Hierarchies of Grief

Can grief be quantified? This is the question that arose for me in my reading of this week’s essays. Sherman Alexie writes about the unspeakable grief and fear of witnessing his infant son in a coma, and contemplates the ways in which grief and hope are policed. Likewise, Arundhati Roy discusses the packaging and commercialization of grief, the compulsive need to speculate, to quantify and justify suffering. These authors touch on something vital; does our cultural tendency to make order of tragedy, both catastrophic and everyday, impair our human ability to empathize? By creating a hierarchy of grief and suffering, we “other” those who experience grief that is different than our own. We tend to minimize grief that we perceive as minor, and to fear and eschew grief that we perceive as too vast, leaving ourselves and others isolated, each on her own lonely tier of some constructed and abstract scale of suffering. 

I think that this can be a difficult thing to talk about; I do not want to presume to understand the suffering of others, particularly when my life experience is only mine. But isn’t it more problematic to shy away from attempting, to the best of our ability, to understand the experience of others, no matter how different we perceive their experiences to be? Suffering and grief manifest themselves differently in each person, our suffering is not the same as someone else’s simply because we look like that person, or have experienced a similar kind of loss or trauma. Likewise, my grief might not be so different from someone who seems to have a very different life experience. Andrea Gibson writes about this conundrum in their poem entitled “A Letter to White Queers, A letter to Myself” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpBUenMIe8U 

“Another black man has been murdered in the streets, 

And I am white as a ghost, haunting my own grief

Thinking: Who am I to feel grief?

Thinking: My God, who am I not to?”

This speaks to the (perhaps very human) tendency to want to separate ourselves from grief that that we feel is outside of our realm of understanding, whether that desire stems from fear, or simply not wanting to impose ourselves. Maybe we use this conceptual separation of griefs as an excuse to shy away from truly feeling the suffering of others, from digging deep and finding ways to relate, and if we can’t relate, then at least locating the generosity to listen. The problem stems at least in part from the churning amassment of neoliberal values, individuality, and the invisibility of suffering in our society. We do not know how to interact with grief; there is very little guidance for how to grieve, and even less for how to support those who are actively grieving (and aren’t we all, in one way or another?). We tend to offer prescriptive hope to those whose suffering is out of our realm of understanding. Truly acknowledging the scope of someone else’s experience can be painful, so instead we dismiss and minimize with hope, serving to separate ourselves from those who’s grief we believe is larger, uglier, or too foreign to truly empathize with. 

…..I keep coming back to this wishing that I could tidily conclude it, but I’m realizing that there’s not really any way to do that. This is just something that I’ve been grappling with. How do we find a middle ground of empathy and compassion that respects both the immense differences and the commonalities that exist between humans? It feels like a vital part of being a good ally and a good friend, and I haven't quite figured it out yet. Let me know if you do.