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| Pablo Picasso's famous painiting Guernica, 1937, is considered one of the best works of art which depict grief. Source: www.pablopicasso.org |
It
was 7:00 am as my alarm went off. The sun is shining bright… filling my room…
the birds chirping on the shiuli tree outside my window. Nature has its way of telling
us that it is a new day of possibilities. But in that newness, I feel numbed by
the silence of my room. The calm numbness of silence after a storm, the
numbness that grief brings with it. No new stories, no more phone calls, no new
memories. I sense a chilling numbness as everything seems blurry. My skin
crawls as I am reminded of the reality. I don’t know if it is real. I still
can’t believe it is. I don’t know how to process it. I want to return to sleep…
to evade this feeling. Maybe, it is a dream.
Lately,
I have been exhausting myself to sleep… but nothing changes. The numbness
remains, the sadness lingers and the silence is unending. These days, I pretend
to be busy. While the reality is that I am unable to keep my thoughts together…
to utter even two coherent sentences. I am unable to communicate. I excuse
myself often by telling everyone that I can’t talk because I have some work.
But, on the inside, I am searching for breath… I am trying to grapple with my
thoughts, The strength that I often showcase to the outside world is breaking.
How does one convey the blank that one feels when… all the laughter, the anger,
the love, the fear, the friendship, the humour, the dreams and hopes and all
the experience we share, is taken away… in a moment? You are robbed-off your
mundane and routine… your everydayness is lost. You don’t know what to do with
this new emptiness.
- Diary (20th August 2020)
Today,
modern society has blessed us with several platforms and the social media for
communicating our thoughts, emotions and beliefs, building communities and
collectives in the real, and, the virtual world (, 2015). Yet in our everyday lives, we often
lack the space, the language, the vocabulary and comfort, and the faith to
share our pains, losses and grief. In an era of oversharing, viral trends,
hashtags and virtual public spaces, grief is not something that can easily be
conveyed. Fear of judgement, vulnerability, weakness, questioning and sympathy
often prevent us from baring our hearts. Are we becoming a society of ableists
or are the intangibles of our being losing meaning in this overtly competitive
world? Research suggests that the physical, psychological, social and spiritual
impact of grief can affect our well-being. This is often challenged by the
context that we experience grief in. The need to find new meaning and develop a
new understanding of how to process the loss becomes an expression guided by
culture, rituals and norms.
As children, social learning, as emphasised by Albert Bandura, became an important method of learning and understanding the rituals, norms and acts to be performed for navigating everyday life situations. Yet, the meaning of this everydayness is fully comprehended only when one goes through similar situations in life. That is where the shared meanings and collective practice of rituals of everyday life acquire significance.
I
remember how fascinated I used to be when the elderly in the house would
narrate stories about their life, struggles, of independence, of their friends,
their siblings and parents. Learning about times and people that are now only
memories, was like time-travelling for me as a little girl. Summer vacations
meant ghost stories narrated by the elders while the children sat together
holding onto their pillows. Women in my family who were otherwise caught in the
household chores became storytellers and time travellers with the children
making a picturesque impact on young minds. With time I realised that these
were not just stories, but collective memories that travel for generations,
and, give us a sense of belongingness and language through which we remember
our loved ones. I often sense a melancholy wrapped in the sweetness of those
childhood memories and stories that my parents share as a daily ritual. It is
the untapped emotion that does not know any other language, and one realises
that grief changes forms, but it doesn’t ever leave us. People never really
leave us. They live as an inseparable part of our memory.
I
want to cry, but I can’t find my tears. My eyes are hurting from gazing into
the deep for long. My head hurts from overthinking and not knowing what to
think at the same time. People are visiting, repeated calls on our mobile, and
the noise of condolences… it is nauseating to be a witness to the social
displays and the patterned conversation that emerge. I hear people repeating
the same questions and the same sentences time and again…These days the
routineness of the sentences exchanged has made a pattern of conversation…
I
feel the thickness of my skin as if nothing penetrates through it. My eyes and
my mind are scaling off into oblivion… and for a moment I want to scream. I
want to feel and hear anything apart from the noise, but I am too exhausted even
to speak. I distract myself with chores so that I don’t have to speak to
anyone. I think I am yet to register in my mind what has happened. Will I ever
be able to process this?
