Generalised statements, like "Have the British forgotten how to grieve?", are meaningless. There is no collectively British way to grieve, and never was, though there have been socially acceptable rituals surrounding death for millennia. The two shouldn't be confused. Clover seems to be going through a list of options, in search of some sort of structured grieving process. There isn't one, though some people may find comfort in sharing rituals because they don't need to think about them; you just follow a prescribed formula, which is an easy option when you're emotionally fragile.
As someone who's been bereaved several times, in different ways, and as a humanist celebrant for over 20 years, my experience has been that grief is personal and everyone grieves according to their own personality and the relationship that they had with the person (or pet) who died. A mother who'd lost her baby once asked me, "How long will I feel like this?", as though there should be a time limit to it, or desperately hoping that the pain would end soon. Some self-styled grief counsellors used to tell clients that there are stages to grieving, to be followed in order. This is nonsense. Months, years after a loss, something may remind you of the one you loved and the feelings may return, perhaps less acutely, but still in a wave of emotion. No one has forgotten how to grieve; we just can't help ourselves.
Friday, February 21, 2014
Grief and mourning rituals are two different things
A Telegraph sub-editor has headed an article about grieving by Clover Stroud, "Have the British Forgotten how to grieve?" I've commented:
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5 comments:
A good refreshing blast of emotional common sense. It looks as though when journos lack a subject these days, they decide to write something about death and funerals. Sometimes, but not perhaps that often, it is enlightening...
Thank you!
I read this article. Promising start but... It looks as if Tony Walter had little time for the writer, either. Some people may find guidance and value in other cultural observances, say, Jewish practices - tahara, shiva, kaddish, etc - and give them a personal, secular makeover. It can be good to take a time out, and it's almost certainly good to keep busy. I'm a big believer in statutory bereavement leave. But I am no fan of grief becoming the specialist province of psych-fixers and medication, and of bereaved people identifying as such, given that there's scarcely a person living who has not been bereaved. As for closure...
Not to mention a national grieving style.
But yes, as you say, to be surprised by grief at any time, and for any length of time, is normal. As Churchill put it, we (bereaved people) must just keep buggering on. We're on our own with our sadness, that's the way of it.
Charles, as you wrote, "there's scarcely a person living who has not been bereaved", but being bereaved for the first time does seem to affect some people differently. The author of the article begins by referring to her mother's death. From her website, Clover Stroud appears to be relatively young, so maybe her mum's death was her first. It's not that it gets any easier with age, but I think it's about expectations. Hazlitt wrote that, for the young, "Death, old age, are words without a meaning, a dream, a fiction, with which we have nothing to do. Others may have undergone, or may still undergo them ― we ‘bear a charmed life,’ which laughs to scorn all such idle fancies." When grief knocks you for six while still young, for the first time, maybe some react in a more child-like way, looking for someone to make it better, unwilling to face it alone, as we all must.
Very good point, Margaret. Her opening paragraphs would certainly testify to that; they accurately describe first bereavement.
What's perhaps notable is the way communities on the whole tend not to be at all good at rallying round bereaved people. This may be in recognition that grief is so particular, the experience of it so disparate, that there's little we feel we can do but shrug helplessly and hope they can work it out for themselves.
Last year I became friendly with a Jew with a good sense of humour and a strong sense of the ridiculous who was saying kaddish daily for his father - a year long task requiring him to say a prayer in praise of his God which contained no words designed to mitigate grief. He had to get to a synagogue every day at the right time, wherever he was. Since he travelled a lot he had to make arrangements in advance because there also had to be a minyan, or quorum, of people present. I observed that, to a non-religious person like me, this looked insane. He was able to see my point of view and could only tell me that that the exertion involved in performing this duty to his dead dad was doing him a lot of good.
So, perhaps laborare est dolere. Or as Dr Johnson observed, 'grief is a species of idleness'.
It's an endless topic, isn't it? Julian Barnes says that great grief drives out language, so how can language be pressed into its service? It hasn't stopped him writing two books about it!
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