Commentary

Grief and Mariana Alessandri’s Night Vision 

Erin Tarver

Emory University, USA

Tarver, Erin. 2026. “Grief and Mariana Alessandri’s Night Vision.”

 Journal of Philosophy of Emotion 8, no. 2: 20-26. https://doi.org/10.33497/2026.latesummer.3. 

Abstract:  I reflect on my own experience of reading Night Vision in the context of the loss of a loved one and a personal struggle with grief and anger. I suggest that Alessandri’s analysis of grief and anger is important for its recognition of the value of sitting with these emotions rather than attempting to overcome them, but question whether the book is in danger of romanticizing pain, which sufferers genuinely want to overcome. I suggest that a unique contribution of Alessandri’s book is, for me, the impetus to embrace and love life again, despite the pain of grief.    

Keywords: grief, mourning, personal reflection, anger, hope

Night Vision first came to me in the winter of early 2023. I was on a plane to or from Boston, on one of the five trips I had made to the city from my home in Atlanta over the course of three months. I made those trips because I was running away from my grief, grief that had become unbearable at home, where I was surrounded by the memories of my late partner, who had died suddenly on my forty-first birthday: October 10, 2022. In the months that followed, I did what I could to survive—though at times I did not want to. My chief coping mechanisms included smelling his old clothes, writing, and impulse-buying plane tickets to Boston, where I went to stay with my closest friends anytime I could manage it. 

It was on one of these trips that I read the first chapter of Night Vision, on anger. I was surprised to recognize myself in this chapter, one in which Alessandri describes the justice-seeking goals of “first-order anger” and the

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sanity-preserving rage of “second-order anger” that occurs when those goals are not—or in my case, could not be—satisfied (2023, 39-40). “Not everyone will get the relief their anger is demanding,” Alessandri writes:

But to turn against your anger simply because you cannot secure satisfaction would be a mistake. Anger functions to protect us, to keep us grounded in the reality of our unfair situation. To anyone who says that anger is useless if you cannot change your situation, Lorde, hooks, and Lugones would disagree. One of anger’s functions is to preserve dignity (44). 

I would not have, at that point, described my mood primarily as angry. I was broken, desperate, lonely, suffering, but I was reluctant to admit (perhaps even to myself) that I was angry. Doing so, as Alessandri put it, felt ugly. It felt selfish. It felt embarrassing.

But I was angry, a fact that became clear to me every time someone told me how “strong” I was. As I learned from Megan Devine’s book, It’s OK that You’re Not OK, which Alessandri discusses in her own chapter on grief, this is a common experience. I had, up till that point in my life, been a deeply private person about my own dark moods, and experienced visceral revulsion of the idea of expressing emotional vulnerability to anyone but my closest friends. To avoid that, I employed a strategy favored by many Type-A people with high-functioning anxiety: I threw myself into my work. I took exactly one week off of teaching class, then returned at full speed to my duties as Chair and as a member of faculty. I kept busy, I sent emails, I did the dishes. Then I came home to no one and frequently cried on the floor, feeling, alternately, an aching, desperate sense of absence, and a choking indignation at the fact that I, of all people in his life, was the only one experiencing his loss alone. Everyone else had someone to come home to, and I was left to pick up the pieces of my life and the detritus of his, in an empty house. I felt myself overcome with resentment, even at the attempts my own friends and family made to help—no one could understand me, I thought. At forty-one, no one I knew had lost a partner, not even my parents. I increasingly heard others’ marveling at my “strength” as something akin to mockery, or at least like a barely-concealed expression of their relief that they were not in my shoes. I couldn’t make sense of this until I got Megan Devine’s book that fall, whose dedication reads: “For those who are the stuff of other people’s nightmares” (2017, iv).

Where I ultimately found the most comfort was, perhaps unsurprisingly, in a support group for people who had lost partners. I met woman after woman who told me how much they hated being told they were “so strong.” “I don’t want to be strong,” one said. “I want my husband back.” What we all had in common, I think, was not only that we had experienced a grievous loss, but that we felt that we didn’t have any choice but to be strong. What was the alternative?

In her book, Alessandri writes, “A society that equates a woman’s strength with her capacity to bottle up her grievances, a society that admonishes us with the perennial reminder that someone else has it worse, a society that hands her a self-help book instead of admitting that she has a raw deal, is a society full of sick women” (2023, 31-32). She is not being metaphorical here: unexpressed anger quite literally contributes to physical pain and negative medical outcomes. “In one study…breast cancer patients who expressed their anger survived at twice the rate of those who kept it in” (32).

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I saw myself, too, in this haunting statistic. I had struggled for the prior year with chronic back pain, which had turned out to be the result of a herniated disc that first occurred at the end of my previous relationship. The loss of my marriage was followed by the near total loss of my mobility that summer, and then later, the loss of my new partner. Nothing about this was fair, but I was determined not to dwell on the unfairness of my predicament until my seething, unexpressed rage came rushing out in the week after I found myself in the hospital for back surgery. I yelled at my parents and I alienated my partner’s sister. I wrote this in my journal that December:

Last Friday I had back surgery. I am too young for back surgery, as the anesthesiologist declared to me when he entered the room. I am also too young to be grieving the loss of a partner, too young to feel my body turn against me, to stop doing what it is supposed to do, to buckle under the weight of my life these past twelve months. And yet, here we are.

