Play Synopsis

JO: surprise yourself. how much do you love me? try.

On an ordinary evening, Jo and Lucy are in their kitchen as they prepare a meal together for, unbeknownst to either of them, is the last time. In an instant, Jo is gone. Lucy remains, shrouded in the specific grief known only to those who have suddenly lost a partner. Lucy is visited by a teenager who wanders into her kitchen in search of food and conversation. He leaves, and Lucy greets the door to three guests, each of whom have aided her in the process of her grief. Dreamlike, dark, and tender, What We Know grapples with the complex pain that accompanies loss, the mystery of memory, and significant role of food in the process towards healing.

About the Playwright

Pamela Carter is a Scottish playwright and dramaturg. Her plays include: Lines (Yard Theatre); Fast Ganz Nah/Almost Near (Theater Dresden); Skåne (Hampstead Theatre; winner of the New Writing Commission at the Berliner Festspiele Stückemarkt in 2012); What We Know (Traverse Theatre); Wildlife (Magnetic North Theatre Co). Her work with Stewart Laing includes: The End of Eddy, Slope, Paul Bright’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and An Argument About Sex (After Marivaux).

Since 2010 she has written for the internationally renowned Swedish artists Goldin+Senneby. She also writes for dance and opera, and has recently adapted a Don Delillo short story for composer Lliam Paterson and Scottish Opera, and is currently writing a music theatre piece based on the true story of a group of London schoolboys lost in the Black Forest in 1936, for Theater Freiburg in Germany. As dramaturg and writer with Vanishing Point Theatre, she has made the award-winning Interiors, Saturday Night, and Tomorrow.

She has also made work for the National Theatre of Scotland, Scottish Dance Theatre, Traverse Theatre, Tramway, LIFT, the Young Vic, Hampstead Theatre, and Malmö Opera House amongst others.

(Bio Courtesy of the National Theatre of Scotland)

Grieving and The Stages of Grief

From the Dramaturg:

Grief has a simple definition: it is the human response to loss. Without question, the simplicity of the definition does not encompass the complex, excruciating, and often extremely emotional passage that is experienced universally and yet differently by all human beings who encounter loss.

A common theory often used to explain the inexplicable process of grieving is the Five Stages of Death, first developed by Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Kübler-Ross offered a framework and defined the five phases as Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance in her book “On Death and Dying.” Her work was first developed in response to her work with terminally ill patients who were confronted with and coping with their impending mortality. The stages have evolved since the cycle was first introduced in 1969 and have often been conflated as a definitive prescriptive process that each human being experiences while grieving.

In the forward to her follow-up work, “On Grief and Grieving,” written in 2004, Kübler-Ross wrote “The stages…were never meant to help tuck messy emotions into neat packages. They were never meant to help tuck messy emotions into neat packages. They are responses that people have, but there is not a typical response to loss, as there is no typical loss. Our grief is as individual as our lives.” (7)

DENIAL

this isn’t it. this isn’t how it’s supposed to be.

-  LUCY

Denial is often misconstrued as the literal denial of death, when in fact it’s closer to disbelief. It is not a lack of awareness that you will not see the person you have lost ever again, it is that you “simply can’t fathom that he will never walk through that door again.”

 

ANGER

Anger is a necessary, volatile, and natural emotional response to loss and considered to be the second stage of grief. It may present itself as rage towards your loved one for not going to the doctor, frustration with peers who still have their husbands, mothers, children present in their lives, fury with yourself for not recognizing symptoms earlier, violent madness at the injustice of having to live on without the person you loved at your side. Anger is perhaps, of the five stages, the most difficult to manage because fury, as natural an emotion as it is, is not usually an appropriate way to interact with oneself nor is it with others. The most important aspect of anger, however, is finding a way to release it, to honor it, and to let it out so that ultimately, you can find a way to let go of its grip on your psyche.

“Anger is strength and it can be an anchor, giving temporary structure to the nothingness of loss. At first grief feels like being lost at sea: no connection to anything. Then you get angry …suddenly you have a structure – your anger towards them. A bridge over the open sea, a connection from you to them. It is something to hold on to, and a connection made from the strength of anger feels better than nothing.” (16)

BARGAINING

i should’ve said more. i wish i’d…i tried…this is really fucking hard.

