The Ache Family

A Vela Essay — DRAFT

Slug: the-ache-family Series: Emotion Seams (essay 1 of 3) · companion to the emotion guides on grief, longing, and nostalgia Essay type: analytical Published at: DRAFT — pending arc-batch coherence pass (ASN-1450) Meta title: The Ache Family | Vela Meta description: Grief, longing, and nostalgia are not three names for one feeling. One mourns what was, one reaches for what is barred, one sweetens a past that was harder than it now glows — and the corpus shows them behaving differently. This essay names the differences.

There is a word you reach for when something is missing, and the word is too small for what you mean, and you use it anyway because the language has not given you anything better at the speed the feeling moves. The word is ache. You say I ache for her, I ache for that summer, I ache for the life I didn't take — and the same three letters carry, in those three sentences, three different facts about your relationship to the missing thing. The flattening is convenient. It is also a small dishonesty, because the feelings underneath are not interchangeable, and you act differently depending on which one you are inside.

This essay is about pulling the ache apart. There are at least three things that go by the name, and the people who write best about loss keep them distinct even when they never stop to define them. Grief is the ache for what was and is gone. Longing is the ache for what you can name and cannot have. Nostalgia is the ache for a past you have sweetened in the act of missing it. They share a territory — the gap between you and something absent — and they behave so differently inside that territory that to call them one feeling is to lose the use of all three.

Start with the gap itself, because that is what they have in common and it is the only thing they have in common. In each of them there is a distance between you and an object, and the distance is not closing. What changes from one to the next is what sits on the far side of the distance, and what you are doing about it, and whether you would close the distance if you could.

Grief is the ache for what was

Grief is the one that wants the lost thing back. It does not negotiate with the absence and it does not sweeten it. It is the rawest of the three because the loss is most complete: the object existed, fully, and now does not, and the wanting has nowhere to go.

The body knows this before the mind agrees to it. Roxane Gay, writing in Hunger about a loss that was done to her rather than taken from her, locates grief exactly where it lives, which is not in the calendar but in the flesh:

So many years past being raped, I tell myself what happened is "in the past." This is only partly true. In too many ways, the past is still with me. The past is written on my body. I carry it every single day. The past sometimes feels like it might kill me. It is a very heavy burden.

Notice that the grief here refuses the consolation the mind keeps offering it. In the past is exactly the phrase a person uses to manage grief, and Gay names it as a half-lie — the loss is not back there, it is here, weight-bearing, present tense. That is the first mark of grief against its cousins: it does not cool. Where nostalgia has made its peace with the gone-ness and longing keeps the object propped up where it can be looked at, grief is still in the wound, and the wound is now.

The second mark is that grief takes the body hostage. It is not, in the testimony, primarily a thought; it is a physical occupation. Stephanie Foo, in What My Bones Know, renders the somatic siege without a shred of melodrama:

I was devastated. For three months, all I consumed were bottles of Jameson and a single box of cornflakes—a small handful a day, and even that made me nauseated. I lost so much weight that my ribs formed a stepladder, my vertebrae sharp shells pushing dangerously out from beneath my skin.

The grief is in the ribs and the cornflakes before it is in any sentence she could say about it. And the prose stays at the level of the body on purpose, because that is where the truth of the state is — the mind narrating I thought I fixed this problem while the body quietly stops eating. Grief is the emotion that most exposes the gap between what we have decided about a loss and what the loss is still doing to us.

Then there is grief's strange relationship with time, which is not the soft retrospection of nostalgia but something closer to a stalled clock. Tolstoy, watching a man sit through the death of someone he loves, catches the way grief abolishes duration:

But after that hour there passed another hour, two hours, three, the full five hours he had fixed as the furthest limit of his sufferings, and the position was still unchanged; and he was still bearing it because there was nothing to be done but bear it; every instant feeling that he had reached the utmost limits of his endurance… But still the minutes passed by and the hours, and still hours more, and his misery and horror grew and were more and more intense.