I have thought a lot, since Kaleb died, about what the body can bear, about when it gives warning of its collapse and when it does not, about how it rebels against its circumstances in whatever little way it can (heart palpitations, herniated discs, accumulated fat cells in the midsection), and about how certain I feel that I will survive this even as I am not sure how and even as I feel so very tired of being strong.

I do not want to be a good patient, a good griever today. I want to run around the block screaming, I want to tear off my bandages and drink a bottle of wine, I want to abandon my responsibilities. I want my body to cooperate, to be the one I used to have, the one that made me overcome with wonder at what it was still capable of at forty […]. I want to curse the universe that dealt me this hand. I want to slaughter a goat or chicken to atone for whatever wrong I may have committed to deserve this devolution into melodrama. 

I want what cannot be. I want a universe without death, I want a body that doesn’t wear down.

(Tarver 2022)

I didn’t get any of these things, but I did scream. It helped, but not much. Grief had, as Alessandri writes, “[put me] in touch with a basic fact: surviving hurts” (2023, 99).

In all of this, one of the lessons I learned was the value of connection, of open honesty about the rawness of my grief, anger, sadness, and anxiety. My widow friends were invaluable to me as people who would listen to and affirm my darkness without telling me about my own strength. I spent countless hours with my Boston friends on Zoom when I couldn’t physically get on a plane. I also posted, I’m sure more than was advisable, on social media, sharing the depths of my loss in ways that I would not have dreamed of and probably would have found cringe-inducing just a few months prior. I did not care. I was broken open, and more importantly, it was all I felt I could do to grasp at connection, to feel my way out of the deep hole of isolation that was my grief. In her chapter on suffering, Alessandri discusses the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unanumo’s recognition that the acknowledgement of our suffering is what enables us to connect most significantly with others: “Why talk about your irritations? To give people in your life a chance to love you. Sorrow craves acknowledgement and expression, not repression or cheering up. Pain is a sign of vitality, and acknowledging it gives us eyes to

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recognize it when it’s sitting across the kitchen table. People in pain are not broken. They’re just in pain” (2023, 63).

I want to spend my remaining space on this experience of pain, and its place in our lives, and what it means for our response to dark moods and Alessandri’s perspective on them. I was, for much of the fall and winter before finding Night Vision, in a chasm of pain, one that I wanted only to end. If I could offer one hesitation about the book, it is this: is it possible to make space for or even appreciate what these “dark moods” teach us without valorizing or romanticizing them? “Granted their dignity,” Alessandri writes, “our dark moods remind us that congenital analgesia (the inability to feel pain) is not something to aspire to…if we could imagine dolor as bestowing upon us a sixth sense, then we might be more tempted to look around, head high, until we spot a fellow sufferer. If misery loves company, let’s use it to find one another” (2023, 176). There were certainly times that year in which my pain was so immense that I wished for nothing more than congenital analgesia. Perhaps this is partly a result of (what Alessandri calls) the light metaphor, and of growing up in a culture that taught me that negative emotions were a sign that my faith was not strong enough, that there was something wrong with these emotions. But I think a major part of this was simply that the experience was excruciating. And pain, as Alessandri notes elsewhere in the book, is most frequently a sign to us—at least when it affects our bodies—that something is wrong. This is one of its most significant gifts. I imagine that Alessandri might respond that, in this instance, what is wrong is the human condition: that we are mortal, that those we love die and leave us, that our bodies break down.

I am of two minds here, because I think Alessandri is absolutely right that sitting with our dark moods is the only healthy way through them. Like her, I am attracted to the dark realism of the Stoics; I find myself as compelled today as I was in college by sentiments like the one expressed by Seneca, which Alessandri quotes: “To this end you were born, to experience loss and to perish, to feel hope and fear, to disturb others and yourself, to dread and yet long for death, and, worst of all, never to know under what terms you exist” (quoted in 2023, 79). Yet, I have to admit that my own constitution is one that, despite that dark awareness of and preoccupation with death and finitude, continually searches for means of creating hope, of loving life. I cannot help myself from being drawn, for example, to Marcus Aurelius’s suggestion that Philosophy will save us from the apparent meaninglessness of human existence. At the end of his second Meditation, he writes: 

Human life. Duration: momentary. Nature: changeable. Perception: dim.

