a sudden seem mundane or irrelevant. It can take the joy out of other aspects of life that would otherwise bring joy, such as one’s relationships, achievements and career.  Otherwise important things tend to be put on hold while grief holds the floor.

HAMLET I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition, that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how express and admirable in action, how like an angel in apprehension, how like a god! The beauty of the world; the paragon of animals; and yet to me what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—nor women neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.  Hamlet III.i

It also has flow-on effects in the lives and experiences of others:  when our emotions are most fragile, our relationships with others are proportionally vulnerable simply because of the impact of grief on one’s ability to connect and communicate effectively. The tendency to focus on one’s own self and situation may be a survival instinct in one sense, but it can also have a significant ripple effect among those around us.

Grief is relatable. The fact that we can all understand Hamlet’s feelings and responses show us that it is an integral element of life. Nobody lives forever, no matter how hard they try. That every society and culture has rituals and observances of death and mourning shows that grief is a universal experience: one which we will all encounter at some point in our lives.

From Hamlet , it is evident that there are constructive and destructive ways to deal with grief .

The pursuit of truth and justice, when necessary, is both healthy and appropriate. Questioning our priorities and examining our relationships can be a process of growth and refinement.

About, my brains! Hum—I have heard That guilty creatures sitting at a play Have by the very cunning of the scene Been struck so to the soul, that presently They have proclaim’d their malefactions: For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ. I’ll have these players Play something like the murder of my father Before mine uncle. I’ll observe his looks, I’ll tent him to the quick. If ’a do blench, I know my course. The spirit that I have seen May be a dev’l, and the dev’l hath power T’ assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps, Out of my weakness and my melancholy, As he is very potent with such spirits, Abuses me to damn me. I’ll have grounds More relative than this—the play’s the thing Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king. Hamlet, II. i

The observance and expression of grief is natural and should never be suppressed. The idea that men should not cry is not only unhealthy, it is absolute bunkum.

Grief complicates ones own emotions, affects mental and emotional health, adds pressure to relationships, and restricts one’s ability to ask for help.

It is crucial, then, to take great care to prevent grief leading us into self-destructive thoughts and behaviours.

HAMLET O that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d His canon ’gainst self-slaughter! O God, God,How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on’t, ah fie! H amlet, I.ii

Thoughts of self-harm and suicide are a definite sign that someone is not coping with their emotions and their circumstances, and that they need trustworthy help and support. 

Sacrificing our relationships with the living in the indulgence of grief for the dead. Hamlet’s rejection of Ophelia clearly had devastating consequences for her life, and ultimately caused more grief for those who knew and loved her.

HAMLET I have heard of your paintings, well enough. God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another. You jig and amble, and you lisp, you nickname God’s creatures and make your wantonness your ignorance. Go to, I’ll no more on’t, it hath made me mad. I say we will have no more marriage. Those that are married already (all but one) shall live, the rest shall keep as they are. To a nunn’ry, go. Exit. OPHELIA O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown! The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword, Th’ expectation and rose of the fair state, The glass of fashion and the mould of form, Th’ observ’d of all observers, quite, quite down! And I, of ladies most deject and wretched, That suck’d the honey of his music vows, Now see that noble and most sovereign reason Like sweet bells jangled out of time, and harsh; That unmatch’d form and stature of blown youth Blasted with ecstasy. O, woe is me T’ have seen what I have seen, see what I see! Ophelia withdraws. Hamlet III.i

Had Hamlet and Ophelia shared their thoughts and feelings with each other and others instead of internalising everything and shutting them out, things may have ended far more positively for them both.

The Problem of Female Agency in Shakespeare’s ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ #women #Shakespeare #ShakespeareSunday Tweet

Shakespeare demonstrates that grief is life-changing and long term. It is complex and challenging. Through the examples and experiences of the characters in Hamlet , we can consider and evaluate healthy and not-so-healthy ways of dealing with it. While everyone’s circumstances are different, we can each grow in empathy and understanding of the effects of grief on ourselves and other people.

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Shakespeare, Sadness-Shaman: How Hamlet Can Help Us Through Our Grief and Despair

By maria popova.

“Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be,” Joan Didion wrote in her soul-stretching meditation on grief . Our coping strategies can be among the most disorienting defiances of expectation — it’s a given that nothing gives comfort per se, but the things that bring even marginal relief aren’t always the ones we imagine. From The Long Goodbye ( public library ) — poet, essayist, and editor Meghan O’Rourke ’s stirring memoir of losing her mother — comes an exquisite case not only for finding a semblance of consolation in a timeless work of art, but for what Susan Sontag once termed the “self-transcendence” that reading affords us.

