Two things are true about death regardless of your religious beliefs or lack of them. Life goes on and the dead don’t care about mourning. Mourning is for family and close friends, emphasis on the word close. If your only contact is seeing the deceased on TV, in a movie, on a video or at a game, you are not close. When you use mourning to display your personal beliefs, you are not mourning.
110
@Michael Blazin
I get your point but the regulation of who should mourn that you suggest is a form of "grief policing," itself, no?
7
Is this a column about grief or the dangers of social media addiction. Maybe it is both.
If we allow millions of strangers into our mental neighborhood and any one of them can wound us with their cruelty, I'm not sure we are improving our lives with our expanded community.
Culture used to develop over centuries, now it transforms in a decade.
What percentage of Americans are on some form of mood altering meds? How can culture adapt when it is changing at the speed of hi-tech?
69
I live in the shadow of Kobe's high school. The outpouring of grief in our township is massive, and i know some of this grief is genuine.
I also know there's not a single black man living in my neighborhood. And I really doubt black men would feel safe here. I really doubt it would be safe for a black man to live here.
So I'm a little circumspect about these expressions of grief. Sorry, not sorry, if that makes me the grief police.
45
After John McCain died, an observant writer noted that many of those broadcasting or posting tributes to him were really expressing more about themselves than about McCain's characteristics or actions. There was a lot of "I" in some messages: "when I met him...," "when I did X for him..." and so on. In other words, more "I" than "he." Translation: many of the tributes were more about air time for the posters. Perhaps those who are the most prominent are the most private about their grief, and reluctant to draw attention to themselves.
71
@Linda Carlson - Yup. I wasn't there, but when a very close acquaintance died and there was a memorial/tribute held, a close friend who attended said, all the people who spoke, ... their stories were about themselves and not the deceased. Sounded horrible.
10
Perhaps we need to get off of social media and live our lives privately.
Social media is no place for talking about grief. Grief should be addressed with trustworthy relatives, friends and counselors.
As for individuals who have died but whom we don't know, celebrities or whoever else, it is appropriate to feel sad it happened, but to expect grief? That is where the over the top responses follow because grief is becoming a public performance for social media likes.
It was once expected that close family and friends would be prostrate with grief. They were the ones who would put their lives on hold when someone died.
Acquaintances would express their condolences, send a card and go to the funeral, at most, but their lives would go on.
It's unreal what we have come to expect. It's as though we don't know what is appropriate, because we have no sense of boundaries. It all ties back to the reality that the private has become public.
39
@Barbara Thank you for this. I was going to post that it's also ok not to grieve at all but you said it much better.
4
@Barbara - I also like the distinction another reader made between grief and mourning. We can mourn the loss of a public figure who maybe made a difference in our lives, but we grieve those closer to us personally.
8
It's sad when someone like the young Barnard student is murdered, or a revered sports figure dies. But unless you know that person or their family personally, why should any mourning be expected? If you feel a need to place flowers somewhere, or attend a memorial out of respect or grief, that's admirable. But people who don't feel that need shouldn't be criticized.
126
Grief is not a competition and you don't get points for publicly displaying markers for it.
8
I am so happy I am not famous so I don’t feel obligated to have a social media page where I am forced to react to every crisis or tragedy, or to expose my own private grief. Privacy is priceless.
10
My son died two days after a freak auto accident in January over 27 years ago. His birthday is next week. In the weeks of the holidays up to his birthday, my grief still takes on numerous forms. Some days, it's acceptance. Some days, I have tears. Some days, I don't think of it.
I doubt the grief police understand that the stages of grief overlap, express themselves in different ways at different times and under different circumstances. They need to allow people to grieve--or not--in their own unique ways.
15
Social media is, itself, shameful. Too accessible, too easy, too instant. And, if anyone comments: "Okay, Boomer.", you prove my point.
8
@Mary Sojourner Wasn't going to comment that way. I am a millennial (age 35) and I completely agree with you.