-  LUCY

“Bargaining allows us to believe that we can restore order to the chaos that has taken over.” (20)

Bargaining is often seen as the third stage of grief. It is a constant feedback loop of, “If Only I Had’s” held together with guilt, despair, and the act of imaginary negotiating that will ultimately never reverse the course of events that have already unfolded or the loss which has already occurred. It is a natural attempt to regain control, to change the outcome or timing. The person who has experienced the loss is holding onto hope that by offering something to whatever entity has power (spiritual being, God, fate, and so on) the pain of the loss may be delayed. Eventually, the process ends as the individual slowly concludes that the loss is permanent, and no offering can bring that person back.

DEPRESSION

i feel full of sadness. full of it. heavy with it. and at the same time, i feel like i’ve been emptied out. dug out like a big hole. isn’t that strange? isn’t it strange that jo’s not being here is so big, so massive, that it is here? it’s absolutely this. now. there. this probably wasn’t the kind of evening you were hoping for.

-  LUCY

“Morning comes…but you don’t care.” (21)

Depression is considered the fourth stage of grief, and perhaps the most difficult to define. Depression is a state of intense and empty sadness in which many grievers report feeling numb or nothing at all, except lethargy and exhaustion. It is heavy, it is sorrowful, and it is inescapable. Society often pushes us back into the wheel of “real life” without having truly explored the depth of this phase, and people often feel pressure to present a sunnier version of themselves than is authentic to their emotional state. Some people cannot stop crying, while others cannot summon a single tear.

During this phase, people often begin to grapple with their present reality. The loss is not a dream from which a person will wake up. It is a time of mourning what has transpired and who has left your life. It is hitting the bottom of the floor of an experience that has transformed you. There is no timeline. There are no guidelines.

Kübler-Ross says that, “as difficult as it is to endure, depression has elements that can be helpful in grief. It slows us down and allows us to take real stock of the loss. It makes us rebuild ourselves from the ground up. It clears the deck for growth. It takes us to a deeper place in our soul that we would not normally explore.” (24)

ACCEPTANCE

it’s okay. it’s fine, isn’t it? all fine. because here we are safe and well. and on we go.

-  LUCY

Acceptance, while considered the fifth and final stage of grief, is not a happy ending. Acceptance is not a singular moment in which the person stops grieving or stops longing for their lost loved one to be with them, alive. It is a stage in which we accept the reality of our loved one being gone as our new permanent reality. It is a powerful and transformative phase in which we learn to live on in a world where our loved one no longer is living.

Like any other phase, acceptance looks different for everyone. It may be finally visiting the cemetery to place flowers on a loved one’s grave or listening to their favorite song when it comes on the radio instead of skipping it, or choosing to wade into the dating world after losing a partner. Little by little, we begin to sort through the wreckage of our grief and begin to build new landscapes in our lives.

Relevant Articles on Grief and Grieving

NPR: How Your Brain Copes With Grief, And Why It Takes Time To Heal
“Grief is like someone turned up the volume dial all of a sudden. The emotion that I think often interferes with our relationships and friendships when we're grieving is anger, because the anger feels so intense.”

New York Times: How Long Should It Take To Grieve?
“To this day, she is not sure how she got from one point to the other. “All of a sudden, you look up,” she said, “and a few years have gone by, and you’re back in the world.”

The Atlantic: The Final Pandemic Betrayal
“Many grievers are starved for sympathy and patience because our popular understanding of grief is wrong…it doesn’t involve discrete stages, doesn’t proceed along a predictable linear path, and might not end in acceptance. “Closure” is a simplistic myth. Grief, as it actually unfolds, is erratic, and in many cases slow.”

Widowhood/The Loss of a Partner

 

i know that i’ve been loved. i know what you know. please know how much i love you.

– LUCY

All loss is distinct and different, entirely dependent on the relationship to the lost person and as unique as each individual. However, the loss of a partner or a spouse is a loss like no other because it a person with whom, generally, you have chosen to walk through life. The minutiae of every day, the meals, and the moments we share with a partner/spouse make for a tremendous loss that defies description once it is felt. The etymology of the word “widow” is Indo-European, and literally translated comes from a root that means “to be empty.”

