Unmetabolized Grief

Protect the joy

People who are grieving make decisions they wouldn’t make if they weren’t riven by loss, riddled by bereavement. I know this from personal experience. “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” is how I frame decisions I made in grief that had negative consequences.

We kind of know that individually, and you hear it when you’re going through grief. Don’t make any big decisions after a loss, people say. But we’re less aware of how that works culturally when an entire world, country, group, or city is stricken.

We understand that people who lost their homes in the fires in LA are suffering a loss. But it’s clear that the entire area suffered a significant trauma. Houses left standing are uninhabitable because of smoke and ash. The structure exists, from the street it might look unscathed, but it’s too polluted for habitation. And the fires are still burning as I write this.

I’m not a therapist or a grief counselor, but I’ve lived through various kinds of loss, and what I’m noticing today is the cultural impact of unmetabolized grief. Not as a scholar or practitioner of any kind, but as someone who made some regrettable decisions following a loss.

If we don’t make space for grief, individually and communally, it’s difficult to process it. And that lingering grief, metastasized, can show up in unexpected, damaging ways.

Short Shrift

As most of you know, I write about grief because I’ve experienced it; the loss of my father when I was a teenager, the death of my teenaged son. The cultural frame of grief gives short shrift to the actual lived experience in a few ways. Here are some of the prevailing narratives that limit people experiencing loss.

Time: Everyone assumes you’re going to be done grieving quickly. More than a few months and people start giving you looks, or gently suggest medication or therapy. Both can be helpful, don’t get me wrong, but when your spouse or child or parent dies, it’s not a three-month process. We’re not growing tomatoes; we’re reconciling the loss of one of the relational pillars of our existence.

Complexity: Grief is not just sad. For me, it was anxious – are the other people I love going to be struck down by hideous circumstances? Anger – a rage against people who remained unscathed, who complained about their teen’s sloppy room when I was trying to decide whether or not I should keep the suit my dead son wore when he played Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. Control – the desire to construct a narrative that gives you any sense of agency. Which often leads to fault finding – this person, or institution or situation is the one to blame for what happened.

Action: I did plenty of lashing out after my son died. The feeling of utter helplessness is so terrifying, I was driven to do something, anything, to assert some power. For some people this means they start a foundation, or get politically active. For others it means trying to exert more control over the people or situations around them. Others still stop acting at all because passivity is safer and takes less energy.

What happens to unmetabolized grief?

Experts, pundits and scholars have opined at length as to why the Presidential Election of 2024 turned out the way it did. Some of the arguments are cogent, others are not. You have, no doubt, read many of them and have your own thoughts.

What I don’t hear much about is the impact of unmetabolized grief on political leaders around the world. It’s been noted how many of the governments, political parties and leaders who led at the end of the Covid pandemic were unceremoniously ousted from power, regardless of any substantive policy accomplishments they might have had.

I would argue that one of the factors at play was the complexity of grief; the rage, frustration, desire to blame combined with the desperate craving for action, change, disruption. The election results in the US surprised some of us, but I think only because we underestimated the level of emotional complexity and rage bubbling up around us.

Between the beginning of the pandemic in early 2020 through May 3,2023, 1,131,729 people died from Covid. That’s over 1 million mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, children, cousins, friends that died.

Storms, fires, floods, brought on by climate change, have killed or displaced so many people. People who lost loved ones, homes, pets, livelihoods, communities, neighborhoods, financial security.

In fifteen months of war, according to ABC, 46,000 Palestinians were killed, more than 109,000 wounded, 1.9 million displaced. Social media brought images of bombed hospitals, dead children, weeping families into the devices in our hands, all day every day.

Many of us are grieving the specific and the global, our personal losses as well as our sorrow at the state of the world.

But in our culture, especially here in the US, a kind of willed amnesia works against us. We don’t have monuments or days of remembrance for the 1.1 million people who died of Covid, or those who cared for them. Plenty of people, many of them now in power, think that vaccines are bad, climate change isn’t happening, the healthcare system is just fine, thanks.

The hardest thing to hear when you are grieving is that the loss that tore your heart didn’t happen, or didn’t matter. Or that the anguish you are experiencing is a personal failing and not a result of the failure of critical systems we, as a society, should be supporting. What’s your problem, these voices say, everyone else has moved on. When these negating narratives are plastered over with a veneer of false Christianity as oligarchs and craven politicians cash in, it’s bad.

What can you do?

· First, honor the grief. Your own, your community’s, others around you.

· Help where you can. Friends in LA have said how the outpouring of community donations and support uplifted them emotionally and practically in this difficult time.

· Connect. Lean into friendships, gather in any way that happens in real life, and away from a screen. Call that friend you haven’t talked to for a while, go on a date, volunteer.

· Do what supports you, avoid what damages you. Stop doomscrolling. Set a limit for time you’ll spend on social media and use one of the many reminders and timers available to help you stick to that.

· Finally, protect the joy. Play, dance, ski, swim, read good books or watch good movies, move your mind and your brain. Enjoy the children in your life, relish and invest in your family and friends, eat great meals, have lots of sex. Don’t let someone else’s narrative about your loss erase your grief or flatten your joy.