Sometimes my parents, and even some news commentators, say some things that are grossly out of touch and outdated and show how little they understand of my generation. I reserve "okay" for that (and often just think it). Seriously, Boomer's have done some massively stupid and destructive stuff. But my generation, the Millennials, have their own faults and dangerous tendencies. In some ways Boomers are awful and Millennials are much much worse. Our addiction to social media is pretty high on the list of Millennials' faults.
Social media is the Dark Side. It's not stronger or better. Merely quicker, easier, and more seductive.
3
Since when has policing other peoples’ actions been a new phenomenon? Some prime examples are religion, the Salem witch hunt, the rule of law, etc. Humans that don’t live by rationality will criticize anything that’s different from their modus operandi or anything that deviates from the accepted norm, because they lack the imagination to fathom people can do or go through the same scenario in divergent ways.
1
Sian Beilock is absolutely correct. I'd like to add one additional point. As a retired teacher, I have often been bothered when schools rush to bring in a whole bevy of counselors over every death even remotely relevant to their students. In my mind, that actually encourages young, impressionable people to think they are supposed to go into deep mourning and be psychologically impacted by deaths of people with whom they had no personal connection. Obviously, I'm not talking about shootings which took place at school --- certainly those students have been traumatized and will benefit from help and guidance. And, like others who have posted here, I certainly feel sympathy for the family and personal friends who are grieving deeply. But no normally well adjusted human being should be disabled by profound grief over celebrities they have never even met.
6
You can only grieve for someone you knew personally. Other than that, you are just expressing sympathy, sadness, and fear of death. That's not grief.
9
Thank you for putting grief and those who mourn in perspective.
2
Grieving someone we don't know seems like displacement, and empathy. We're remembering people we knew who are no longer with us, and imagining how the newly bereaved are dealing with their loss.
As for the way we grieve, some of us just don't want to make others uncomfortable, so we grieve in private and put on the best face in public.
4
And then there are the grief police who tell people who have lost close friends and family members that they "should be over this by now." It has happened to me, and it's devastating.
14
Is there another side to this? Is it required that a person quickly move on as if life has not changed after a tragedy such as the brutal murder of one's child?
3
Compassion is the antidote to grief policing. It takes all kinds and we never truly know what another person is experiencing.
I’m sorry for your loss, and that of Bryant’s family and friends, and for anyone else who is judged harshly for the quality or quantity of their displays of sorrow.
Life is too short; let it be.
73
Not so long ago widows were to dress in black, look solemn and mope about for 6 months to a year before restoring life to some worthwhile form for them.
Otherwise, the gossips and other local social enforcers would look askance and rumor that she was seeing the gardener or mailman on the side.
None of their business, so it seems. I mourned loss of friends and family different from my other family members, and no way is a wrong way.
I do feel that the so called grief from a famous person passing and has no close connection (movie star, musician, prominent politician) is far from real grief. It's more like peer pressure to be all torn up over such an event, and piles of flowers and sobbing strangers are pretty much a front. It is acceptable and understandable to be shocked and shaken by witnessing a sudden tragedy, that's a human quality, but to carry on for days and to go to great lengths and expense to add your bouquet to the huge pile really does little in the way of resolution.
My major complaint with all the fuss and public grieving over the player's death is that equally valuable human beings will die every day, many with very few other than close friends and family having to deal with the loss of a father figure, a son, or friend. Their loss is as great as the loss of this father, and hero figure. That is the great tragedy of this, the discounting of others who die unexpectedly and to no fault of their own, but without fame and fortune.
98
@reid More grief policing. A public figure is someone who means a lot to people, even those who don't know them. If Obama were to die tragically many people would be deeply affected and their voices are worth hearing. That person has touched a lot of lives.
9
@reid Absolutely correct. 7250 people die every day in the US, every one a tragedy for their loved ones. Only the famous get noticed.
