• Noel Berman on sharing his personal journey in ‘Reflections from the Edge of the Abyss’

Noel Berman has authored publications such as ‘Leadership Lessons from Joshua: The Preparation of a Leader’, ‘Entrapped – The Tragedy of Selfish Ambition’, and ‘Natalie – My Journey from Rape to Recovery to Redemption’, but it is in his latest novel, ‘Reflections from the Edge of the Abyss’, that he is being open about his personal journey through grief following the loss of his wife, Faith.

The book was released in August, and gives readers a personal perspective on grief, which is, as the author himself says, raw, rough, and at times even ruthless. In conversation with The Daily Morning, Berman said that in his writing, he didn’t have to feel inhibited to show feeling. “I felt that I owed it to myself irrespective of what anybody thinks,” he said, adding that it did take courage for one to be open with their feelings.

He also quoted what his children, Naomi and Jonathan, wrote in the foreword: “While every individual has his or her own story of grief, it is our hope that the pain and some of the lessons learnt through our dad’s experience will encourage those of you who read this book to know that you are not alone.”

Berman went into detail about what motivated him to publish ‘Reflections from the Edge of the Abyss’ and how he plans on taking his experience and learning forward to help more people become aware of grief and find solace.

Following are excerpts from the interview:

Tell us about ‘Reflections from the Edge of the Abyss’.

In February 2022, Faith, my wife of 42 years, was diagnosed with a tumour. Surgery was done, and it was successful, but she started having fits, and subsequently got a clot that travelled to her brain and was paralysed. She survived another 5 ½ months.

I’m a person who by nature writes a lot of notes. I can’t wait without scribbling my thoughts. I went into default mode and wrote various thoughts that were going through my mind as I experienced grief and shock at what had happened. While my wife was still alive, somewhere in May 2022, I wrote a poem that I entitled ‘The Edge of the Abyss’. It became a recurring theme – the edge of the abyss. It was not intentional.

My motive in writing the notes was to keep track in the hope that one day when Faith recovered and had her full consciousness, I could relate to her what had happened. But, it was not meant to be.

After she passed away, I kept recording some of my thoughts and feelings. I had a couple of experiences where, while I was grieving, people came and said the wrong things. That actually motivated me.

The initial motivations were that I needed to write something of my experience, making myself vulnerable. I had a desire to create awareness among people who are grieving that they are not alone, and for people to at least understand that a person who is grieving is going through a lot of stuff and that we need to be sensitive.

This was a side-effect of the book, and not exactly the main purpose: The hope that those who know somebody who is grieving will refrain from saying nonsensical things to them, that they will learn that their presence is far more important than any pious platitudes, cliches, or catchphrases that they can use.

I’ve been a person who has always been outward. My philosophy in life is that if we don’t help people in this world, what on earth are we here for? When I launched the book, I talked about Margaret Mead, a famous anthropologist. One of her students asked her what the first sign of civilisation was. He expected her to say something like the making of clay pots or weapons.

Yet, she said it was a healed femur, explaining that in the primitive animal world of those times, if a person broke his leg, it was equal to death. He couldn’t get to the river to get water, he couldn’t defend himself, he couldn’t run away from danger, he couldn’t do anything. He was basically food for the beasts. But, the fact that there was a person with a healed femur showed that somebody had cared for the person and cared for them until the person healed. And so, she said the first sign of civilisation was a healed broken bone.

Because I’m a Christian, I said: If a healed broken bone can be the first sign of civilisation, then may I suggest to you that a healed broken heart, where somebody has cared for the person till the person healed, is the sign of true Christianity?

How does the book capture your personal journey through grief?

I made one deliberate choice when I was writing the book. When I mentioned the book to one of my close friends, he asked what books I was researching. I said I wasn’t researching anything and he was confused. I have a number of books at home about grief, but I was not looking at them at all.

The reason being that I wanted this to be my experience, and if I read anybody, the chances were, there would be a certain influence that person’s thoughts would have on me. I didn’t want that to happen; this had to be a first-person account of everything that happened to me. It couldn’t be filtered by somebody else.

I talk about my meltdowns, our shattered dreams. Even though we were in our late 60s, we had dreams and plans, and those are not going to be achieved. I feel that by helping other people, I can redeem my pain.

