Offering: February 2025

Lost possibilities

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It’s been almost five years since I first encountered and began learning the legend of Tuan Mac Cairill through James Stephens’ collection of Irish Fairy Tales. It was in the early days of COVID and I was living in California. I didn’t think about it this way at the time, but I was grieving the loss of one of the most significant social worlds I’ve had in my life, which was a community of ashtanga yoga practitioners I met with almost daily for ten years in Berkeley.

By the time the pandemic hit, I’d been back in the East Bay for just a few months after having spent three years away. A lot was changing in my life at the time, I was working on Tarot for Change in relative isolation, and practicing yoga each day with people I’d known nearly my whole adult life was grounding, important, and special.

But by July of that year—after months of social distancing and with the yoga room indefinitely closed—I’d made up my mind to head back east where I came from. I bought a truck, drove three thousand miles, and when I got to my new place sat in the new backyard and made a recording of myself reading Stephens’ telling of Tuan Mac Cairill.

It’s a long story, but I thought I could learn it by heart if I listened enough. It wasn’t until a couple years later that I started to listen so intently and repetitively that I could tell (a pared down version) by heart. For autumn equinox that year, fortified with a few swigs of bourbon and a couple good friends, I told Tuan to a group for the first time at the barn where I’d been learning to ride. It was the first in-person event I’d done since COVID.

Shortly after that telling, I started to think very heavily and carefully about grief. In the first years of the pandemic I hadn’t had an understanding of grief that made it possible for me to understand what I was doing as grieving, but these days I think that it was and perhaps in some ways still is.

Philosophers who think about grief have taken great pains to discern what it is that we grieve when we’re grieving, in other words, to figure out what is the object of grief. Is it a person or place? Or is it something more complex or nebulous like a relationship, a world, or a future? If there wasn’t a particular person or being who died or had left—as was my case in those first months of COVID, when it was that the social world I relied on was no longer accessible—how might I know I was grieving?

In her recent paper on shared grief, philosopher Louise Richardson reviews some of the objects philosophers have suggested might be the thing that we grieve when we’re grieving. For Colin Murray Parkes it was an “assumptive world” that one grieves. For Peter Marris, a “construction of reality.” For James Gillies and Robert Neimeyer, the object of grief is a particular “meaning structure.” For Michael Cholbi, the thing we grieve when we’re grieving is the “loss of a relationship with someone on whom one’s practical identity depended.¹”

Richardson also notes philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe’s suggestion that, in the case of bereavement, the object of grief is “a wide-ranging network of possibilities that depended on someone’s continued, living presence.” Richardson adds that a “network of lost possibilities” is an object of grief when the possibilities are consequential to one’s sense of identity. It is the way the possibilities that are lost impact who we know ourselves to be that, for Richardson, “rules out feeling grief over an isolated minor loss, such as the loss of an umbrella.”

As part of a four-year study at the University of York, Richardson, Ratcliffe and colleagues Becky Millar and Emily Hughes conducted a survey “to investigate people's experiences of grief, focusing especially on aspects that are poorly understood, puzzling, and difficult to articulate.” They asked twenty questions and received 265 completed responses. Then, they compiled the anonymized testimonies in a searchable database that is accessible for use by the public.

One thing that I’ve found particularly useful about the database is that responses can be sorted by question. For instance, by selecting “How, if at all, has your experience of bereavement changed you as a person?” you can read people’s responses to the ways the death of someone significant has impacted their sense of identity.

Responses can also be sorted depending on whether the testimonies describe current or past grief experiences, as well as by demographic factors like age, or nature of the relationship (whether the person who died was the respondent’s parent, grandparent, child, friend, and so on).

The idea that what we grieve when we’re grieving is “a network of lost possibilities” feels useful because it seems to provide a basis for understanding losses that aren’t culturally acknowledged as causes for grief without needing to collapse the wide variety of grief experiences into one another in a way that might undermine the unique difficulties that come with certain kinds of loss.

And with this understanding of grief, I’ve been wondering if what made Tuan Mac Cairill’s story so enticing to me back in 2020 was the wide range of losses he suffered—loss of loved ones, loss of place, loss of faith, loss of future, loss of youth and certain bodily abilities—as well as the vastly diverse ways that he grieved them.

One of the things I’ve been particularly interested in is what I consider to be the most difficult scene in the story. Tuan has been living alone in Ireland for more than twenty years since his whole family—including extended family, and every last human inhabitant of their small settlement—died.

He’s padding along the coast one day as he’s learned how to do from the wolves. When he looks up and sees a fleet of ships coming in, there are no words that I know of which could adequately describe the excitement he feels in that moment, or what becomes instantaneously possible for him, and his future.

As he makes his way to the shore to greet who he’s already decided will be his new family, he stops for a drink and sees his reflection in the water for the first time in years. It’s of course not the first time he’s knelt over water slow moving enough to offer up a reflection, but in the absence of other humans his appearance simply never mattered enough to pay mind to.

Something sad happens here. He sees that he is “hairy and tufted and bristled…lean as a stripped bush…greyer than a badger…withered and wrinkled like an empty sack…naked as a fish; wretched as a starving crow in winter.²” And as Stephens describes on Tuan’s behalf, “I sat by the pool weeping my loneliness and wildness and my stern old age.”

As he weeps a storm rolls in. And there is no more painful scene in the entire long story or perhaps anywhere, ever. Tuan watches in horror as the ships are tossed like dice into the sky and then down, into the “glassy, inky horror” of the stormy Atlantic.

Every last ship in the fleet of them crashes. And down with them goes each of the ten thousand options Tuan had, without even noticing, immediately come to count on the instant he saw those ships making their way to the shore.

Night falls. And not even the night after his whole family died more than two decades ago is as lonely as this one:

“A thousand darknesses fell from the screeching sky…Not a creature dared creep or stand. For a great wind strode the world lashing its league-long whips in cracks of thunder, and singing to itself…with a long snarl and whine it hovered over the world searching for life to destroy.”

And in all the swirling, gnashing horror of this situation Tuan can’t say in hindsight whether he passes out from wailing from the depths of his lungs, or is knocked unconscious by a sailing rock or torn tree branch. All he knows is that he goes to sleep there. And as he sleeps, something miraculous happens:

“There I dreamed, and I saw myself changing into a stag in dream, and I felt in dream the beating of a new heart within me, and in dream I arched my neck and braced my powerful limbs. I awoke from the dream, and I was that which I had dreamed.”

If we understand Tuan’s grief here as the loss of significant possibilities, there is the most glaring loss of the possibility to connect with people again after so many years without human contact. In that light, it is not hard to understand why, after more than two decades, it was a heart-shattering experience to have that hope activated and then so violently dashed.

But as Richardson notes, we do not grieve only our own lost possibilities. We may also grieve the lost possibilities of significant others when those possibilities have some sort of impact on our sense of identity. It was not only the possibility of human connection that Tuan lost when the ships wrecked, it was also the perceived possibility of a human community that would survive his own aging and death, in the place he had lived and loved most of his life.

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1. Richardson’s paper, “Shared emotion without togetherness, the case of shared grief” is open access and available to read here.

2. All quotes from Tuan’s story in this Offering are from Irish Fairy Tales by James Stephens.