The man sets a limit — five hours, after which surely it will be bearable — and the limit means nothing, because grief does not run on a schedule and will not be administered. This is the precise opposite of the way nostalgia handles time. Nostalgia loves the pastness of its object; the distance is what makes the past glow. Grief has no use for distance at all. It wants the clock turned back, and the clock will not turn, and the refusal is the pain.

Grief is also, in its largest form, a fact about other people that exceeds any one mourner. Rebecca Makkai, in The Great Believers, writing about the AIDS epidemic, lets grief widen until a whole city becomes the lost object:

How could she explain that this city was a graveyard? That they were walking every day through streets where there had been a holocaust, a mass murder of neglect and antipathy, that when they stepped through a pocket of cold air, didn't they understand it was a ghost, it was a boy the world had spat out? Here, in her hand, a stack of ghosts.

The stack of ghosts is grief's signature image — not a softened memory to rest in, but a present accusation, the dead crowding the living streets, the loss refusing to stay buried. And the guilt that rides it (the whole epidemic was somehow her fault) is grief's particular companion, the irrational arithmetic of the survivor, which is nothing like nostalgia's gentle self-forgiveness or longing's flattering improvement of its object. Grief blames. It is the least consoling of the three because it is the most honest about how much was actually lost.

Hold the shape of it before moving on: grief wants the gone thing back, in the body, now, on a clock that will not move, and it does not gild what it lost. Everything that distinguishes its cousins is a departure from one of those facts.

Longing is the ache for what is barred

Longing shares grief's seriousness and grief's present tense — it, too, wants its object now — but it differs on a single decisive point. Grief's object is gone; longing's object exists, or existed, and is held on the far side of a distance the wanting cannot cross. The dead do not return; that is grief. The living beloved who married someone else, the mother who can no longer protect you, the city you can no longer afford — those are still out there, real and unreachable, and the ache toward them is longing.

The mark of longing against grief is that longing can almost always name what it wants, with a precision grief rarely manages. The grieving person wants an impossible reversal; the longing person wants a specific, namable thing. Irvin Yalom, the psychotherapist, watching his own want surface in a hospital group, names his to the exact relation and the exact function:

Perhaps the aching, the longing, for a mother to protect me from the brute facts of life and death… my deep craving for motherly comfort, fanned by my mother's death.

Notice the doubling: his mother's death is the grief, and the longing for a mother to protect me is what the grief becomes when it acquires an object and a direction. Not comfort in general — motherly comfort, the particular protection only she had offered, now barred by death. The naming does not relieve the longing. It sharpens it, the way a clear photograph of a far-off thing makes the distance more painful, not less.

Longing's second mark is that it improves what it cannot reach. Grief, in its honesty, often blames; longing, in its reaching, gilds. It builds a more lovable version of the barred object than the object ever was, which is one reason the reach is so consuming and reunion so often disappoints. Anaïs Nin, in Henry and June, longing for a man she partly has and is terrified of losing, organizes her whole psyche around the name:

Today I can't work because yesterday's feelings lie ready to pounce on me out of the softness of the garden… I need him near me every moment—more than near, inside of me… June, take everything from me but not Henry. Leave me Henry.

This is longing at full pressure — the named object installed at the center of attention so totally that the self will bargain away everything else to keep the reach open. And it shows the boundary longing shares with desire: Nin can have Henry, at least for now, so the feeling is partly desire; but she longs for him in the same breath because the having is precarious and the named thing could be taken. When the object can be reached, the feeling is desire. When it is named and barred, the feeling is longing. They ride together constantly, which is why the difference is so easy to miss.

There is a borderline case worth preserving, where longing sits so close to its objectless cousin that the writer cannot at first find what he wants. Nick Flynn opens Another Bullshit Night in Suck City in exactly that fog:

I'm twenty-four when I start at Pine Street, full of nonspecific, scattershot longing. "Dissatisfied" is an emotion.

