Grief Gap
I’ve had a few different posts going for over a month now. But frankly, I haven’t worked on any of them since October. They’ve just sat there. Yes, there was the election, but that’s not why. The reason is I’ve had two deaths of close family members, just 3 days apart from one another. Sudden, unexpected deaths. This is not my journal, and I’m not writing this to process my loss; that’s not my goal here. As always, I’m writing about the structures: what I want to focus on is the socialization of grief and loss.
I’ve encountered many losses of people close to me over my life. As are we all, at some point – death, after all, comes for us all. I’ve seen how different each loss is. Not only for me as an individual, but in the rules, regulations, systems, and mores we have in how we are expected to talk and act about death.
Socialization of grief: Immediate and ongoing response
Deaths take many different forms, and so do reactions. After the most painful death in my life (also sudden, 15 years ago now), I went into a shock-like state and was barely aware of what was happening around me. I had just gotten off a plane to go to a bachelor party. Fortunately, my friends helped me move up my return flight and get home that same day. Another person in my shoes, however, may have responded very differently. They may have wanted to dive into drinking to forget for at least a moment; or, to be around friends celebrating the joys of life to counterbalance the ache. I’ve had, and seen, many different responses. Some people show no outward sign of grief at all; others seem to change moment to moment. People do, of course, have different ways of being.
At the same time, society makes many expectations about what grief is supposed to look like. This is nothing new. Queen Victoria set standards for displays of grief in the 19th century after her husband died. Conventions are described in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. NYC’s Morbid Anatomy has had some poignant exhibits and events about this. And yet for many in current US society, we’ve learned to view our immediate and ongoing responses through a lens of pathology. This goes beyond the judgments people have always made of others’ responses: “You can see from how indifferent he is that he never really cared about her.”
Pathologizing grief
Nowadays, there is a pull to go through grief not by exploring meaning, but diagnosing pathology. You can hear it underlying how people approach each other, and even how we listen to ourselves. “She’s got to deal with it.” “He’s just wallowing in it and not doing anything. You have to move on.” “Am I feeling the right way about it? Should I be sadder, or angrier? Why didn’t I cry?”
We are making an assumption. You may be grieving wrong, and grieving wrong means you are sick. Dysfunctional. Queen Victoria may have judged you as a heartless person for the wrong outward show. Now, those judgments are converted into assessing illness. If your thoughts, feelings, and actions aren’t up to standard, you may be sick. Like a watch whose spring isn’t winding properly. The American Psychiatric Association only officially enshrined grief into potential pathology in 2022, but we’ve been treating it this way for much longer.
It’s tempting, isn’t it. Grief can be so heart-wrenching. It can feel obliterating. And we often don’t get the community support we need. Calling it illness, something that just can’t be helped, can make it feel easier. My pain isn’t me – it’s my illness. And my responsibilities can be put off, right? After all, you don’t expect someone with a 103-degree fever to be doing the laundry, following up on emails, paying bills, etc. Why not grief as well?
Because when reframed as illness, context is lost. Meaning is lost. Grief is (or rather, can be) hard (some may not be, and that can be okay too!). The reframe is harmful both ways. The pain helps identify what’s important to us in life and death, while the responsibilities are a guide to putting this one relationship into context of a whole, meaningful life. If the griever’s response is deemed too much, pathologizing cuts off meaning and context; if deemed too little, we may reinforce rigid role demands about strength and connection in grief.
The words
Try saying the word “milk” over and over again, out loud, as fast as you can. Eventually, you’ll feel a shift. Now try “grief.” Or, “condolences.”
Language and meaning are often strange bedfellows. At times, words can pierce into us and leave us feeling understood, loved, warmed; or alternatively, small, hurt, or angry. At other times, they pass through us as nothing more than conventions of sound. No different from the ding of a text message or the whir of a microwave.
With grief, knowing what to say, how to say it, even whether to say anything at all can be really tricky. And because the nature of loss is so specific to the relationship and to how and when death happened, desired meaning varies tremendously. And yet somehow, we only have a limited set of verbal conventions. “I’m sorry for your loss.” “My condolences.” Or potentially worse, quoted platitudes of what grief is. Even if the wise words accurately reflect the griever’s perspective on this specific loss, the speaker has removed themselves from the relationship and have become nothing more than a support-bot.
This is why nonverbal contact can be so powerful in grief: crying together, laughing together, giving a hug, holding the person’s hand. At the same time, words are important too. For those in the role of supporter, it’s really more about conveying caring and, as desired, help, for the griever than about the specific sounds being made.
Griever’s words (and actions)
For those who are grieving, words are just as hard. You’d be tempted to think that in grief, we should be open to any expression. If we were islands, this would perhaps be true. But having seen different types of loss, and having myself been in different relations to the one who has died, I know it is more complicated than that. Who gets to grieve? And how much? If you talk about the person’s death, are you preventing others from moving on? And if you don’t, are you avoiding? If the death was sudden or feels shameful, can you talk about that? Should you bring up only happy memories, or only sad memories? Grief is like a bitter pie, abandoned in the center of the table. It is unclear who gets how much and in what order.
Rituals and conventions
In the socialization of grief, rituals and conventions are generally the most obvious elements. It is one of the few times that are not holidays or vacations when people are still expected to take off from work. Workplaces often have a special category of leave for bereavement. Generally, permission to use bereavement time is not connected to how close you were but to whether the person was an immediate family member. Even if they were your closest friend who felt like a sibling, tough. And even for an immediate family member, you get three days, and then what? That may be enough for some, and not for others.
And of course, the rituals. Wakes, memorials, shiva, parades (online memorial posts?). Every culture has them. They may vary in many ways, but generally they involve food, company, and time. A chance to reflect, remember, rest, and more fundamentally, to let go of the millions of daily life demands. To just be with each other. And for a little while, we remain mostly free from the pathologizing. During these services, you can wail, laugh (cf. the Mary Tyler Moore show), talk to someone who isn’t there anymore, or even make no response at all.
Just for a time. Sooner or later, the pathologizing returns.
And yet even these mostly-accepting rituals are not designed for all deaths, either. What rituals are designed for when the death leaves the grievers angry? At the deceased, or at someone else? Or, when the death is of a child? What rituals connect for people who feel not just bereft, but robbed? Consider again Shakespeare, and the death of Ophelia in Hamlet. The rituals of her funeral did not sit quite right for many of the characters.
Socialization of grief: Summary
In the end, this post is feeling messy. Less of a clear message, less clear of a story arc that my other posts. Perhaps that is appropriate to the paradox of death. Where one’s most personal stories can only be told by others. Where a clear ending leaves so much uncertain and unfinished. I’m reminded of a line from Live’s Lightning Crashes: “Her intentions fall to the floor.” In death, all the strands that we constantly work to hold together in life crash down and shatter, leaving glimmers reflected all over the community who knew them. Never to be put back together just so, but nevertheless joined with other pieces as new strands, in new ways, as part of new stories. The stories of our families. The stories of our communities.