In the first few days following her mother’s death, O’Rourke had received such grief classics as C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed (1961) and On Death and Dying (1969) by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the psychiatrist who pioneered the famous theory of the five stages of grief. And yet the book that enchanted her the most was even older — centuries older: Hamlet .

O’Rourke writes:

I returned over and over to key speeches as if they were prayers or clues. I’d always thought of Hamlet’s melancholy as existential. His sense that the world “is out of joint” came across as vague and philosophical, the dilemma of a depressive young man who can’t stop chewing at big metaphysical questions. But now it seemed to me that Hamlet was moody and irascible in no small part because he is grieving: his father has just died. He is radically dislocated, stumbling through the days while the rest of the world acts as if nothing important has changed. For the trouble is not just that Hamlet is sad; it is that everyone around him is unnerved by his grief. When Hamlet comes onstage, his uncle greets him with the worst question you can ask a grieving person: “How is it that the clouds still hang on you?” Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, tries to get him to see that his loss is “common.” No wonder Hamlet is angry and cagey; he is told that how he feels is “unmanly” and unseemly. This was a predicament familiar to me. No one was telling me that my sadness was unseemly, but I felt, all the time, that to descend to the deepest fathom of it was somehow taboo. (As my dad said, “You have this choice when you go out and people ask how you’re doing. You can tell the truth, which you know will make them really uncomfortable, or seem inappropriate. Or you can lie. But then you’re lying.”) I was struck, too, by how much of Hamlet is about the precise kind of slippage the mourner experiences: the difference between being and seeming, the uncertainty about how the inner translates into the outer, the sense that one is expected to perform grief palatably. (If you don’t seem sad, people worry; but if you are grief-stricken, people flinch away from your pain.)

Above all, Shakespeare’s hero holds up a mirror to O’Rourke’s own duality of emotion — emptiness and anger, despair and longing for relief — providing a kind of kindred comfort. It is no small gift.

Hamlet also captures an aspect of loss I found difficult to speak about — the profound ennui, the moments of angrily feeling it is not worth continuing to live. In A Grief Observed , Lewis captures the laziness of grief, how it made him not want to shave or answer letters. Hamlet’s famous soliloquy invokes that numb exhaustion: O that this too too sullied flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew, Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d His canon ’gainst self-slaughter. O God! God! How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world! “Weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable”: yes. I shared with Hamlet the pained wish that I might melt away. Researchers have found that the bereaved are at a higher risk for suicidal thinking than the depressed. But Hamlet, I thought, is less searching actively for death than wishing futilely for the world to make sense again. And this, too, was how I felt.

The Long Goodbye is enormously poignant in its totality, a must-read for anyone who has ever lost a loved one or ever will — which encompasses just about all of us, to the extent that we’re capable of love. Dive deeper into it here .

— Published July 22, 2014 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/07/22/meghan-o-rourke-hamlet-grief/ —

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Grief and Hamlet

2020, Shakespeare and Emotion

Grief punctuates all of Shakespeare's tragedies, and many of his comedies and histories too, but none is so resolutely focused on what it means to feel loss as Hamlet. From the personal loss of a father, to the social loss of a king, to an existential loss of meaning and place in the world, Hamlet explores what happens when one's sense of individuality and vitality collapses into something rote and mechanical...

Related Papers

Hansueli Hauenstein

Marcos Henrique Silva

Forrest O Johnson

This paper re-evaluates moral and masculine constructs within Shakespeare's Hamlet. The moral and the masculine become conflated into hegemonic law, which Hamlet comes to challenge, giving him the appearance of madness as he confronts the Same while giving the audience the perspective of the Other.

Raluca Galita

L’image de la mort est omnipresente dans Hamlet de William Shakespeare. La mort est envisagée comme crime, suicide, infection, poison, maladie. Cet article essaie de surprendre et de commenter tos ces aspects.

IJELS Editor , Malik Hassan

The researcher explains the tragic of the play represented with Hamlet's father death. The most familiar image of the play is the young prince contemplating how he will revenge., the overriding theme being how people react to death. Though every version has the basic central story of Hamlet's revenge for his father's murder, each inevitably presents a more or less subtly different narrative, some omitting whole scenes and even major story threads. All this helps to explain why the play-and its central character-have been subject to an exceptionally wide range of interpretation. The researcher in this paper, will concentrate on one of the tragic situation for the protagonist of the play that father's murder by his mother and uncle.