He calls it nonspecific, scattershot — and the very fact that he reaches for those qualifiers shows he feels the difference from ordinary longing, which would not need them. The book then spends itself finding the object: his absent father, on the streets where Flynn works, the named figure the scattershot longing was pointed at all along. That is the tell. When an ache is truly objectless, it has slid into something else — the diffuse, addressless yearning that is its own state. When it is nonspecific in Flynn's sense, it is usually longing whose object has not yet been admitted, and the work is the naming.

Longing's deepest emblem is the named object kept in view precisely because it cannot be touched. Robert Greene, recounting Juan Perón imprisoned and separated from Eva, gives the gesture its purest form:

Suddenly he felt new emotions sweeping over him: he pinned her photographs all over the wall… He wrote to her, "It is only being apart from loved ones that we can measure our affection. From the day I left you… I have not been able to calm my sad heart… My immense solitude is full of your memory."

The photographs on the wall are longing exactly: the named object made visible, addressed, written-toward, and untouchable. It is only being apart that we can measure our affection. Present love does not produce this; presence does not have to be reached for. Longing is what affection becomes when its object is moved to a measurable distance — and the measuring, the pinning-up, the writing-toward, is what the distance forces the love to do. This is the clean line between longing and grief: the griever has no photograph to pin up, because the object is not at a distance but gone; the longer has the photograph, and the photograph is the wound.

Nostalgia is the ache for a sweetened past

Nostalgia is the gentlest of the three and the least trustworthy. It differs from both its cousins on the same axis: it has made its peace with the gone-ness. Grief wants the lost thing back and longing reaches for the barred thing still, both at full present-tense pressure; nostalgia has cooled, and in cooling has sweetened, and now takes a strange pleasure in the very loss the other two only suffer. It is the ache that has learned to enjoy itself.

The word carries its own history of this softening. It was coined in 1688 by a Swiss medical student, Johannes Hofer, who built it from the Greek nostos, the return home, and algos, pain — the painful longing of soldiers serving abroad who sickened, sometimes fatally, with homesickness for their distant valleys. For two centuries it named a disease of place, a real ache for a real and reachable home. The modern feeling is stranger: we are now nostalgic for a time, which no journey reaches, and the home we ache for is increasingly one we suspect never quite existed in the form we miss.

Tobias Wolff names the state outright, with none of the self-flattery nostalgia usually hides behind, when he describes the boyhood friendship that lived entirely in the backward glance:

Looking always backward, we became mired in nostalgia. We both liked old movies, which Mrs. Gayle allowed us to watch all night… We preferred old cars to new ones. We used antique slang… we sang old songs together, our voices quavering with loss.

Mired is the honest word, and quavering with loss names the sweetness directly — the loss is not suffered here, it is performed, savored, made into a shared pleasure. No one grieving sings about it for fun. No one longing for a barred beloved enjoys the longing. Nostalgia is the only one of the three that turns the ache into entertainment, and Wolff catches the slightly fatuous quality of that — the boys gilding a past they were too young to have, because the gilding felt good.

Its supreme practitioner is honest in a different and harder way. Nabokov, in Speak, Memory, confesses nostalgia's deepest secret — that he would not undo the loss even if he could, because the loss is the condition of the sweetness:

The break in my own destiny affords me in retrospect a syncopal kick that I would not have missed for worlds. Ever since that exchange of letters with Tamara, homesickness has been with me a sensuous and particular matter… give me anything on any continent resembling the St. Petersburg countryside and my heart melts.

This is the line that separates nostalgia from grief beyond any confusion. Grief would give anything to undo the loss. Nostalgia would not have missed it for worlds — it prizes the rupture, because the rupture is what made the lost country a sensuous and particular matter, gilded, treasurable, more vivid in exile than it ever was in fact. The grieving person is robbed; the nostalgic person, perversely, is enriched. Nabokov treasures the lost Russia and knows, with complete clarity, that he is treasuring a reconstruction. That double awareness — feeling the sweetness fully and refusing to be fooled by it — is the whole art of honest nostalgia.