5
I am saddened by the senseless deaths of Tess Majors, Kobe Bryant, his daughter Gianna, and everyone else in that ill-fated helicopter.
But my general sadness cannot accurately be termed "mourning", because I had never met any of these people, did not know them personally beyond their public personas. To call it mourning, and to expect this sadness to disrupt my life in the way a loss of a close loved one would, would be disingenuous in the extreme.
And yet, I have gotten some flack for expressing this attitude (and wonder if I will get a little more for expressing it here).
But I've never been good at lying to myself, and don't think I should develop the ability now just because someone might criticize my perspective.
And I only express it here in the hope that others who feel this way, and who might be victims of social media condemnation, can feel at least a bit validated; you are not alone.
132
@Glenn Ribotsky -No flack, yet. I believe you expressed yourself very well.
7
Kobe Bryant is a name I heard occasionally on 1010-WINS during the sports report, which I very often turn off anyway. When I heard he was killed, I thought, That's a shame; the way I would for anyone in a crash. Then I went about my business and didn't give it another thought.
23
And yet we we've made a cottage industry of condemning anti-bullying and its nefarious results. Ignorance of our hypocrisy is no excuse for it.
Death is not necessarily a bad thing. I know we are all supposed to live long and consume so that the wealthy people can profit off our existence, but old people die and it's a good thing because otherwise we would have destroyed the planet already.
I grieve young people dying and celebrate old people dying (celebrate their lives) and I am getting old myself. There are way more people than are necessary for any real reason. Most also suffer through a useless and meaningless life and mostly don't even realize it.
Fear of death rules many lives and they join cults so that they can sleep at night, but they are delusional and actually very harmful to society because they base their actions upon magical beliefs. I believe obsession with death is a way to waste your life.
Experience the void, it is where freedom is found.
1
Grief seems so intensely private that I shut down my fb page when my spouse died.
Increasingly, social media seems more about dividing than connecting people.
5
People always both grieved differently and pretended to grieve -- and competed as to who grieved more.
Now we've ramped it up. Hence the ridiculous teddy bears and ribbons tied to lampposts near crash scenes and stabbings.
And now it's done on social media, the most infantile and insidious invention to come out of the twenty-first century.
1
No, it’s the “ Social Media “ Taliban. Live by the Device, Die by the Device. Even after Literal Death.
SAD.
3
Overall, this is a great article, but I wonder if a part of it, at least, adds to the "grief police" aspect.
"Another criticized those who brought up the rape allegation against Bryant in their commemorations: 'Some people have no respect for the dead.'"
How is tweeting out articles about Kobe's rape allegation a part of the mourning process?
1
@Sharon Maselli I agree. I think they are trying to slip this one past us, as if because it is wrong to criticize people for not grieving "the right way", it is wrong to criticize someone for talking about how the dead was a rapist. We need to separate out criticizing people for speak ill of the dead and criticizing how people are mourning. Mentioning Kobe's rape allegation is a form of grief policing, as if those grieving Kobe's death need to be reminded that Kobe was also a rapist. Both the grief policy and mentioning Kobe's rape allegation are often more about self-promotion (especially on social media) and less about grieving Kobe. Both interfere with other people's grieving process. Speaking ill of the dead is often inconsiderate of those who will miss the deceased and are still grieving.
We simply need to stop using Twitter. And to give those who are genuinely mourning (or are getting on with life) space to mourn in their own way.
Just get out of the cesspool that is social media. You're welcome.
6
You all need to stop using social media.
Social media is not healthy. It's just an infinite rage machine. If it didn't make you so angry, you'd just stop using it and Facebook, Twitter, etc can't have that. Also, you are having your internet drama bleed over into real life. The internet is not real. People in real life are real.
