Zero Hour (1991)

Grief might be the prevailing condition of the 21st century. Or maybe it has always prevailed, going by a different name, subsumed by other names like melancholy, malaise, ennui. Was it that great critic of the Enlightenment Friedrich Nietzsche who predicted despair would come for us before Death does?

Much of what we call grief is related to death -- or in Nietszsche's case, what happens to us when our values die on the vine. Trauma is another kind of death. A living death that, we have come to understand, can be inherited.

More than landscape, language and identity, grief is the great unifier in this country's literature, and there is something suspicious about the writer (at least those interviewed on the CBC) who do not step naked from bed each morning and walk directly to the cafe in tears, stopping only to talk -- to confess -- to whomever might listen. (To extend the fantasy: if Cafe Grief has a boss barista, her name is Shelagh Rogers.)

Nordic people are often characterized as emotionally cool sorts. Cool without the neurosis of the English. Björk makes a burlesque of this. But Björk (b. 1965) has transcended the human and appears to most of us in spirit form, a visitor from Helheim.

Like Björk, Kristjana Gunnars (b. 1948) was also born in Iceland, but she seems closer to an emotionally cool sort, and I think that's why I have such a fondness for her lyric memoir Zero Hour, which unfolds in its time-shifting, braided way to tell of her father's passing and of her own life changes as she enters her forties -- a book as much about writing as the truth-to-emotions carried within it.

I was prepared to say more about Zero Hour, when out of nowhere I was hit with a heaviness I have come to associate with -- despair. So let me leave you with this, an excerpt from Zero Hour:

"The hospice people left a sheet of paper with us when they visited my father one day. The sheet said Symptoms of Grief. Do not be alarmed if the following conditions occur, it is normal when a person experiences grief: excessive fatigue, inability to cope with noise; severe changes in sexual habits; depression; development of the symptoms of the deceased; lethargy; fear of people; a desire to hide; excessive weight on symbolism; a need for ritual; bouts of weeping; hot flashes; inability to cope wth everyday details. Do not try to hurry the process. Understand what is happening." (p. 108)