I read dozens of memoirs about tragedy, loss, and grief in the wake of my mother’s death. I didn’t know how to talk about what I was feeling, exactly, and I didn’t know how to embrace the negative aspects of my grief. But I wanted to connect with those who did seem to know.
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Some favorites include Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, in which she hikes the Pacific Crest Trail after her mom’s death, reckoning with both her environment and her grief; and Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk, in which the author, a longtime falconer, trains a young goshawk as a means of grappling with her dad dying. In both, there is an external physical journey that reflects and refracts the writer’s internal grief journey. After a series of harrowing challenges, the completion of the external arc lends itself to the completion of the internal character arc, the messiness of grief beginning to clarify.
A narrative package provides an author with boundaries within which they’re able to share feelings that most readers otherwise might not engage with or find too difficult. In a plotted, recognizable form, a reader can broadly know where the story is going and, crucially, that it will end.
The very fact of the book’s existence implies that the writer has achieved a sufficient distance to reflect. They must have healed. Amid her grief, unable to define its bounds or to be certain of its end is a more difficult person to talk to or read.
A lost person cannot be an effective guide. If I was going to connect with others, I figured I’d need to have a clearer way of talking about my grief, of explaining it.
As an action movie takes you out of an otherwise humdrum life, grief memoirs took me out of my own sadness and made me feel further from my own troubles as I got closer to others’.
In reading these memoirs, I often felt connected to the authors’ journeys, seeing myself in them, realizing I still had much to learn, much to feel. Other times, though, I found myself excited by their grief, in part as I realized I was not alone. But it was exciting, too, because their grief felt like a daring cliffhanger. Would it destroy them? Would it upend their lives?
As an action movie takes you out of an otherwise humdrum life, grief memoirs took me out of my own sadness and made me feel further from my own troubles as I got closer to others’. I could focus less on my own and more on these writers’ issues, from which I was ultimately safe. I was able to replace my real grief with their far-off version. It would never be intimately consequential.
The eighteenth-century philosopher Edmund Burke proposed that pain, from a distance, can bring pleasure. Fear, so long as we sense we’re safe while experiencing it, can “delight,” he said. Aristotle suggested that through witnessing tragedy, we achieve relief from our burdens—catharsis. By consuming tragedy through TV, movies, music, art, and books, or even by seeing it ourselves (so long as it’s brief and we have a ready escape—as we’re driving past, say, or getting off the subway), we get to feel that we are experiencing and learning from a universal phenomenon when really we are only consuming a curated or circumscribed version.
This “curated grief” can be used to bolster one’s own profile, particularly in the age of self-branding and social media. You might, for instance, post a TikTok lamenting the horrors of a faraway tragedy and how you, personally, are struggling with it—driving engagement. Or you might jump in on a hashtag or change your social media profile photos to align yourself with a loss that has little to do with you.
Most generously, this is an attempt at building community, at forging bonds with others grieving. Cynically, it is self-serving: helping you to establish your supposed moral goodness or make a claim about your tastes. (Your outpouring of words on social media about the death of David Bowie, for example, would probably be more about demonstrating to your connections that you have excellent taste in music and are an empathetic person than it would be about, say, consoling his surviving family.)
Crystal Abidin, an ethnographer of internet culture, calls this “publicity grieving,” in which one nods toward a community in grief for personal gain. Publicity grieving is particularly important in the
twenty-first century because it’s one of the few socially acceptable forms of outward-facing mourning. Discussing the death of Queen Elizabeth II, for instance, is more socially permissible than talking about your sister who passed. One loss is faraway. The other is up close, real. Most people are generally receptive to the former. It is a conversation between two people in the land of the healthy. The latter is a conversation between someone in the land of the sick who is trying to cross the border.
It’s no surprise that a form of publicity grief is often used as a PR strategy. Think of all the emails and social media posts in times of collective grieving.
After the Boston marathon bombing, the food site Epicurious tweeted (and later deleted), “In honor of Boston and New England, may we suggest: whole-grain cranberry scones!”When the musician Prince died, Cheerios tweeted “Rest in Peace” on a purple background, with a Cheerio dotting the i (also later deleted). “Everyone at Domino’s joins the nation and the world in mourning the death of Queen Elizabeth II,” read a tweet posted by Domino’s UK in dramatic black and white (still up as of this writing).
The aim was to get you to buy Cheerios or to order a pizza from a company that you think of as socially engaged, as entities that have the capacity for an emotion as human as grief. It also, perhaps inadvertently, helps establish a hierarchy of what is worth grieving. What kind of loss merits a tweet from Domino’s? Whose death will Cheerios memorialize? For what level of loss might I consider baking whole-grain cranberry scones?
Grief here is fundamentally an intense form of attention. Those in power have an incentive to use grief as a spotlight on events that bolster national identity, financial or brand interest, or otherwise, just as they have an incentive not to draw attention to events that could sow discord or upend these interests.
What a society chooses to grieve is ultimately its way of “posing the question of who ‘we’ are,” writes the philosopher Judith Butler. “By asking whose lives are considered valuable, whose lives are mourned, and whose lives are considered ungrievable.”
I’ve long felt mixed up in how I might share my grief, which, with all the respect my mother deserves, isn’t a grief necessarily of immediate public interest. It wasn’t clear to me what grieving with others could even mean. How could I find community without troubling other people or feeling that I was making it all about me?
The path of least resistance was to shut myself down, to not talk about it, to instead train myself to react to the inevitable Oh I’m very sorry with kinder and kinder letdowns to the point of replying with No worries! in response to people consoling me.
It’s a bullshit dance we all do. Between the commonality of publicity grief and the cultural pursuit of happiness at all costs, few of us know how to really be there for someone grieving. And so what’s easiest for the griever is to do nothing, to isolate herself. True community is rarely forthcoming.
The irony was that I’d thought, after a loss, one would become the center of attention in one’s community, for better or worse. In reality, you become more invisible.
I failed to connect with almost everyone around me in my grief, but I don’t blame others so much as I blame myself. I was the one who chose to tell everyone I was fine. I’m good, don’t worry. It was worse to watch friends and teachers and faraway family struggle to say something useful. Sometimes, they’d say the wrong thing, be too dismissive, or too interested and overbearing. I didn’t know what I wanted or needed out of other people, and they didn’t know what to say—a stalemate.
The irony was that I’d thought, after a loss, one would become the center of attention in one’s community, for better or worse. In reality, you become more invisible. Like the memoirists, I wanted a way to talk about my grief if I was going to connect with others about it. Right now, it was too amorphous. A narrative would help, a story to tell, to make it easier to understand, easier to empathize with and find community.
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The Grief Cure: Looking for the End of Loss by Cody Delistraty is available via Harper.