Also, stop grieving every celebrity death on social media. Maybe for the rare celebrity who truly touched your life. But for the most part you do not know these celebrities. As famous as they are, they are real people. The people who truly knew them and loved them should grieve them, not just random people on the internet. I don't think most people are genuinely grieving anyways, they are just virtue signaling and seeking dopamine hits by joining in with everyone else. And by the sounds of it getting angry and being jerks to strangers. Like I said, infinite rage machine.
People need to put down their phones and get back to the people they know and love in person.
Seriously, stop using social media. It's bad for you. Say no to Twitter like you'd say no to drugs.
4
@James
James, you are spot on! As you essentially say, it is the internet itself that is the problem. My less eloquent way of stating it in another comment:
As with everything else, "grief" has become a profit-making industry and, through the internet, a source for the pursuit of agendas designed to manipulate people. Nothing in America is beyond marketable exploitation. Nothing in America is beyond being weaponized.
To paraphrase Roger Cohen, "Like truth, privacy, decency, and respect are just so 20th century!"
2
@Steve Fankuchen I will agree with you that the US economy is currently designed and regulated to promote profit-making above all else, even at the expense of consumers and employees. Yes, every area of life and the human experience, including grief, has become a commodity.
I also agree that social media as it is currently used is definitely the problem.
However, I don't quite think that navigating via Google Maps or Netflix are problems and in particular the cause of grief policing. There are ways to use the internet that improve people's lives and other ways that just divide everyone and creates drama.
I think social media in any form is a problem. Its current form was designed to be addictive. But any form of social media would need engagement to work and would need to curate what content you see. All social media generate lots of data on people's personalities. The ability to broadcast your opinion to millions of people plays on people's vanity, desire for fame and social capitol, and the tendency for form angry mobs. Maybe if social media was just communicating with small groups of friends and had strong privacy protections where data was regularly deleted it might be okay. But beyond that, social media is a serious danger to society, especially mental health, relationships, and social cohesion. People need to realize any use of social media is deeply unhealthy and very dangerous. And social media should be banned, like smoking in public areas.
No need to introduce the term “grief police”. These are just the same old Puritans that we encounter in other walks of American life. By this time next week they’ll be on to something new.
It’s strange, though, that the young women at Barnard should be so upset. This is a college that was founded in the late eighteen hundreds because Columbia would not give degrees to women. Its founders must have been a very determined and clear-minded bunch. Good examples for the young and unformed female minds of their day.
It’s gone downhill, I suppose, like so much else in American education.
1
"Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not 'seems.'
'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected 'havior of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly: these indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play:
But I have that within which passeth show;
These but the trappings and the suits of woe."
--William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 2
Thank you, Dr. Beilock, for your important piece.
4
To me it's arbitrary that we put so much importance on 'some' celebrity deaths. Whenever this happens it always makes me sad to think of all the people that died on the same day, all over the country and all over the world, that go unnoticed. Are those less sad, less important? Just less chronicled. I'm sure many of us have lost someone we loved on the same day as some celebrity death. I'll bet it ain't too comforting to see all the attention on some celebrity while going through your more personal loss.
Because how people react is so public, now, it's open to positive or negative criticism. Collectively, we are going to say sensitive, thoughtful, caring things and insensitive, flippant, stupid things, like, "I'll get you a new dog."
Social media has enabled the mass exposure of Mencken's booboisie's Id-norance. Best to Id-nore it.
There is no word in the English language for a homosexual whose lover dies, and normally there is no public recognition either. It is unbearably painful and the need for secrecy adds to the suffering. My first four lovers all had violent deaths before the age of thirty in the seventies. Geoffrey committed suicide after twelve years of conversion therapy. Christopher fell in Vietnam. Peter died of an overdose. Mark was killed in prison. I have survivor’s guilt: I do not know why I deserve to be alive when they are dead. This is my own private Auschwitz. All I can do is to tell their stories, but who wants to hear them?
1
@Robert Dole I want to hear them. Maybe you could write them. You have just written a perfect opening paragraph, and I would keep on reading if this were the first page of a book. I would want to know about Geoffrey and Christopher and Peter and Mark, and about you, the teller of their stories.
