Alternative Inventory of Complicated Grief by Deborah Thompson The following test is offered as an alternative to the psychiatric community’s “Inventory of Complicated Grief,” which determines whether or not a widow’s grieving is “maladaptive” and “pathologic.” Answer Yes or No to the following questions. There are no right answers. Are you unable to answer the question “How are you?”? Do you come up short when the computerized form offers bubbles only for single, married, or divorced? Are you unable to complete the form? Do you have pronoun problems? Do you struggle over whether to say “I” or “we,” as in “I moved here seven years ago” or “we moved here seven years ago”? Does “I” elude you? Do you fail to recognize yourself? Do you wander the grocery store aisles unable to find an item that makes sense in your cart? Does your chest crave the press of a hug so hungrily through the night that you have to start sleeping on your stomach? Do you miss picking his pimples? Do you croon with torch songs and country songs that you used to scorn? Has every break-up song become a death song? Have you lost your baby? Did your sugar-pie leave you? Do you have the lovesick blues? Do you dream in blue? Do you pause at your front door before inserting the key, knowing that the house beyond is empty? Do you wish you were a dog so that you could still smell his last remaining molecules that must linger in the closet below your detection? Do you urge your dog to sniff the still-hanging clothes and watch him closely for signs of recognition? Do you sport Bassett eyes and Mastiff jowls? Do you snort and slobber? With the loss of your mind, have you become pure animal? Do your ungainly cries inspire your dogs to join in a communal howl? Do you refuse to smile when a friend says that she doesn’t want to watch her diet, that she’d rather gorge, smoke, drink, and die young? Do you laugh at Goths, for whom morbidity is a style and pain an accessory? Who romanticize death and mistake it for depth? Do you go a little Goth yourself, dressing in all-black when you can’t live up to any other color? Do you find yourself attracted to icons of death, collecting skull keychains and Grimm Reaper figurines? Do you find the first red of blood beautiful? Do you walk into a crowded room and think, “Everyone here is going to die some day?” Do you, having lost all survival instincts, cross the street without looking either way? Do you stop at the green light, go at the red? Is yellow a crisis? Is each decision, however trivial, a crisis? Do you have trouble choosing an outfit in the morning because you don’t know who you are? Does every outfit feel like a costume, like you’re playing someone else, someone you once were, someone you’ll never be again? Is yes or no an impossibility? Do you have tense problems? Is it “we had three dogs” or “we have three dogs” or “he had and I have three dogs”? Do you sometimes wonder if you ever knew him at all? Are you sometimes tempted to toy with telemarketers when they ask for him by name and then demand, when you say he’s not available, to know when he'll be in? Do you ever answer their aggressive questions with, “He’ll never be available again. He’s dead” and then see how they deal with it? When you’re told, “Everything happens for a reason” and “God has a plan,” do you ever respond with a polite euphemism for “Fuck you?" Are you offended by the phrase “Get on with your life”? Are you offended by spring? Do you fetishize numbers and dates—the date of diagnosis, the death date, days ending in the same numbers? Have you created your own private numerology? Do you see him peripherally, and learn not to turn your head to look directly so as not to make him go away again? Do you mine religions for explanations of death and for myths of an afterlife? Do you reach to believe these unbelievable stories which are so much better than yours? Do you look for signs? Is each bird a messenger? Each fox an omen? Do you see ghosts? At airports, do you turn your head away—or, alternatively, stare with punishing compulsion—when couples reunite? Do you whimper when you see an old couple holding hands? If you answered yes to 0-10 questions, they will say that you are “coping.” If you answered yes to 11-20 questions, you are living proof. If you answered yes to 21-30 questions, you are far gone. If you answered yes to 31-34 questions, you know why a dog’s howls come from the bottom of his chest. Deborah Thompson is an Associate Professor of English at Colorado State University. She lives in the foothills of Colorado with three dogs and a cat. HOME