- Diary
(25th August 2020)
I
have been visiting your Facebook page, again and again, to see you, to read
your conversations. Your words make me feel that you are there with me.
Sometimes I weep when I see the messages we shared… at other times I stare at
the messages thinking that there will be no more. I remember, frantically
searching for all your pictures and messages so that I can save them…scrolling
through them again and again… numerous times in a day. It gives me the strength
and warmth that I felt when I talked to you… when you were here. Today, when I
got up in the morning, I woke up with a startling realisation… that you are
gone… it is real. This is what life will be… without you physically being here.
I
want to talk, and I want to talk more about what it is that I have lost, what
you meant to me. I want to talk about every insignificant detail because my
heart hurts with pain, and the cracks are screaming with your memories. How do
I convey all this? Will anyone understand or is everyone busy creating their
own ways of processing the reality?
- Diary
(8th September 2020)
Grieving
is a metamorphosis inevitable for the individuals that we are and that we are
to become. Grieving our losses and pains is not about strength and weakness. It
is about the process of life and how we reconstruct ourselves through it.
Grieving is not just about crying and venting out our emotions of losing
someone. It doesn’t end. It is cruel, and it is painful. You realise what
heartache feels like; it hurts everywhere. Hollowness feels eternal. People
repeatedly weep and repeat the same stories and try to create a solidarity of
shared memory. But you feel too exhausted to reciprocate and at some levels,
you don’t want to reciprocate because if you do then your loss is real. It is the
reality.
For
some of us, the repeated narration becomes a process of accepting reality. For
people sharing our grief perform all the rituals and norms of our shared
cultures, the language in which they imagine our loss and pain. Anthropologists
suggest that each culture has its traditions, rituals, norms and ways of
expressing grief and mourning. As humans living in a society, we learn through
experience and the practice of rituals. Rituals come alive through enactment.
These patterns are a part of our socialisation. Thus there is a solidarity in
grieving too for there is a shared vocabulary. When we witness the performance
of the rituals by different cultures, we realise what is shared in one culture
is not shared by another. Yet if we care to see beyond the visible
differences, there is also a common
humanness of life, death and grieving that binds us all.
Grief,
Culture and the Self in Contradiction:
Stroebe
and Schut (2014) suggest that grief is a universal reaction understood in terms
of our biological heritage and survival of species. Reactions identifiable as
grief have been documented for diverse societies and species, animals and humans.
The authors argue that the ‘normal’ reaction or the healthy way of coping to
grief is largely a western and ethnocentric construction. Therefore, through a
cross-cultural comparison of diverse cultural perspectives, they suggest how
grief, mourning and bereavement are interrelated, and how the visible signs
(manifestations), personal perceptions (symptoms) and health consequences of
grief vary significantly across cultures. Therefore, grief may be a universal
reaction to the loss by death of a significant other. In the authors’
imagination, thus, the grieving process is largely defined by the macro aspects
of society and culture, and not the individual self and their multiple
identities, and the relational dynamics of experience of grieving (Rosenblatt,
2017).
Culture
and rituals provide a medium for expressing grief and processing our loss of
the beloved, but in practice, one may sense a loss of agency. Since these
rituals and norms are largely accepted and rehearsed patterns of societal
guidelines, one does not have space, if not freedom, to choose one’s expression
of grief.
Rituals
and norms anonymise the loss and disregard the question of diversity of
conditionings and agency and diversity in the expression of our grief. Suppose
we can’t identify with the culture and the rituals it provides us with. What if
we do not find space in it for ourselves?
Can we construct new dimensions within the community for acceptance of the
emerging narratives? Is there a marginalisation in the process of identification
of loss and what one may or may not grieve about? Are all our losses acknowledged
and ‘accepted’ as grief, or do our cultures, rituals and realities value
specific forms of losses more than others (not based on the degree of
permanence, but the ground of social and morally ethical losses)?
