In this episode we explore the challenges of tackling grief on a global scale as the world changes around us.
A week or so ago I was visiting a friend who was struggling with grief after his lifelong partner had died from cancer. It felt like an amputation, he said: his whole life had been about doing things for her, and with her, and now suddenly that was gone. So it wasn’t something he could ignore, or ‘get over it’: we don’t ‘get over’ something like the loss of a limb, and apparently the brain interprets it in much the same way.
But he was being systematic about tackling it. He wasn’t moping, or wallowing, but he also wasn’t pretending that it hadn’t happened. He knew that for him it was worse in the mornings, so he would go for a long walk every day, reflecting on life, reflecting on the past, focussing carefully on his experience of a lack of any sense of future. It would take time, he said: there was a process, and he was following that process, towards finding a new future. The metaphoric amputation would never truly heal, of course, but it would be possible to rebuild his life even with that fact.
Grief is hard.
It dominates, debilitates.
It bites hard, and won’t let go.
Grief can also be triggered by many different things. In Portuguese fado - one of the classic cultural-expressions of grief - the songs in Lisbon are about the loss of a lover; in Porto they’re about leaving home, leaving the country, and in Coimbra they’re about loss of connection to the university and its community there. The Welsh word heraeth is often mistranslated as ‘homesickness’, but more accurately describes ‘a longing and a grieving for that which is not, and now can never be’. In blues, and also in much of country-music, it’s about the pain and harshness of life in general - and with good reason, too.
And grief can also be about the loss of a way of life:
Sure, mining was a hard way to make a living; but it was indeed a way of life, and everything else that’s associated with a way of life: camaraderie, community and more. Once that’s gone - as in this abandoned gold-mine above - there’s a real sense of loss. And for many people, that loss can bite - not just in practical ways, such as loss of income, but in emotional and spiritual ways too. Especially so, if there’s no way for that way of life to ever return. Which triggers grief.
And even that kind of grief is hard to bear.
In the now-classic Kübler-Ross model, grief has five distinct phases: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. And as my friend warned, it’s all too easy to get stuck in any of those phases - particularly denial, anger and depression.
Take a look at the raging anger of many on the far-right of politics, particularly in the US: their old way of life is gone and never coming back, and they’re trapped in anger and grievance about it, unable to move on. (That they’re focussing their anger on entirely the wrong cause is another story, of course, but it doesn’t change the fact that the grievances themselves are real.)
Take a look at most people’s response to climate-change: yes, stuck in denial for more than half a century now, but it doesn’t change the fact that the denial is driven by fear of the loss of their existing way of life - however unsustainable that way of life may be. (And this time it won’t just be the poorer country people left behind by technology-change and resource-depletion who’ll be affected by this: with sea-level rise and ever more extreme weather, the richer coastal cities may well become untenable too.)
If we want a viable world, there’ll need to be big changes from the world of now - a lot of change, often at very large scale. That’s going to cause huge disruption for a lot of ways of life: and because of the scale and severity of the issues we’re facing, many if not most of those ways of life can never come back in their current form. That’s going to mean a lot of grievance, a lot of grief - and, if we’re not careful, a lot of easy pickings for the ever-controlling, ever-manipulative covert-crybabies carrying false promises of ‘back to the certainty of the past’ and easy choices for scapegoats to blame…
There are ways to resolve grief, or at least to help people to move through those phases, all the way through to acceptance of the change, preventing a last-minute fallback into the all-too-easy addictions of grief, and instead moving forward into a new future that still acknowledges the meaning of the past. The Kübler-Ross model is one such approach to do this; there are many others. The point is to find a way that works for each person, and help them through. The challenge is how to make it work at large scale, for an entire community, an entire country, an entire world.
So yes, we need to take a long look at large-scale grief, and take it seriously, too. Because if we can’t do that, the pull-back towards the past may be so extreme that there won’t be any room left for a viable future at all.
Beautiful writing. Some of your best, I think. Be well, my friend.