Melancholy: My Perfect Emotion

I’ve always liked sad music, heartbreaking books, and movies about love and loss. Last week when I was writing, listening to a classical playlist, a tragically sad song came on, one that made my pen slow down;  a wash of warmth moved through me. I felt simultaneously somber and content. I could feel my heart rate slow down and my breath become more shallow. I felt a deep sense of calm and okayness.

As I wrote I recognized that I loved this feeling I was having. If the music coming from my phone had been the soundtrack from a scene in a movie I would have been sitting on a beautiful horse on a vast prairie remembering a great love lost. 

The deep sorrow of loss does indeed create an opening for memories, images, and feelings related to that mourning. I often feel it when I read a poem or look at photos of my late father — melancholy — great sadness merged with nostalgia. 

Melancholy is the quintessential welcoming of opposites to create a sense of peaceful presence. For me, melancholy invites me to slow down. To welcome all that comes with melancholy, my overly active physical body and always busy brain have to downshift to experience the complexity of the emotion.

It’s why I love to read heartbreaking memoirs. It’s why I gravitate towards slow, storytelling music like country and folk. It’s why I’ll always choose the tragic family dramas on Netflix. When I enter those spaces I invite in melancholy.

We learn early in life to steer clear of sadness. We learn that it will bring us down, keep us from living our best lives. And it’s true. Wallowing is not the same thing as melancholy. When my grandmother died and then her son, my father, a few months later, I experienced deep sadness, grief, and mourning.

But twenty years later when I think of my father, when I write a poem and his humor comes through me, or when I share with my brother how alike they look, I feel melancholy. I miss him and wish her were still here. And at the same time, memories of him run through me like a warm stream. I am happy-sad all at once. It is a feeling of fullness and complete presence.

Freud writes of the difference between melancholia and mourning. Mourning, he posits, is finite and external, related to immediate loss. Mourning, he says, eventually ends in acceptance. Melancholia, on the other hand, is more complex. The pain of loss is relegated to the unconscious so is not obvious, even to the griever. 

From my cursory review of Freud’s analysis, what I can gather is that melancholia exists when a grieving person has not had the opportunity to fully move through loss to acceptance. And I wonder if any of us ever fully moves through deep loss or if there is always some residue of melancholia.

This makes sense to me. Sometimes I reminisce about days when my daughter let me hug her and snuggle her. I remember the times when she needed me to guide her. And I miss that. I miss that version of her that is gone now that she is a young adult. Sometimes my iPhone will send me a video of images of her, of my family with sad music playing in the background. It comes at random times, a delightful surprise where I can take a break from whatever I am doing to pause and welcome that perfect sense of melancholy.