Grief: Individual or communal?
Our cultural attitudes toward death are fraught. We undoubtedly live in a death-phobic culture. A culture that steers the conversation away from death at every opportunity, and one which expects its citizens to “get over” their grief as quickly as possible. To move on and get back to normal life. We are not exposed to death, preferring to keep that unpleasant reality behind locked doors. We mumble awkward condolences when we hear of death and feel at a loss as to how to help someone grieving.
Other cultures and other times have approached death differently, and when we look toward our own grief, we might take some inspiration from those cultures. In the West, we continue to de-value rite and ritual, which has for a long time been a central principle in the way grief is processed in other cultures. And whilst we seem hell bent on ignoring and denying the reality of death, the philosophies and religions of the past echo one profound but simple truth: we know for sure we are going to die, but we don’t know when. This should not be invitation to despair, but an invitation to live each day, each moment, as if it were our last, for indeed it could be.
The Stoic Philosopher Marcus Aurelius, for example, contemplates death regularly, and recommends this contemplation as a kind of personal therapy. The constant reminder of death, he argues, is one way to live well. Similarly, the existentialist position holds that living well requires an “authentic” engagement with life, and that authenticity in this sense demands a conscious orientation towards one’s inevitable death. Without doing so, we live in a state of “inauthenticity”. A state which is less than honest, and at odds with reality.
Western philosophy has, however, tended to overlook the social nature of death. As in many things in our culture, the tendency has been to view death, and even grief, as an individual event. An individual dies and I, as an individual, grieve. But death and grief are much more than that. Death is a shared, social event. One which binds and connects in ways deeper than most. When we grieve, we tend to want to do so in communities of people who also knew the dead, or who have been through a similar loss. But many difficulties in grieving come from trying to do it on one’s own.
Finding an integration between the individuality of our Western tradition and the more communal approaches found in other cultures may help us to feel and manage our grief in more adaptive ways. We can maintain an individual awareness of our own inevitable death, as a way of contacting our life more deeply; while at the same time ensuring that we are embedded in communities of people which allow us to feel and express our grief in helpful ways.