I have published this story in a book called What Rough Beast.
1
I’m surprised you didn’t mention the opposite phenomenon, which was most visible in NYT comment sections. Scattered among the heartfelt tributes were numerous self-satisfied bores lecturing us on the perils of pop culture idolatry and how a person with prodigious basketball talent isn’t any more important than the rest of us.
It's all about me. Mourning always has been to a large extent and now with the proliferation of social media, how people mourn is now public and widespread.
The reaction to Kobe Bryant's death has brought to the spotlight the narcissistic character of mourning. Celebrities, sports figures and other public and private figures have been engaged in a great contest to show how mournful they are. And woe be to whomever fails to satisfy the "grief police." But citing what "one person wrote on Twitter" just shows how ridiculous the whole grieving and mourning process has become. "One person on Twitter?" How have we gotten to the place where someone shooting their mouth (or tweet) off makes a difference at all?
Kobe Bryant's death and the others who lost their lives is indeed a tragedy and I was sad to hear of it. It did not help that it was apparently caused by a stupid mistake. But death is a fact of life. It's OK to be sad and to some worthy of a degree of mourning but how people mourn should be private.
We can't know what another person truly feels and he or she should not feel the need to publicly express it. And, more importantly, other people should leave them alone. You don't know how they feel and don't need to. It's none of your business.
1
I feel a bit sad for Kobe, but let's be real -my brother died last month - that is grief. I don't understand what planet this columnist is coming from.
I never met Anthony Bourdain but his suicide touched me deeply, and I still tear up thinking about the fact that he’s gone. I believe I will mourn him forever... Kobe, not a whit. There’s quite a difference between mourning and grieving I believe. I feel grief for someone I knew personally, but I can mourn the loss of someone who enriched my life, who made me smile... (sometimes they are the same person, sometimes not.)
34
Social media is so intrusive. Grieving is a private matter. Do it in your own way.
2
To paraphrase Roger Cohen, "Like truth, privacy, decency, and respect are just so 20th century!"
As with everything else, "grief" has become a profit-making industry and, through the internet, a source for the pursuit of agendas designed to manipulate people. Nothing in America is beyond marketable exploitation. Nothing in America is beyond being weaponized.
2
Grief shaming hits a zenith these days if someone ever mentions making prayers (e.g. in the common formulation, “thoughts and prayers”). That mourning statement is now a springboard for every hater of the institutional church to pounce on the mourner - and an opportunity to pummel the mourner over an assumption that the mourner takes no other action to help a situation. Not sure how that statement of mourning has come to proffer such a terrible supposed license to observers.
1
@Critical Thinking Please I believe that criticism might be justified if the thoughts and prayers are offered by a person in power and the tragic loss might have been prevented by public action on their part.
2
How we cope with grief is entirely personal. When someone close to me dies, I am grateful when other people help me acknowledge and share the importance of that loss.
However, I have no right to expect strangers to share my grief. Yet that's what the "grief police" demand. That is an unreasonable, and to to my mind a self-centered, demand. It's one thing to expecet people to respect your grief. It's something quite different to demand that they share it.
2
Dr. Beilock's points are valid, but this behavior is a form of norm creating and enforcing that goes back as far in human history as we have any records. It's cruel, but it seems to come from somewhere very deep within us. Still, it's good for people like Dr. Beilock to call it out, because, while I think there's no hope of eliminating these urges, perhaps we can limit them if we're aware of them.
1
Dr. Beilock - thank you for your wise, caring and accurate statements about mourning. Each of us is unique, and yes; each of us has our own path to deal with death.
I do not judge others in how they respond to loss - and hope that friends and family accept me for my personal reactions when loss enters my heart, too.
1
Thank you. I have noted a tendency the past few decades for "closure" to be considered as a bad medicine that has to be taken quickly and painfully then forgotten, because we have to move on to other matters in this busy society.