Textual Practice

Indira Ghose

Adel Fartakh

This paper looks closely at death as a thematic concern in Shakespearean tragedy, with a focus on Othello and Hamlet. In both plays, death as a tragic ending brings the stories of heroes who are led up constantly to fall and yield to the force of circumstances that have been created and plotted. The calamities in Shakespeare"s tragedies are not accidental. They proceed mainly from actions which beget others until this series of interconnected acts leads to a catastrophe. These acts are predominantly of great importance to the tragic ending. As the tragedy advances towards its "denouement", one would notice that the catastrophe follows inextricably from certain actions whose main source is a flaw in the hero"s character. Such is the case with both Othello and Hamlet. This paper attempts to offer a critical reading and a discussion of Shakespeare"s tragedy.

Comparative Literature

Andrew Barnaby

This essay explores the mutual implication of Shakespeare's Hamlet and Freudian psychoanalysis as works of mourning. More particularly, it takes up how both the play and a series of Freud's writings — from early letters to Fliess to the Interpretation of Dreams to “Mourning and Melancholia” to Beyond the Pleasure Principle — themselves explore mourning as the almost impossible burden of a son trying to shed the authority of the dead but still potent father. In that sense, mourning has less to do with grief as traditionally conceived than with ambivalence, even hostility, toward the dead. It is an emotive experience that, in repressed form, manifests first as identification with the dead. The essay thus documents the complex “working-through” by which, in response to their fathers' deaths, two “tardy sons” finally arrive at a place of self-identification, a site from which they refuse the burden of living out — of repeating — the existence of the one who came before. Seen from this vantage, Shakespeare (through his tragic hero) and Freud both offer existential meditations on the need to originate our own lives even as they concede that, at the place of the origin, our lives are at once our own and not our own.

Hamlet: Critical Insights

Robert C . Evans

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William Shakespeare

Everything you need for every book you read..

How Grief’s Alchemy Turned “Hamnet” into “Hamlet”

Jeannette Cooperman

Cover image from Hamnet , by Maggie O’Farrell

Over wine, my book club raved about the quiet spell Hamnet cast, the grace and tenderness of its language. We read aloud our favorite Maggie O’Farrell’s lines: “The fireplace, which is filled only with ashes, held in the fragile shape of the log they once were…” “Time runs only one way.” “Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns.” We marked Agnes’s reason for falling in love with William Shakespeare: “You had more hidden away inside you than anyone else she’d ever met.” Above all, we were grateful: Somehow O’Farrell evokes the most wrenching grief of all, a parent losing a child, in a way that takes you by the hand, keeps you from wanting to slam the book shut and find a comedy on Netflix.

Because we had just come through the worst of the pandemic, we were riveted when she traced the bubonic plague that killed Shakespeare’s son to a single flea, stowed away with an African monkey on a ship where it leaped from cats to rats and sailors and laid itself to rest in a box of Murano glass beads that was bound for Stratford, where the Shakespeares’ daughter would open it. She was the frail one you expected to die. We had held our breath as her eleven-year-old brother lay down next to her, desperate to save her, only to die in her stead. All this while the life of the household moved on, oblivious, the adults occupied with everyday chores. This is why we prize deathbed goodbyes, I suspect. First because we want that last chance to exchange love, but also because it is so much worse to be absent, busying ourselves with the mundane while someone we love is dying. In retrospect, these trivial preoccupations will seem grotesque. How can you return to routine with full ease, now that you know its sweet reassurance can coincide with tragedy?

We talked our way to the end of the novel, sympathizing with Will Shakespeare’s wife, furious at him for going off to write his plays while their son died and she grieved. What a relief, when she saw the play he had written—in the novel, it is Hamlet —and understood that her husband’s grief was as sharp as her own…

And there I tripped. It was all wrong. How could Shakespeare have cherished his young son and then written him up as a neurotic (our term) introvert paralyzed by conflicting emotions and a love for his mother that later scholars would see as lust? Hamlet may be Shakespeare’s greatest play, but its title character is far from heroic. He winds up dead in large part because his own melodramatic scheming has run amok— no!