Nostalgia's editing hand improves not only the good but the bad, which is the surest sign it is not telling the truth about the past. Anthony Bourdain, in The Nasty Bits, gilds even the squalid once it is safely behind him:

I like living in the city where so many of my favorite films take place, where nearly every street corner reminds me of some piece of lurid personal or criminal history. "Crazy Joe Gallo was shot here… Used to score there… My old methadone clinic… That used to be an after-hours club…"

The methadone clinic glows. That is what nostalgia does that neither grief nor longing would: it makes the bad past precious, because what nostalgia loves is not the thing but the pastness of the thing, the safe distance from which anything at all can be made to shine. Radclyffe Hall, in The Well of Loneliness, shows the same gilding turned on a place the exile actively hated:

Homesick unto death she would suddenly feel for the dour little Highland village of Beedles. More even than for its dull bricks and mortar would she long for its dull and respectable spirit… the greengrocer's shop that stood on the corner, where they sold, side by side with the cabbages and onions, little neatly tied bunches of Scottish heather.

She is homesick for the dullness she fled. That is impossible in grief, which mourns a real loss, and impossible in longing, which reaches for a thing it genuinely wants; only nostalgia can ache for what it disliked, because the disliking has cooled and the cabbages now glow. James Baldwin, in Another Country, watches a woman do this and answers her with the corrective grief and longing never need:

"When everything, touching and tasting—everything—was so new, and even suffering was wonderful because it was so complete." "That's hindsight, Cass. I wouldn't want to be that young again for anything on earth."

That's hindsight. The whole danger of nostalgia is in that exchange. The remembered youth was miserable — Cass admits it a page later — but distance has lit it warmly, and the warm light is mistaken, for a moment, for the truth of the time. Vivaldo's flat refusal is what keeps nostalgia honest: the past was not golden; it is being gilded now, by the longing that reaches back for it.

Why the difference is worth keeping

You could let all three stay under the one word, and most of the time the language does. But the collapse costs you something specific, and it costs you it in each direction.

Call grief nostalgia and you ask a person to enjoy a loss that is still a wound — you hand the bereaved a journey and a closure and a soft golden frame for a thing that has not cooled and may never cool, and the kindness curdles into pressure. Call longing grief and you tell someone reaching for a real and barred object that they should be mourning instead of reaching, that the want is a sickness to be processed rather than a relation to be inhabited — when sometimes the reaching, like Perón's photographs on the wall, is the only way left to stay in relation to what is gone. Call nostalgia longing, or longing nostalgia, and you lose the most consequential distinction of all: nostalgia, unlike the other two, can be a lie, and when its gilding is mistaken for history it stops being a private comfort and becomes a program for restoring a past that never was. The grieving and the longing are at least honest about what they have lost. The nostalgic is the only one who needs to be asked, gently, but was it ever really like that.

The three are not ranked. None is healthier than the others, and a single loss will often move through all of them in turn — grief first, raw and clock-stalled; then, as the object recedes to a nameable distance, longing, the reach toward what is barred; then, much later, if you are lucky and honest, nostalgia, the cooled and sweetened version you can finally rest in, provided you remember it is sweetened. The ache does not stay one thing. It travels. And the only way to know where you are in it — whether you are in the wound, or the reach, or the gilding — is to have kept the three words apart, so that when the ache rises you can ask it the question it most needs: not do I miss something, but which kind of missing is this, and what does this kind ask of me.

The arrow is the same in all three — pointed at something on the far side of a distance that will not close. What differs is whether the thing it points at is gone, or barred, or only gilded. Grief points at the gone and wants it back. Longing points at the barred and reaches anyway. Nostalgia points at the past and warms it in the looking. You have felt all three, probably this week. The least the language can do is let you tell them apart.