When each of my parents died, I eventually reached closure, where I could remember their virtues and faults with a smile, a grimace, laugh or tears, and then move back to my current life. It took a long time, and I don't remember suddenly feeling "I have reached closure." It's an individual path, and others have no business trying to dictate the speed or approach.
Death leaves a scar, but it's a mark on my body like a past fracture, laceration that was sutured, or a wrinkle. It's a sign that I have lived through something.
I've gone through closure, but it can't be rushed. I occasionally still find myself saying, "I wish my parents knew what I have done in the past few years. They would have gotten a kick out of it. Or kicked me and told me what I should have done." That's my definition.
9
Since last May I have lost four family blood cousins who were also my friends.
The circumstances of their deaths ranged from shock to expected.
The first was an emotional and mental troubling event from the no ailments nor medications ' healthiest' person in my family who succumbed to a massive brain aneurysm to the latest expected 18 month ugly inhumane demise to brain cancer. Both are survived by their mothers.
In between was an an aged slowly ailing and declining family patriarch and another who dealt with metastatic cancer for four years while fiercely living her family life to her fullest until the end. Both are survived by a single sibling.
Kobe Bryant was neither family nor friend. But I mourned his loss more for what he did off the court than on it. But not the same way I that I miss my family/ friends.
Death is the equal opportunity mortal destination for every primate African ape.
4
Right. There is no right or wrong way to grieve nor is there a set time in which the mourner must get over the process. I am a retired pastor. In that role I had the privilege of being with many families as they planned their loved one's service and walking with them in the immediate time and for weeks and months beyond.
When I met with the mourners to plan the service, many families not only cried, but laughed as they told stories, and shared memories. In short, in their remembering and recalling, the experienced the fullness of who their loved one was and of their lives lived with him or her.
Beyond that, life goes on. It is the deceased whose life has ended, not that of their spouse, child, sibling, parent or friend. For some, life will forever be a bit (or a lot) different without that person. Still, they have a life to live. It is healthy to both mourn (cry, feel sad, bereft, lonely etc.) and to move on with one's own life. Those who prove over time unable to do both will not thrive. Some will need therapy to help them learn to live again - that's fine. Sadly, some never get that help.
11
The idea of "police" setting a societal standard of behavior is not new.
Over forty years ago a co-worker was raped. She did not return to work after the period the company as appropriate for dealing with her trauma. I remember hearing people who were supposedly her friends talk about how "she just has to get over it." They were saying that her response, her inability to return to "normal," was excessive.
The difference between then and now is that no one is telling the police that their response is excessive.
8
Thank you. I am sick of the "stages of grief". Mourning is messy and our strengths enable us to emerge from it. No one should judge.
22
It seems to me the essential question here, without even speaking about grief, is: Should one care what anonymous strangers say to or about oneself online?
The timeless wisdom that you cannot control other people's reactions still applies in the digital age.
21
@AC - I agree. Beilock talks about the "power" that "the grief police wield ... in calling people out". But it is only power if we give it to them. Those in this reader forum who argue against using social media to air our grieving/mourning are pointing out one way to avoid being "called out" by what you call "anonymous strangers". And we can go further in the private sphere against the grief police there (neighbors, family members) by owning our personal response as genuine and sufficient.
2
I live far away, do not follow sports and had never heard of Mr Bryant before his death. For me, this article is more about our vulnerability to social pressure than about grieving. I have always regarded the US as a culture that values individualism, encourages young people to try things out, to discover their potential and uniqueness, to embrace their differences. It would seem that such a culture forms self confident, self aware individuals who are able to withstand cyber bullies and who value more things than the likes on their social posts... or does it also form individuals who are so sure of themselves that they seek to impose their views on others and think they do not need to grow and learn?...