Widowhood has typically referred to women, and throughout history has had complex social and economic implications. “The widowhood effect” refers to a sharp increase in probability of loss of life after the loss of a partner, particularly amongst the elderly population. Studies have shown that the mortality rate for a bereaved spouse increased by over twenty percent. It is a rare instance in which science might back up the phenomenon of dying of a broken heart.

The New Yorker: “A Widow’s Story” by Joyce Carol Oates

New York Times: For Many Widows, the Hardest Part is Mealtime

Time Magazine: “I Can’t Imagine”

Guardian Angels and Supernatural Encounters

 

on my own? i don’t think i’ll ever be on my own again, cal. there are ghosts here.

– LUCY

The sight of a red cardinal. The feeling of sudden heat on your skin. A dime on the ground. For those of us who experience loss, a tiny comfort that may be found is the sensation of a visit from somewhere beyond our current plane of existence. The mystery of life after death and visitors from beyond the grave have been at the center of many human stories from our earliest recorded moments. In the Bible, angels are represented as beings who serve as an intermediary between humans and heaven. A guardian angel is seen as a protector. Even the most agnostic individual might experience a inexplicably mysterious moment that makes them reconsider – signs that our lost loved ones might live on in other ways we cannot fathom in an earthly existence.

 

Immortality

Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am in a thousand winds that blow,
I am the softly falling snow.
I am the gentle showers of rain,
I am the fields of ripening grain.
I am in the morning hush,
I am in the graceful rush
Of beautiful birds in circling flight,
I am the starshine of the night.
I am in the flowers that bloom,
I am in a quiet room.
I am in the birds that sing,
I am in each lovely thing.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there; I did not die

– Mary Elizabeth Frye, 1935

 

Angel Sightings

The Daily Mail: Do These Stories Prove that Loved Ones Come Back to Comfort Us?

 

Supplementary Tools

Glossary

puttanesca: The origins of puttanesca sauce are disputed, but food historians agree it was created in Naples in the mid-20th century. The classic combination of anchovies, olives, garlic, chile flakes, tomatoes, and capers gives this sauce a robust flavor. It comes together quickly, and can be cooked in the time it takes to boil water and cook the pasta.

blancmange: A traditional French dessert which, literally translated, means “white eating” (although historians generally agree that the etymology is “white dish.”)

bollocks: British slang; typically meant to refer to the testicles or to express frustration and/or annoyance

spunk: Vulgar slang; refers to semen that has dried

uncouth: Refers to a person lacking grace or manners

crockery: Plates, dishes, cups, and other similar items, especially ones made of earthenware or china.

amnesia: Amnesia refers to the loss of memories, such as facts, information and experiences. Though forgetting your identity is a common plot device in movies and television, that's not generally the case in real-life amnesia. Instead, people with amnesia — also called amnestic syndrome — usually know who they are.

Crossing the Rubicon: An idiom that means to pass the point of no return.

Dizzee Rascal: A British MC and rapper, known as a pioneer of grime music, which blends jungle, dancehall, and hiphop. See Dizzee Rascal's music video for "Dance Wiv Me."

Pete Tong: An English DJ known for his work on BBC Radio. The phrase “It’s all gone Pete Tong” is an idiom that play on the phrase “it’s all gone wrong.” See a video of Pete Tong presenting the Ibiza Classics

Gnocchi: A traditional Italian pasta dish,there are generally two ways to make gnocchi: with potatoes (most popular) and with semolina. Potato gnocchi is generally smaller and firmer, while Semolina gnocchi tends to be larger, denser, and closer to a dumpling. Watch: How to make gnocchi ala romana

Venice: A city in Northeastern Italy, Venice is one of the most picturesque cities in the world. Venice has no roads, only canals. It is one of the world’s oldest cities and remains a significant seaport. For years, it has been said that Venice is ”disappearing” or sinking underwater due to pollution, climate change, and erosion. From the New York Times "The Most Beautiful City in the World"

Pestilential bog: “Pestilential” means likely to spread and cause an infectious disease; “bog” refers to a wetland. Bogs are found all over Scotland and Ireland due to their climates and topography.

Trumpery: Word meaning “showy but worthless”

hemorrhages: A massive escape of blood from a ruptured blood vessel. In medical terms, a hemorrhage may be internal or external and involves losing a great amount of blood in a short time. The etymology is "violent bleeding.” View National Library of Medicine's entry on hemorrhages