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Volume IV, No. 1/November 2001
The Fate and future of Grieving Families: Individual Suffering, Cultural Meanings and Collective Action
By Ester R. Shapiro
The terrorizing acts of mass murder committed on September 11 have forced us, as death always does, to confront the meaning of our lives. As we dig out our dead and struggle to re-establish the social institutions that put bread on the table and sustain us in social communities of love and meaning, we do not yet know the impact and consequences for bereaved survivors and the broader community. We hear calls for justice, for revenge, for war, much of it in the name of the bereaved. As we listen to these calls, we must be careful to untangle the needs and interests of our pluralistic democracy from those of grieving families. The initial priorities for a shattered society after catastrophe are to rebuild the fabric that sustains everyday life, restore disrupted institutions, and create public understanding of the deaths and their meaning. The rituals of grief and the mechanisms of justice are only secondarily designed for the care of grieving families.
In the days ahead, thousands of bereaved children and parents, widows and widowers will discover both the generosity and failures of our social institutions in offering what they truly need materially, psychologically, ethically, and spiritually, to survive as families while incorporating the crushing realities of violent death into their daily lives. Grieving families depend on concentric circles of social support and shared meaning, first to begin to grasp in intimate, agonized detail their loved one’s last moments and, as quickly as possible, to re-establish the disrupted rhythms of everyday life in a terribly diminished new world. The longer-term journey of grief and growth is as unique as each individual whose life was extinguished and whose family and community mourn them. Families all around us already know a great deal about how we absorb the enormity of violent death while preserving our capacity to survive and thrive in our everyday lives. Their knowledge far exceeds what social scientists and grief counselors can offer. Contrary to popular belief, there are no proven therapeutic techniques that guarantee individuals and families will cope successfully with the enormous challenges presented by a family death. The pseudo-scientific therapeutics for "working-through" stages of grief, promoted by a commercial media which profits from selling a quick fix for what ails us, prescribe immediate expression of feelings to "overcome denial", acceptance of the death so as to "get closure" and "move on", as if we could offer a cure for the illness of grief. The media frenzy over Timothy McVeigh’s execution, justified in the name of bereaved families and their need for "closure", obscured the reality that loss continues to unfold throughout a lifetime of lost birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, and graduations.
Reconstructive grief requires the transformation of our relationships with the deceased, slowly coming to terms with the agonizing reality of their corporeal absence and transforming these relationships into psychological and spiritual presences. The challenge after a violent death is even greater, because our mind wants to understand the implications of the death and its meaning but abhors the images of our loved one’s suffering at the hands of a murderer. All death stops time, but violent death stops time in the midst of unbearable terror and rage. We do know from studying the lifelong impact of death and grief on individual and family growth that our collective community responses will affect not only the fate of grieving families but also our social integrity. All of us who hear the news of a loved one’s death enter a sacred space in which time stops while we try to absorb the news and its implications in our hearts, minds and lives. Every culture throughout history has ritualized this heightened intimacy in the transitional, transformational space between the dead and the living, creating ceremonies that affirm our sacred connections and enduring bonds while reassuring the wider community that the rent social fabric can be made whole, can continue to sustain life. Grieving families emerge from this sacred space much more slowly than we in a modern, secular, therapeutic society are prepared to acknowledge. A social dialogue resulting in respectful, inclusive shared meaning making and memorialization offers families an important starting point as they re-establish a new life after death.
At the very beginning of a new century, we need to remember what the last catastrophic century taught us about the ways families get caught up in the cruel movements of politics and history. After World War I, the prior century’s first great confrontation between new ways of life and new ways of war, every combatant nation faced the previously unimaginable work of rebuilding society and mourning for millions of war dead. Concerned for the impact on families whose dead sons could not be identified for individual burial, Great Britain chose to bury their fallen soldiers in war cemeteries throughout France and Flanders, and to honor their return home through symbolic shared rituals in the tombs to unknown soldiers and national memorial spaces. The great Victorian attention to funerals and mourning had to give way to the fabled "stiff upper lip" required to rebuild a devastated society after the war. Families had to find their own path to further recognize the irreplaceable individuality of their loved ones; every day in British newspapers, the bereaved post notices to their deceased relatives, celebrating and recognizing birthdays, anniversaries of the death, just a loving reminder that their memories are cherished.
The Vietnam War Memorial offers us an example of how different strands of social debate were creatively resolved through a memorial honoring the sacrifices made by the dead and their survivors without glorifying what many believed was an unjust war. Maya Lin’s aesthetic vision created an ethical, sacred space, naming each soldier while recognizing the dreadful enormity of our collective loss. Every day at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., grieving families and surviving soldiers communicate with their dead, leaving them notes, gifts, bringing them up to date on life without them. At our country’s most visited memorial, we created a national shrine at which enduring bonds between the dead and the living are recognized and transformed, a space where restless ghosts become protective ancestors and guardian angels.
In post-conflict societies all over the world, a prescriptive language of grief therapy has been manipulated politically, obscuring critical distinctions between the needs of bereaved family survivors and a society’s need for justice, accountability and collective remembering. In rebuilding post-conflict societies, legal bodies and truth commissions have tried to determine how much justice is enough justice to support bereaved survivors and establish a foundation for the growth of democracy and the rule of law. The South Africa truth commission chose truth over justice, granting amnesty to murderers in exchange for their testimony, communicating to families and the public that "Revealing is Healing". In the aftermath of violent regimes that labeled social critics as subversives so dangerous they did not deserve to exist, such as Argentina, truth commissions offer bereaved families the opportunity to learn how a "disappeared" loved one was murdered within an ethical political space that restores their loved one’s dignity and social integrity. For a post-conflict democracy, collective remembering and memorialization offer the opportunity to reopen pluralistic political participation, Yet, in the absence of accountability for crimes, neither the needs of families nor the needs of a just society are served.
Thanks to the enormous sacrifice of so many individuals and families, those of us physically far from ground zero are in a position to learn priceless lessons for living from our manageable distance. This privilege, granted to us by fate, only makes us more ethically responsible to work toward the cultural and community conditions which sustain the bereaved families and communities most directly affected. Death forces us to test the values that make our lives worth living, starting with the easy ones first: to cherish each moment as if it could be our last, because none of us gets a guarantee of long life with our loved ones. None of us will ever forget the flurry of cell phone calls made all over the country, as passengers on four ill-fated flights and in burning buildings connected with their loved ones for the last time on this earth. If we are fortunate, we will permit the sacredness of life to permeate our everyday acts. We will reconsider the values we live by and find a way to shift from our preoccupation with the busy creation and consumption of material wealth to a recognition of the higher values that sustain us at precisely the moments when life and death meet.
Ester R. Shapiro is a professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