15
Thank you very much for this thoughtful article. It requires the process of evaluating the relationship and values of the self to the other. Not just in mourning of individuals well known or unknown, but also to anxieties and reactions to thoughts and actions of others during any crisis of natural disasters, epidemics, politics, and wars.
7
During the summer after my pre-clinical years, one of my medical-school classmates died in London. I told my mother, a physician, of the death.
"Was she a friend of yours?", she asked. "No, an acquaintance only," I answered honestly.
"Then what do you care?" she asked me. "You'd never have seen her again anyhow, now that you're going into your clinical rotations."
A bracing reply, not to say a cold one. But absolutely accurate. And for me in later years a corrective, even an antidote, to the loose sentimentality at Diana WIndsor's death and certainly now at Bryant's.
18
If we’re paying attention, life experience helps us learn how to process grief. From age 25 to 32, I lost six family members: all four grandparents, a great-grandmother, and my only uncle. We are a small, close-knit family and those departures left giant holes in my heart. Now in my sixties, I’ve experienced the prolonged decline and eventual passing of my father and the sudden death of my wife’s beloved stepdad.
Along the way, music has been my lifelong passion. I’ve mourned the passing of many of my favorite musicians: Rory Gallagher (1995), Lonesome Dave Peverett (2000) and Rod Price (2005) of Foghat, Ronnie James Dio (2010), Jon Lord of Deep Purple (2012), B.B. King (2015), Chris Cornell (2017), Tom Petty (2017), Ric Ocasek of the Cars (2019), and Neil Peart of Rush (2020). Some inspired me to not only pick up a guitar at age 14 but to keep on learning, exploring and playing.
And yet, after 45 years in the technology space, it never occurs to me to express my sense of loss via social media.
While those performers are important to me, I don’t feel the need to subject my grief to online scrutiny, nor do I want to enter my emotions into what often devolves into a competition (e.g., “My sadness is just so much deeper than your sadness.”).
Instead, I mourn and grieve in private with my innermost circle of family and friends. It’s a place of trust where we simply honor and respect what each of us may (or may not) feel. Others choose a different path.
21
"Amid their feelings of heartbreak, members of our community were worried about how others would perceive their specific form of grieving."
This does not surprise me in the slightest. The most intolerant group of all of the intolerant groups in this country are the young, "woke" PC crowd. Everything must be said, done and believed to their specifications.
I figured there would be a time when they'd start turning on each other. Perhaps this is a sign that it is already beginning.
15
Grieving is such a personal, private and physical phenomenon it really doesn't lend itself to "social media". It's best just to process the grief among st friends and family and stay offline. Grieving on social media quickly becomes a competition....and it never, ever should be that.
34
@Harley Leiber I agree but the family network has been severely compromised in these times and perhaps in grief has been somewhat replaced by social media. Hence, posting to FB on a deceased persons page.
3
Back when Jack Kennedy was shot, I was pretty irritated by my husband and his friend who sat on the couch and didn’t realize that the Saturday football game would be cancelled.
When Kobe was killed, I didn’t know much about him. I found an article from a year ago which clarified what he was doing then, and also what happened back when he was 24, and how he reacted to it. That way I didn’t get tangled up with the feelings of people to whom he meant so much. However, that article was centered around his helicopter which gave it an eerie air.
1
I am still amazed at the sadness I felt when Princess Diana died. No easy explanation for such strong feelings for the loss of Diana shared with many around the world.
On the other hand I think we should be economical about where we express our sadness. Life can have many big losses and it seems healthier to try to reserve grief for when we lose people close to us.
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It's also troubling how responses from people with distant "relationships" to the person we've lost are broadcast ad nauseum to keep the 24/7 news cycle going (I've had his poster on my wall since I was 10... she was in my intro to econ class...). It diminishes grief as an experience, reduces it to a performance of grief that can come to seem like an interminable exercise in self-indulgence and self-promotion, one interview after another, even if the interviewee doesn't intend to use the opportunity that way.
