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Another Person’s Grief

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Everybody grieves in their own way. If Charlie Kirk’s widow needs to film herself crying by the casket, then she should. One truly never knows how grief will manifest. The mind enters a survival mode and works out its own way to process. It’s not going to be the same way for everyone.

There was a reader on this blog some time ago. A great, very active reader. But in the spring of 2014, only a few months after my son’s death, she decided that she knew exactly how parents of stillborn babies needed to grieve. It’s ok to have an opinion, especially when you haven’t been touched by a certain kind of tragedy yourself, but she started to deploy her opinion at me very insistently. It was actually quite embarrassing to watch.

Albert Camus described precisely this bovine conviction that one’s emotional response is the correct one in his novel The Stranger.

5 responses to “Another Person’s Grief”

  1. methylethyl Avatar
    methylethyl

    My VN friends hire a professional cameraman to film their wakes and funerals, and then edit together the highlights set to music, including the deceased’s face being covered with a cloth, the casket being filled with rice hulls, and the relatives throwing themselves on the casket sobbing.

    I know because on the anniversary of my hostess’ mother’s death, she brought out the DVD and we all watched it together. She had a little cry in front of everybody, and honestly it seemed to do her good and nobody acted like this was in any way abnormal or weird or embarrassing.

    Kirk’s widow… this is very tame compared to public grieving rituals in probably MOST of the world. I’m not at all sure that white American culture is doing it right, with our stiff-upper-lip, grieve-in-private, don’t make a scene attitudes.

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    1. Demotrash Avatar
      Demotrash

      I’ve had a few deaths in my family in the past year and I definitely feel like we’re doing it wrong. It felt slightly unacceptable to cry even at the funeral. What’s wrong with my family that we’re this emotionally repressed?

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      1. oldcowboy3 Avatar
        oldcowboy3

        Actually, it is normal. As young children both boys and girls cry, but society teaches boys to suppress their emotions, to become stoic. And at puberty, higher levels of testosterone and lower levels of prolactin reinforces the difference between us. The male brain is more compartmentalized, simpler with fewer neural connections between the hemispheres. We are both naturally designed and societal trained to be very different animals.

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        1. Demotrash Avatar
          Demotrash

          This standard is inflicted on both genders in my family, so it’s not that.

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          1. oldcowboy3 Avatar
            oldcowboy3

            That is strange, are every generation of the women in your family like that?

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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