As
gendered bodies in modern society, the transition of the self often becomes non-negotiable
and comes in conflict with the society that one comes from. The constructs and
imaginings of one’s self vis-à-vis one’s context results in a trade-off between
the community comfort in collective mourning, and isolation. In such a
situation, the departure from one’s culture of origin towards a need for a
counterculture where one can talk and share their reflections and grieve seems
inevitable. Here, what one often feels challenged about is that while there are
‘socially identified and accepted’ forms of losses like death, the reason for
death and ‘who’ dies may also determine the narratives that emerge through the
condolences and queries in the culture, like in the case of death by suicide,
crimes, accident, or illness/ medical condition, or the death of a person from
a marginalised community (LGBTQIA+, Dalits and other oppressed communities, the
minorities, communities of ‘unaccepted’ forms of labour like the sex workers). The
rituals, in such a case, may vary depending upon the societal narrative of the construction
of these bodies. Likewise, the expression of grief and the pattern of mourning may
also be verifiably distinct.
Yet,
what about the unaccepted or unidentified forms of losses? Do identities and the
‘self’ matter in what we can and cannot grieve about? Will the manifestations
and perceptions of loss matter in what we choose to grieve publicly and what we
grieve about in private? For instance, a miscarriage, a loss of a partner
(outside the recognised norms of law, society and community), experiences of
physical and sexual assault, abuse and exploitation at the hands of a society
that we experience in everyday life, loss of an animal friend, trauma, etc.;
can we grieve all of these in similar ways? Do we find rituals and norms that
help us express and ‘deal’ and negotiate with the space that we are in? Will we
all process these losses in similar ways if we share the same culture? Maybe
not. Will the narrative and construction of motherhood, a partner, victim (a
person who has been wronged), or a friend in the person that we are, not vary?
Maybe that is where the cultural perspective of grief and mourning seems
inadequate at times. Can we make grieving more inclusive? Can we create new
collectives and new solidarities by sharing our losses with the ‘others’?
Grief
is a kind of education. It becomes a part of you. It doesn’t end. It takes you
through a process that shows you different meanings of life and different sides
of your ‘self’. It changes with time as you find new meaning. It is the death
of emotions and what they mean for someone. Grief is rooted in memories and
stories and the missing parts of the puzzle of our life that we may never find.
That gap change gets reshaped as we process the grief. When we feel we miss
you, it is that you are missing from our life, our narrative and we no longer
know how to make meaning of this life as we used to. We are learning new ways
of meaning-making. We miss you, and that is why we still often talk about you
several times a day. What you used to say, what would you do, what you like and
dislike… Every memory breathes life into our days. I see a different side of
grief now; it’s not only about pain, loss and missing presence, it is also
about building new stories and ways of how we cherish people, loving them more
and making them inseparable parts of our everyday life. But, the sadness…the
sadness lingers and looms like a shadow. It reminds me of the fact that one is
alive, and therefore one must feel.
- Diary
(10th September 2020)
Is
grieving a private act or a social code of conduct?
Grieving
offers a sense of security and stability, a form of collective social learning
of the ritual, culture and norms through practice. Expressions otherwise resorted
to only in the privacy of our lives, become the accepted behaviour and norms,
as we perform the rituals of accepted physical demonstration of our loss. And
abide by the symbolic gestures that are expected of us. Cross-cultural studies
suggest that all cultures have defined what they are going to grieve for and
how they are going to grieve. This may depend upon the attachments that one
forms. Therefore, grieving as a process is closely related to the attachment
theory and the culture of attachment to some,
and not to others in society. Likewise, the expression of grief also
varies, as some cultures expect a dignified and quiet response while in other
societies, mourners are expected to display their raw emotions (Doka, 2012)
openly. Grieving as an act of collective mourning provides us comfort, and
reaffirms community codes.