I don't intend this as a shaming of the grieving fan or fellow student, but as criticism of a media practice that reduces even grief to the thin gruel of infotainment. Better to restore some sense of occasion to commemoration. Let our understanding of the person we want to honor be enlarged by hearing from those who really knew the person, can speak to our collective loss by reminding us of who we've lost.
The rest of us can grieve privately, in our way, with the depth and character that our association with the loss gives us, whether through our respect or admiration of the person or our empathy for the grieving family and friends whose loss may resonate with ours by virtue of its sudden-ness or cause.
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@Tadidino
But that does sound like the grief police right there.For a public figure the reality is, a lot of people have feelings about that person, who is larger than life to them, and is symbolic of aspects of their life that are very important to them. For example, a very moving piece in the NYTimes today: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/02/sports/basketball/kobe-death.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&fbclid=IwAR3EFppd5Ce2Dhh5Z8CvHwAPWGsNPRMf8JHhiI5Lz-bC0BHf7q6gZXk5MZU
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@SEO Tadidino, didn't say their comment wasn't a 'grief police' type. It's their opinion and an explanation of how they behave, which I respect. All of our comments are 'grief policing' on one side or the other.
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"Everyone responds to death differently." Do you really think so? I'd have guessed that there are maybe a dozen ways, but even if there are a hundred or ten thousand, that's hardly 7.8 billion.
I'd have thought, rather, that any response to death is of a kind and quality shared by many people, with some deep and virtually universal commonalities, and that that is why we're able to empathize and support one another in grief even when our feelings vary in degree. Common customs and rituals put those commonalities above differences so no one has to feel altogether alone--or imagine that not one in 7.8 billion others can identify with their experience.
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@Meredith I agree with you, but shaming people on social media is not the way to go. For an average person like me dies, grieving should be within the family and friends--hugging, talking, laughing and crying. Moreover, a large number of us in the western world are alone, there is not much of a cultural community or family to grieve with. One generally has to grieve alone which can take long time, even decades, to come to terms with it.
As with everything else, "grief" has become a profit-making industry and, through the internet, a source for the pursuit of agendas designed to manipulate people. Currently, nothing in America is beyond marketable exploitation. Currently nothing in America is beyond being weaponized. To paraphrase Roger Cohen, "Like truth, decency and respect are so 20th century."
I think Sian Beilock's high school was in the path of the 1991 Oakland Hills firestorm, a conflagration that took the lives of twenty-five people (none at the school.) Though the school was saved, nonetheless the students, in one manner or another and to one degree or another, had to deal with grief, as a number of students lost homes, some may have known people who died, school was moved for a time, and the devastation surrounding the school remained for a couple years.
I would be curious whether, and if so how, that event shaped Sian's perceptions and analysis regarding grief in both the private, affected group, and public spheres.
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Thank you for this wonderful and insightful essay.
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The thought police’s tyranny is not limited to monitoring how we grieve. Words uttered in sincere innocence and good faith from any point of view can be “called out”, casting one into the peculiar 21st-century outer darkness known as cancel culture.
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@Martha Goff
Martha, you hit the nail on he head. My own version (excerpt from my comment elsewhere) below. I wonder if you are/were related to Irv.
As with everything else, "grief" has become a profit-making industry and, through the internet, a source for the pursuit of agendas designed to manipulate people. Currently, nothing in America is beyond marketable exploitation. Currently nothing in America is beyond being weaponized. To paraphrase Roger Cohen, "Like truth, decency and respect are so 20th century."
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@Martha Goff - The policing starts in approximately one and a half comments. Take any positive sentence and so often human nature looks for the one word to pick on. Even "Have a nice day" isn't safe. Hey, what do I mean by that?
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The only right way to mourn is to left be alone to mourn. It was separates us from insects and arthropods. Even birds and animals mourn in their own way. Why not humans mourn the way they want especially when they mourn a legend that they loved.
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