From Here to the Great Unknown

From Here to the Great Unknown centers on the loss and trauma Lisa experienced throughout her life—a focus that Riley names explicitly and attempts to balance with her own joyful memories of her childhood. As a posthumous memoir narrated by both mother and daughter, the text deals with not only the losses that Lisa experienced throughout her life but also Riley’s loss of her mother. The text explores different ways of coping with pain and loss, ultimately suggesting the importance of processing pain so that it does not consume the sufferer.

Both Riley and Lisa emphasize Elvis’s death as the first great loss in Lisa’s life—one that catalyzed a lifelong tension between her personal, private grief and the public mourning of a cultural icon. Elvis and Lisa were incredibly close, and his death made her feel like “the whole world had stopped” (61). However, Elvis’s death was also a public tragedy, with legions of fans mourning the loss of the “godlike figure” of Elvis Presley. Watching the public spectacle of “everyone else’s grief” made it impossible for Lisa to mourn the personal loss of her father. She couldn’t “grieve in public” and instead tried to “do stuff that would distract [her]” (62). However, as soon as the distraction subsided, her grief would creep back in. Throughout her life, the loss of her father was “still just there,” unchanged and forever painful. Riley muses that her mother never truly “processed the loss” of Elvis, and her “anguish” over his death always remained palpable. She developed a “sadness” that “never left” and only worsened after the death of her son.

In contrast, Riley frames Lisa’s response to Ben’s death as drastically different—a deeply personal time of mourning in which she allowed herself and her family the space to grieve his loss in private. As a grown woman, Lisa was able to process the loss of her son on her own terms—something she was never able to do with her father. She kept Ben’s body in the house on dry ice for two months so that she “could become okay with laying him to rest” (250). After his funeral, the family remained together for six months as Lisa led them in a “Ben-centric” “grief pod” in which they spoke of nothing but Ben. Riley describes the period as a “beautiful grieving experience” that brought their family closer. Lisa was insistent that the family “experience” their pain and rejected the tendency to engage in any “kind of escapism to try to dampen the loss” (254). Riley reflects that people are taught to “disassociate” and avoid all bad feelings “because we are afraid of it” (255). However, the experience of truly sitting with the pain of her brother’s death taught her that “two things, maybe more than two things, can be true at the same time” (256). Experiencing pain does not negate joy. The grief may never go away, but that doesn’t mean life has lost all hope and meaning.

Through this experience, Riley develops the tools she needs to process other hardships, including the eventual death of her mother. When Lisa dies, Riley recognizes the same feeling of heartbreak and loss that Ben’s death carried, but she is also able to feel the “joy” at her mother’s “celebratory dance party” of a funeral (279). When Riley received the tapes her mother had recorded for her memoir, the experience of listening to them was “incredibly painful.” However, instead of running from this discomfort, she recognized the “gift” that the recordings represented and used them as a tool to “honor [her] mother” and process her grief.