As a person who found the whole Michael Jackson national grief-fest ridiculous, I've been wondering why so many otherwise rational people participate in public lamentations of celebrity deaths. Surely only a few of them had known Heath Ledger or Brittany Murphy or even thought much about them in their daily lives. There had to be something else. Then I read this article by Meghan O'Rourke - and it makes sense now. Because our grief has to be private - because public displays of pain and loss is seen as unseemly and grossly ostentatious, we don't grieve with strangers. Public deaths allow us to connect with our own unresolved grief and bind them together with thousands of other people that experienced loss.
Rear window markings denoting the death dates and names of loved ones. Flower and cross shrines by a road, where a loved one met death in an auto accident. These seemed somehow out-of-place and inconsiderate to me. Like they were advertisements for death. Names of insignificant lives that people were desperately trying to assign significance to. Hey, their lives mattered - just read the fancy lettering on my licence plate holder....... Yet, why shouldn't they put up a shrine? Their names must have mattered to somebody, somewhere. Why should I find them offensive? There is no reason to. We have been conditioned to keep our pain private - yet this is a recent and Western custom, foreign to most cultures.
Must have been a couple of years ago - I was reading the blog Marmot's Hole. A Korean mother had lost a son - don't remember the specifics - and the mourning was very public and loud. The wailing was shown on television for quite a while. Western commenters at the Hole wrote that they were put-off by the display - surely there must have been insincere theatrics to the whole thing. I vaguely remember nodding my head and agreeing in general with them. Shows how westernized I had become. But, in human history, public lamentations were the norm. The Bible shows how to properly mourn - render your clothes, scream out loud, pour ashes over your body - let everyone know how much pain you are in. The neighbors were expected to honor your grief and provide some ritual and assistance in those times. The grief was communal. Now the grief is something to be shunted out of view.
We are told that everybody deals with grief and mourns in a different way. What if you don't know how to mourn? Nobody teaches you how to grieve - you can read some standardized five-step process of dealing with loss, but can grief be standardized? More I think about this, the more I believe in the ritual of grieving. The pain can be shared - not only within families, but within whole communities, whole towns.
How survivors deal with death is far more interesting to me than how the victims deal with death. Dying people don't really have a choice in the matter - you can be as brave or as craven as possible, but in the end - death still happens. For survivors, the loss can consume them daily, like losing a tiny part of you every day. You plan your days and steps to avoid even the possibility of pain. Walk far and wide, away from everything. In the miniseries John Adams, there is a scene of Jefferson walking with Abigail Adams, talking about death of his wife and child. "Perhaps the art of life," says Jefferson, "is the art of avoiding pain....... He is the best pilot who steers clear of rocks and shoals." I feel like I have been too much afraid of these rocks and shoals. There is no art in it. Just cowardice and more pain.