O’Farrell avoids naming Shakespeare in her novel, calling him “the tutor” when Agnes (Anne Hathaway to us) falls in love with him. This lets us avoid all the pompous scholarly baggage and know him as a young man driven by his love of language and theater, his gifts of wit and knowledge. We fall in love along with Agnes, roll our eyes at his stumbles but root for them both. I could not fathom Hamlet as Agnes did, as a proof of loss so deep he could speak it no other way.

Granted, we would excuse any slip, gratified by O’Farrell’s coup. She changed the angle. You see someone differently when the fame is stripped away and you can peer into their home life, into the hearts of those who have chosen to love them. More than that, though, she showed us how extraordinary Agnes was, put her on public record, made us love her free and independent spirit, taught us about life and grief and love through her courage. Most of what matters in life begins, is made possible, at home, a fact western culture has tended to forget.

Still. Hamlet? I went home and opened my laptop, moved through links. “Aha!” I exclaimed, loud enough to wake both husband and dog. Shakespeare did not write Hamlet right after his son’s death, as the novel suggests. Instead, he wrote romps and romcoms:  The Merry Wives of Windsor ,  Much Ado About Nothing ,  As You Like It— alongside Henry IV, Henry V , and Julius Caesar .

Besides, “writing a play about Hamlet, in or around 1600, may not have been Shakespeare’s own idea,” Stephen Greenblatt notes in The New York Review of Books. Not only had the story of the Danish prince already been staged in England, but that playwright was now dead, the plot was a crowd-pleaser, and a new version promised revenue for the company.

Triumphant, I emailed the book club. This made me feel much better. Illiterate about such things, I had assumed that Shakespeare invented Hamlet from whole cloth, and the idea that his first imaginative act after his son’s death would be that play had floored me.

After I hit send, though, I stared, unfocused, at the screen. How could a writer as accomplished and intelligent as Maggie O’Farrell have gotten something so wrong? Hamnet won righteous praise last year: the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Prize, a place on fifteen Best Books of 2020 lists. I searched further and found plenty of scholars connecting Hamnet’s death with Hamlet, the four-year delay notwithstanding.  

He could have pushed aside the grief, I mused, distracting himself with wit’s swordplay until time dulled the pain bearable. And when his next plot presented itself, how could he not make the connection? Hamnet, Hamlet—a single letter of the alphabet is far too flimsy to keep us from our memories.

The luck is that, by 1600, Shakespeare was ready artistically as well as emotionally. After writing what Greenblatt describes as rather wooden monologues in Richard III, Shakespeare went inward, nailing the complexity of Richard II’s thoughts in lines that did not simply assert and contradict, playing at confession, but instead turned the character’s mind inside out with psychological subtlety. After Hamnet’s death came the reprieve of the comedies, but then, in 1599, Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar, letting most of the play linger on the suspended state between dreaming up a terrible deed and acting it out.

And then came Hamlet , offering him a character who could spend the entire play suspended, trapped by the workings of his own mind. Hamnet had been dead for four years, and Shakespeare had just received word that his father was close to death.

A fresh, hard loss wakes all the old grief you have put to sleep. But enough time had passed to make art possible, and he knew, now, how to go inward.

Hamlet freed its author’s “preference for things untidy, damaged, and unresolved over things neatly arranged, well made, and settled,” Greenblatt writes. The text showed us his pain and “his refusal of easy consolations.”

Sadness works on you. In art, that process is telescoped: Shakespeare skipped Hamlet’s entire childhood so we could watch him confront his father’s death as a young man. Hamnet brings the production of Hamlet forward four years so Agnes can take the measure of her husband’s unspoken grief. But O’Farrell is making the same connection Shakespeare made, when his still vivid grief infused another man’s story—and gave us one of the finest plays ever written.

Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here .

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Madness in Shakespeares Hamlet

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After I Lost My Son, I Realized I Needed to Stop Looking for Closure

By Liz Jensen

Ms. Jensen is a novelist in Copenhagen and the author of “Your Wild and Precious Life: On Grief, Hope and Rebellion.”

Four years ago, I got the news that every parent dreads.

Without warning, my healthy 25-year-old son, Raphaël — a wildlife biologist and an environmental activist — had collapsed and died, likely from a rare heart disorder nobody knew he had. The trauma catapulted me into a place of almost hallucinatory madness: a territory so tormenting, debilitating and bleak that I couldn’t imagine how I’d survive it, let alone find joy in the life that remained.

Catastrophes are radicalizing and transformative. You no longer see your life in the same way afterward. But must grief diminish you, or can it do the opposite?