But
do these rituals not reinforce the oppressive and unequal constructions of
identities and strengthen the divide in a hierarchically structured society?
Can we cultivate an intercultural understanding of grief amongst ourselves? Can
we be a part of the grieving and mourning of cultures different from ours? Are men ‘allowed’ to cry and mourn their
grief without being labelled? Are women ‘free’ not to share their loss in
public?
I
think sometimes we are negligent of the violence that we perpetuate through our
efforts to comfort people who need to grieve, by repeating ourselves and making
people narrate their pain. But that is what becomes of this process, this cruel
process. We too often repeat ourselves to people who try to comfort us, about
our loss, narrating the incident, again and again, every insignificant detail
we think about the person, that reminds us of them. Maybe that is the
make-believe process that helps us grasp the reality. But what happens when
this sharing and repeating of our cycle of emotions are not received and comforted
leading to reverberating impacts?
Grieving
with someone demands empathy, for when we devour our sorrows and pain,
something incomprehensible goes on in our hearts. We hate everything, and we
feel no one understands what we are going through. No one can get through to
us, comfort us and reduce the pain. It is only through grieving that we
internalise the pain and it becomes a part of us, exhausts us of our feelings
and leaves no more thought to be thought about the person. You see your people
getting old in front of your eyes.
A
new side of people who have always been the caregivers and nurturers become
visible, who now need your care and support, and, that is when you realise that
grief is not only rooted in the loss of people to death but also the demise of
the everydayness, security and narratives of our lives. Nothing no
longer remains the same. The meanings, the roles, the relationships, dependency
everything changes, and, with time, we only learn how to weave the threads of
our lives with the new threads of losing the loved ones. Grieving thus becomes the
closure for the love that was felt for the ones we lost, and it never really
quite ends… one more moment, one last word, one last memory.
Today,
as I sit on my bed looking outside the window waiting for daylight, I feel calm
and poised. I realise the newness of this life that I am living. I feel the
calm of the winter, and at that moment, my eyes tear up. These tears are not of
pain, but possibly of disbelief of how I have learnt to live ‘one day at a
time’. I am learning to design my way of expressing what I feel. I have learnt
to be more compassionate towards myself. Maybe now I will be able to reclaim
myself. Perhaps now I cherish the present more than anything else in my life. I
take a moment to breathe, and at that moment, I feel how proud you would have been
of me… of the person that I am becoming.
- Diary (5th November 2020)
Notes:
The
aspects that have been articulated here is probably a small slice of what grief
and grieving are about. The anthropological, socio-biological, cultural and
psycho-social discourse around grief suggests the expanding horizon of it, through
available literature. The perception shared in this write-up is a discussion
piece and not prescriptive in any way. The purpose for sharing this write up is
to encourage the readers to judge less and talk more, share and understand the
intangibles of life that make it difficult for many of us to carry on with our
lives. We often feel that no one will understand us, but maybe we need to begin
these conversations ourselves and rediscover the joy of healing through
sharing.
Bibliography:
Adichie, C. N. (2020). Notes on Grief. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/notes-on-grief
(2015) Socially shared mourning: construction and consumption of collective memory, New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, 21:1-2, 123-145, DOI: 10.1080/13614568.2014.983562
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13614568.2014.983562?journalCode=tham20
Doka, K. J.(2012). What Culture Teaches us about Grief. Huffpost. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/whitney-houston-death_b_1300060
Kuehn, Philip D.. (2013). Cultural Coping Strategies and their Connection to Grief Therapy Modalities for Children: An Investigation into Current Knowledge and Practice. Retrieved from Sophia, the St. Catherine University repository website: https://sophia.stkate.edu/msw_papers/215
(2017) Researching Grief: Cultural, Relational, and Individual Possibilities, Journal of Loss and Trauma, 22:8, 617-630, DOI: 10.1080/15325024.2017.1388347
Stroebe, M. S. & Schut, H.A.W.. (1998). Culture and Grief. Bereavement Care. 17. 7-11. 10.1080/02682629808657425. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/239789673_Culture_and_grief
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