In ‘Natalie’, the title of the book reads ‘from rape to recovery to redemption’, and the girl who is raped finds redemption in helping others. She finds that it gives her some meaning and that she can use her pain for the benefit of somebody else.

That’s the kind of thought that came to me after I wrote this book and was thinking of the seminars; that I can use them to teach and help people so they can find some benefit, some solace in their journey of healing.

You mention wanting to hold seminars. Can you tell us more about them?

After I had handed over the manuscript to my publisher, the thought came to me about doing some seminars. I have a Facebook page called ‘The Edge of the Abyss’, where I want people to join in, talk to one another, and throw out some ideas. I started it a couple of weeks ago.

I suddenly got the idea: There’s a Facebook page, there might be a need for seminars, because nobody talks about this at all. Because of this, I’m now doing some research on grief, as I’d like to conduct some seminars for small groups of 30 or 40, maybe once or twice a month. Hopefully, through them, I can have people not only become aware of what grief is, but help those who are grieving find solace in the fact that they aren’t alone.

What do you think about the way in which we deal with grief in Sri Lanka? Is there a certain silence around it?

On one hand, people do grieve publicly. There are the famous criers from Negombo, as an example. But, on the other hand, there is a kind of social stigma to grieving, I think. People tell the other person, ‘Now that’s enough. You don’t need to grieve anymore’. They’ll say that she or he had a good life so it’s okay. They would just brush it off, saying it’s the person’s karma, or that they are in a better place.

People are uncomfortable with expressions of grief, and in their discomfort, they stifle the other person’s expression. That happens across the board with most religions. They rationalise it. There is a cultural problem there. But each culture, there is nothing good or bad about it. We can’t put values on cultural norms; it’s what one is used to.

We also don’t see many men grieving openly or talking about their grief. What did it feel like to be open about your experience?

I thought I needed to write this as a man bearing his soul as it were, and making himself vulnerable is not usually the case. You think somebody else should do that. And so, even at the cost of people thinking strange thoughts about me, I thought I was going to pen this down so that those who are grieving will know that they are not alone.

A friend of mine, who lost his wife about a year ago, read the book. He found it difficult at times, because it was opening up certain memories; the wounds that had not been healed. But, he also found it helpful; he found resonance in what I was going through, and didn’t feel that there was something wrong with him, because that’s what you tend to think.

One thing I learnt in my recent studies is that the signs of a person grieving are evident, but we don’t recognise them; not because we are not trained, but because we see them but we don’t want to pursue them. Grief is normal, but there is a point when it reaches what psychologists now call the 4Ds, which is deviance, distress, dysfunction, and danger.

These signs are there. For example, when I look back, I see that I had complicated grief. I didn’t realise I had it. There’s normal grief, and then there’s complicated grief; the latter considered a mental disorder. The signs were evident for people to see, but nobody picked it up. For example, the fact that I just couldn’t go to church. I was withdrawing from certain social events I would go for regularly. The fact that I was withdrawing and withdrawing for such a long time – two years – should have given somebody the idea that I needed help.

But, it was in my own self-awareness that I saw a psychiatrist, as I thought I needed help; I wasn’t sleeping, I was dysfunctional, my office work was getting affected. That’s why I want to do the seminars: To create that awareness among people.

How did writing help you come to terms with your emotions? What has helped you through your grief?

I had promised my wife to renovate the house before I retired, so that for 10 years after that we wouldn’t need to worry too much about it. So, I did some renovations for her. I used to tease her when she was gardening, and we would have a lot of fun. I couldn’t get into gardening for a long time, but now I am into gardening.

It was a question of finding things that would have some kind of meaning to me, such as new hobbies. My reading went down. I was a voracious reader, so I forced myself and got back into current affairs and politics through YouTube, where I could at least listen, though reading was stuffed.

At one point, one of my coping mechanisms was not staying at home. I would go out all the time. Because I was living alone, there were times when I couldn’t even walk into the house, so I would always leave the radio on so that when I came into the house there would be noise.

I also switched from classics to jazz on the radio, because some of the songs they play, the golden oldies, would bring back memories.

It was a question of finding different things that I could work with. It will depend on one’s personality. I know some people who get into art, which is brilliant therapy. For me, journalling was one way. There was a certain catharsis in writing down my thoughts.