The question was vital because my devastation as a newly bereaved mother felt mirrored by the pain and anxiety of millions of people struggling to process the consequences of global heating and the obliteration of precious ecosystems.

Both forms of grief were rooted in love. Both required courage, resilience and compassion. And the emotional arc of both, I came to believe, could create the strength and purpose needed to navigate an increasingly unstable future.

In the field of death and dying, one of the most enduring and influential figures is the Swiss American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who in the 1960s came up with the five stages of death: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. She’d been studying the emotional arcs of terminally ill patients, but later she and her colleague David Kessler repurposed the stages to apply to the grief of the bereaved, and the five-stage model became deeply embedded in Western culture.

In a 2007 paper , the Nobel Prize-winning climate scientist Steven Running applied those stages to the climate crisis, characterizing denial as the belief that the climate emergency isn’t happening or that humans aren’t the root cause. The anger stage kicks in when you realize your worldview or lifestyle will have to change substantially. Then you bargain by downplaying the scale of the crisis, or by putting all your faith in technological fixes. The depression stage manifests when you feel overwhelmed by the extent of the crisis and realize that governments and corporations are not only spinning their wheels but also often actively exacerbating the damage. Acceptance entails recognizing that the scale of the challenge is irrefutable, and then looking actively for solutions, because “doing nothing given our present knowledge is unconscionable.”

After tragedy struck Mr. Kessler, he altered his own analysis of bereavement. As an author and public speaker who had spent his career supporting the bereaved, Mr. Kessler felt he knew grief well. But the unexpected death of his 21-year-old son changed everything. Suddenly, like countless other bereaved parents, he faced the existential question raised in the adage that the two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why. And he came to believe that acceptance isn’t the end of the grieving process; it’s only the beginning of a new, sixth stage of grief, defined not by finding closure but by finding meaning.

This stage made a lot more sense to me than any of the others did. There was no meaning in Raphaël’s death. But I could find purpose, meaning and fulfillment in what I did and made happen in its wake.

The year before Raphaël died, I’d co-founded the literary activist group Writers Rebel to put literature in the service of life on Earth. But when we lost him, I stepped back: I couldn’t face the video calls. Then, in those early months of grieving, I began to meet other bereaved parents, take daily swims in the freezing Danish winter sea, reconnect with the natural world and read books about consciousness which led me to abandon my rational, secular view of it. And one day, I remembered what Raphaël said when I belittled my ability to affect change: “Do what you can, where you are, with what you’ve got.”

What, I began to wonder, could be more meaningful than honoring my son’s memory and the world I love by being active rather than crying on the couch?

Seven months after Raphaël’s death, I stood on a podium in the freezing Copenhagen wind with a group of writers and made a speech about why literature must address the climate crisis with the urgency it deserves. I was raw and nervous, but I sensed his presence. When I quoted him — “I won’t stand aside and watch the world burn” — a huge cheer went up, and I felt an inner shift.

Yes, my son was dead. And yes, the planet’s life support systems were weakening. But it wasn’t too late for one of them.

I rejoined my weekly Zooms and helped organize a tribute to the planet’s most critically endangered species. Later, the notes I’d been writing to myself as therapy began morphing into a memoir. And yes, it all felt meaningful.

Mine was just one of many paths from grief to fulfillment. For those feeling paralyzed by climate grief, just doing something new, or doing something familiar more mindfully, can germinate what the eco-philosopher Joanna Macy calls active hope: not the amorphous hope of wishing on a star but the practical hope of rolling up your sleeves and getting to it. Intentions are fine, but the meaning lies in the doing — be it cheering up a friend, energizing voters, transforming a patch of urban scrub into a garden, joining a citizen’s movement, switching to a plant-based diet, ditching a bad habit or taking time to observe a creature in the wild.

Just a few months before the electrical signals in Raphaël’s heart were catastrophically disrupted, I found a passage in his notebook that showed he had a premonition that he would die young, but that his sense of purpose would stay vividly alive.

“I’ll not be dead until my dream is, I’ll not fade away until my vision does, I’ll not be gone until all my hopes are,” he wrote.

It took his death for me to understand why I was born. It can’t take a civilizational collapse for humanity to understand why we belong here.

And it needn’t.

Liz Jensen is the author of eight novels, including the ecological thrillers “The Rapture” and “The Uninvited.” Her most recent book is “Your Wild and Precious Life: On Grief, Hope and Rebellion.”

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