Literature,  The Good Life

Carrying Grief

Kasia Balsbaugh

What if, instead of carrying // a child, I am supposed to carry grief? — Ada Limón


The Ontario Stratford Festival’s King Lear was one of the most reviewed plays of the 2023 season. And no wonder, as the story of a king’s fall from power is one of Shakespeare’s most difficult plays to read, watch, or (I presume) act.

Of the Stratford showing, one common complaint was that actor Paul Gross’s Lear was too hale and hearty for an old king. But it makes sense to have a Lear this way, a Lear who chooses to divide his kingdom so he can carouse with his knights and play with his fool, a Lear out of step with his responsibilities (and not merely unable to fulfill responsibilities)—the same Lear who had apparently such trouble with the responsibility of raising three daughters.

Accordingly, the star of the production was really Lear’s relationships with his daughters, showcased through lost tempers, betrayal, and death. “Death”—a word that critics jumped on Gross for delivering contemptuously at the beginning of the play. But the sarcastic delivery seemed appropriate for a man who doesn’t realize what’s coming, and will gain too much experience with death too quickly.

I saw the play perhaps too soon, less than two weeks after learning of the stopped heartbeat of my unborn child, less than two weeks after being sent home from the emergency room with a stuffed animal and a bottle of formaldehyde. But I didn’t regret “too soon,” because, as I realized, Lear and I now had an understanding. And even the production’s shortcomings (an unconvincing Cordelia, some difficult-to-distinguish lines) could not hide the depth of experience that Lear displays and that I now was only beginning to take part in.

It is hard to see, in the midst of grief, that anyone really understands what you have been through, or even understands the world as it is. I remember soon after the miscarriage seeing an article written by a young woman reflecting on Michelangelo’s Pieta, in the context of her own body and identity being broken by labor and motherhood. My first reaction to her article was that this woman just didn’t understand what she was talking about. She didn’t address something so central to the Pieta: death, grief. She had not herself experienced the death of a child. What were her sorrows compared to mine—or mine compared to Christ’s mother’s?

Lear’s own experience corroborates that it is easy to feel resentment at those who cannot truly understand, have not carried, the depths of our griefs. His first words after carrying the body of Cordelia onstage are an injunction to others to weep with him, and a reprimand of their insensitivity: “Howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones!”

But I think of myself, at nineteen, inexplicably drawn to the last scene in Lear, watching it over and over again in as many renditions as I could. I think of the high school student in the seat next to me at the play, uncomfortably pausing his serial unwrapping of candy bars when Lear carries Cordelia onstage; the rest of his classmates showed no response to the dead Cordelia, not even the nervous giggles that had accompanied some of the play’s more gruesome moments. As Gross said in an interview with Toronto Life, “My job is to bring people into a world that is not their own, to put them through the full existential wringer and then have them leave feeling slightly changed.” Watching Lear carry his grief quiets us, even if we have such limited experience with the particularities of his pain. But this silence at Lear’s world would not happen at all unless we all, in some way, carried grief and pain in our own worlds. The weight of Cordelia’s body held by Lear is a physical instantiation of that, a mirroring of our own pains, deep or shallow. In some sense, we feel seen, and we should feel that we can see in turn.

Still, even if it is helpful to know that deep grief is quieting, it is consoling that some are closer to our particular pain. Most people immediately become awkward when I mention the miscarriage. It makes sense to me, as I act similarly around people who have more extensive familiarity with death than I do. I have never experienced the death of a child I have given birth to, have never yet experienced the death of a parent or a spouse. I am not old; I still cannot, as my professor told me in college, really understand Lear. But at twenty-five, watching Lear carry the body of Cordelia and cry, “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life // and thou no breath at all?,” I felt a deep jolt of recognition, and wept. 

It is a strange comfort to know that when I am forty, I will understand Lear even better than I do now; when I am eighty, even better. Some scenes will take on more immediate meaning. For example, Lear’s crisis of identity after losing his title and the ability to defend it, which is a consequence of retirement and aging. Goneril’s difficult position of being invaded by her father, resulting in a shouting match that could have come straight from a contemporary move into a nursing home. Someday, despite differences in family situation and circumstances, these moments will evoke more sympathy in me than they can today.

I think of this now that I carry my second child. If this child lives, I will inevitably carry the grief of misunderstanding, lost intentions between us. Unlike my first, this child will sin, fail, feel pain. It will be a very different kind of breaking for us both. And Lear as parent, muttering plaintively “I gave you all,” both cared for and mistreated by his daughters, himself by turns rejecting, reviling, restoring, and loving them volatilely, will become clearer.


On September 29th, the author and her husband welcomed their first child into the world, a daughter, Josephine Clare.


Kasia Balsbaugh is a writer and editor living in South Bend, Indiana with her husband and family. She enjoys reading, inviting people to share her baked goods, and cooking her way through Shelf Love: Recipes to Unlock the Secrets of Your Pantry, Fridge, and Freezer.

header image: Ian McKellen and Romola Garai in Trevor Nunn’s King Lear (2008).

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