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Grief
We’ve all lost someone either to death or because of a separation. And I think we all know what it is to grieve. Although interestingly enough grieving is a very perplexing matter. There’s no manual. I mean there, yeah, some people have written, here are the steps of grief, and you could try to follow it. But most people find themselves going through waves of grief or not knowing if they’re grieving the right way. Maybe they’re not grieving. Am I grieving at all? Oh, crash, I am grieving. It can be quite tumultuous and unpredictable.
But one thing that does characterize all forms of grieving is that the person who’s grieving knows what it is they have lost. They know that it’s this person, or this love, or this something that was precious, or something that had value and it is now no longer there. And there is an acknowledgment of that loss. It’s hard to acknowledge loss, and grief takes place in stages. I think because we make the recognition that someone or something is gone only in steps. And this is a point that Freud made. He said, “The verdict of reality comes in fits and starts.” It’s like it’s true that this person is gone. It’s true that I have lost this thing. Yes, it is true. And you learn it again and again. You open the door. You used to be there with somebody. They’re not there. You sit down. Somebody used to be there. They’re not there. Again they’re not there. Again they’re not there. So bit by bit the recognition of loss is made and the grieving process is a slow one. But it is one in which something is known. It’s known over time. It comes to be accepted, acknowledged, and known.
Melancholia
Now, sometimes we can go through the loss of someone or something, or maybe many things. And we think about the loss of a nation, or the loss of many people who are affected by a pandemic, or die from a pandemic, or from war. Sometimes we know that they’re gone at some level, but we have no idea how to grieve. Or we are stopped from grieving. For some reason we can’t afford to acknowledge that loss or we fear that the acknowledgement of that loss will take us with them. Like we ourselves will be dissolved if we acknowledge the loss we’ve just undergone. So we stop the grieving process, or we refuse it, or we refuse to acknowledge the loss.
But the extreme of failing or refusing to acknowledge a loss that you have indeed gone through is what we might call melancholia. Melancholia is the failure to acknowledge loss. That’s its definition. You’re suffering, but you don’t exactly know why you’re suffering. You’re depressed or you’re manic. You’re complaining. You’re ill at ease. But you don’t know exactly what’s wrong because you cannot name it. And the reason you cannot name it is that you cannot acknowledge the loss you’ve been through. It’s not the same suffering as open grieving, but it’s a different kind of suffering. You just don’t know what it is you’re suffering from.
Acknowledging Loss
We see in various parts of the world that certain lives are openly grieved. People who are well known, or who enjoy racial privilege, or have achieved fame and honor, they get grieved openly and strongly and by many people. And then a whole other set of lives remain nameless in the mainstream media, even though they are lost, too. And we have to ask ourselves, “Who gets elevated to the status of the grievable, worthy of grief? Who gets relegated to the status of the ungrievable?”
I mean, surely we would say everybody should be grieved. Everybody’s worthy of grief. Let’s agree on that. Well, we might agree on that in the abstract, and yet there are, in the United States alone during the time that I’m recording this, there are more than 400 people a day who are dying of COVID. But in a way we de-realize that loss. We act like that loss is not happening because we want to tell a story in which COVID is over. And that’s a way of designating a class of people as ungrievable. We’re not going to acknowledge those deaths because to acknowledge those deaths would mean to say that COVID is not over. I think that although many of us have deeply personal, even private, experiences of mourning, few of us emerge from mourning without sharing our grief. Which means that mourning is also a social practice, and it can also be a public practice.
Mourning as a Social Practice
Most people associate the act of mourning with people they know. I mourn somebody, I mourn somebody I knew personally. I can give you their name. I can tell you their story. I can tell you my relationship to that person. I mourn that person. If we are to care about all the living people in this world, what the pandemic does to them, what climate disaster does to them, what systemic racism does to them; we actually have to be able to acknowledge the loss of those we do not know. And that’s how a form of mourning, we might say, that is impersonal in the sense that I don’t know the people whose lives I’m trying to acknowledge as lost, but I do mourn them in the sense that those lives should not have been lost.
When George Floyd was murdered by police, people took to the streets to mourn his loss — the loss of that life — but also to object to the injustice of that life having been lost. Those kinds of protests are interesting. They’re social acts of mourning at the same time that they are demands for justice. So I think mourning is part of political practice that objects to unjust loss or unjust damage, and that it has a positive dimension because we’re asserting the value of a life that has been considered without value by others. And we don’t want to live in a world in which that distribution value can be taken for granted. We refuse that and we contest that.