Condition of Body: decaying. Soul: spinning around. Fortune: unpredictable. Lasting fame: uncertain. Sum Up: the body and its parts are a river, the soul a dream and a mist, life is warfare and a journey far from home, lasting reputation is oblivion. Then what can guide us? Only philosophy. Which means making sure that the power within stays safe and free from assault, superior to pleasure and pain, doing nothing randomly or dishonestly…not dependent on anyone else’s doing something or not…And making sure that it accepts what happens and what is dealt as coming from the same place it came from. And above all, that it accepts death in a cheerful spirit, as nothing but the dissolution of the elements of which each living thing is composed…It’s a natural thing. And nothing natural is evil. (2002, 22-23, italics in original) 

I will admit that I was as incapable as the Roman Stoic Cicero was of putting this into practice when faced with actual death (despite his Stoic commitments, Alessandri reports, Cicero fell apart completely after the death of

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his daughter, Tullia). No amount of reflecting on my loved one’s mortality or my own was sufficient to prepare me for the reality of it. But I find myself unwilling to stop trying, as unwilling to “befriend” my dark moods as Anzaldúa was, according to Alessandri.

Am I unhelpfully struggling against darkness, or am I making my own life livable? I think, here, of William James, a man who had his own struggles with darkness, and who nevertheless advised in “Is Life Worth Living?” that it may, in fact, be better for us to will ourselves to believe that it is worthwhile than to accept the darkness of pessimism. He writes,

Suppose, however thickly evils crowd upon you, that your unconquerable subjectivity proves to be their match, and that you find a more wonderful joy than any passive pleasure can bring in trusting ever in the larger whole. Have you not now made life worth living on these terms? […] Please remember that optimism and pessimism are definitions of the world, and that our own reactions on the world, small as they are in bulk, are integral parts of the whole thing, and necessarily help to determine the definition. They may even be the decisive elements in determining the definition. […] This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it, from the moral point of view, and we are determined to make it from that point of view, so far as we have anything to do with it, a success (James 1992 (1895), 501).

I am not sure if James or I am tacitly capitulating to the light metaphor here; it is arguable that James would advocate I muster whatever of the masculine “strenuous mood” I had left in me to keep going, and to will myself to find meaning and purpose in my life again. Though it sounds exactly like the kind of advice Alessandri’s book argues against (just believe your life can be worthwhile again!) I can say that this is essentially what I ended up doing—though perhaps to Alessandri’s point, only after I had sat, for months, with my darkness, and only with medical interventions under the guidance of professionals.

But what proved the most transformative for me was reading Radical Acceptance, a book by the Buddhist psychotherapist Tara Brach (2003). What resonated most with me in this book was Brach’s suggestion that we reject a core belief that many in the West share: “something is wrong with me” (2003, 4). So many of us, she writes, are gripped by the idea that we are fundamentally broken, that we need to change the way we feel, that we should be ashamed of our negative emotions. This self-shame is ineffective at changing us, though, and in fact only adds shame to whatever negative emotion we are experiencing. Brach advocates a “radical acceptance” of our negative emotions rather than fighting against them: practicing compassion toward them, saying ‘yes’ to them, holding them as if they were small children and providing them recognition and comfort. She writes: “We lay the foundations of Radical Acceptance by seeing how we create suffering when we turn harshly against ourselves, and by remembering our intention to love life…Whether we feel pleasure or pain, the wings of acceptance allow us to honor and cherish this everchanging life, as it is” (Brach 2003, 30-31). Perhaps this is what Alessandri has in mind when she calls for “respecting our anxiety” (2023, 174) for giving “ depression a job in [our] knowledge production” (175), for using anger as “our tool instead of assuming it is something to hide” (32). We may or may not move out of our dark moods, but I think we can hope to do so even as we accept the value of our life’s journeys into the shade. I don’t think this is optimism, per se, nor necessarily an acceptance of the light metaphor. But no one wants to stay in the dark forever, even as we can accept or embrace its deeper moments.

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I’ll end with a poem by Ellen Bass, which I read and reread during the 2022-2023 academic year:

The Thing Is

to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your throat filled with the silt of it. When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air, heavy as water more fit for gills than lungs; when grief weights you down like your own flesh

only more of it, an obesity of grief, you think, How can a body withstand this? Then you hold life like a face between your palms, a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes, and you say, yes, I will take you

I will love you, again. (2002) 

Is the intention to love life, no matter what it brings, compatible with seeing ourselves through dark moods? I think so. And I’m thankful for Dr. Alessandri for writing a book that saw me through my own. 

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References

1. Alessandri, Mariana. 2023. Night Vision: Seeing Ourselves through Dark Moods. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

2. Aurelius, Marcus. 2002. Meditations, trans. Gregory Hays. New York: The Modern Library.

3. Bass, Ellen. 2002. “The Thing Is.” The Poetry Foundation. Accessed April 4, 2025. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/151844/the-thing-is .

4. Brach, Tara. 2003. Radical Acceptance: Embracing your life with the heart of the Buddha. New York: Bantam Books.

5. Devine, Megan. 2017. It’s OK that You’re Not OK: Meeting grief and loss in a culture that doesn’t understand. Boulder, CO: Sounds True.

6. James, William. 1992 (1895). “Is Life Worth Living?” In William James: Writings 1878-1899, edited by Frederick H. Burkhardt, 480-503. New York: The Library of America. 

7. Tarver, Erin. “Personal Journal,” unpublished manuscript. December 9, 2022.

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Erin Tarver © 2026

Author email: erintarver[at]gmail[dot]com