It was 7:00 am as my alarm went off. The sun is shining bright… filling my room… the birds chirping on the shiuli tree outside my window. Nature has its way of telling us that it is a new day of possibilities. But in that newness, I feel numbed by the silence of my room. The calm numbness of silence after a storm, the numbness that grief brings with it. No new stories, no more phone calls, no new memories. I sense a chilling numbness as everything seems blurry. My skin crawls as I am reminded of the reality. I don’t know if it is real. I still can’t believe it is. I don’t know how to process it. I want to return to sleep… to evade this feeling. Maybe, it is a dream.

Lately, I have been exhausting myself to sleep… but nothing changes. The numbness remains, the sadness lingers and the silence is unending. These days, I pretend to be busy. While the reality is that I am unable to keep my thoughts together… to utter even two coherent sentences. I am unable to communicate. I excuse myself often by telling everyone that I can’t talk because I have some work. But, on the inside, I am searching for breath… I am trying to grapple with my thoughts, The strength that I often showcase to the outside world is breaking. How does one convey the blank that one feels when… all the laughter, the anger, the love, the fear, the friendship, the humour, the dreams and hopes and all the experience we share, is taken away… in a moment? You are robbed-off your mundane and routine… your everydayness is lost. You don’t know what to do with this new emptiness.

– Diary (20^th August 2020)

Today, modern society has blessed us with several platforms and the social media for communicating our thoughts, emotions and beliefs, building communities and collectives in the real, and, the virtual world (Harju, 2015). Yet in our everyday lives, we often lack the space, the language, the vocabulary and comfort, and the faith to share our pains, losses and grief. In an era of oversharing, viral trends, hashtags and virtual public spaces, grief is not something that can easily be conveyed. Fear of judgement, vulnerability, weakness, questioning and sympathy often prevent us from baring our hearts. Are we becoming a society of ableists or are the intangibles of our being losing meaning in this overtly competitive world? Research suggests that the physical, psychological, social and spiritual impact of grief can affect our well-being. This is often challenged by the context that we experience grief in. The need to find new meaning and develop a new understanding of how to process the loss becomes an expression guided by culture, rituals and norms.

As children, social learning, as emphasised by Albert Bandura, became an important method of learning and understanding the rituals, norms and acts to be performed for navigating everyday life situations. Yet, the meaning of this everydayness is fully comprehended only when one goes through similar situations in life. That is where the shared meanings and collective practice of rituals of everyday life acquire significance.

I remember how fascinated I used to be when the elderly in the house would narrate stories about their life, struggles, of independence, of their friends, their siblings and parents. Learning about times and people that are now only memories, was like time-travelling for me as a little girl. Summer vacations meant ghost stories narrated by the elders while the children sat together holding onto their pillows. Women in my family who were otherwise caught in the household chores became storytellers and time travellers with the children making a picturesque impact on young minds. With time I realised that these were not just stories, but collective memories that travel for generations, and, give us a sense of belongingness and language through which we remember our loved ones. I often sense a melancholy wrapped in the sweetness of those childhood memories and stories that my parents share as a daily ritual. It is the untapped emotion that does not know any other language, and one realises that grief changes forms, but it doesn’t ever leave us. People never really leave us. They live as an inseparable part of our memory.

 Internalising Grief and Language

I want to cry, but I can’t find my tears. My eyes are hurting from gazing into the deep for long. My head hurts from overthinking and not knowing what to think at the same time. People are visiting, repeated calls on our mobile, and the noise of condolences… it is nauseating to be a witness to the social displays and the patterned conversation that emerge. I hear people repeating the same questions and the same sentences time and again…These days the routineness of the sentences exchanged has made a pattern of conversation…

I feel the thickness of my skin as if nothing penetrates through it. My eyes and my mind are scaling off into oblivion… and for a moment I want to scream. I want to feel and hear anything apart from the noise, but I am too exhausted even to speak. I distract myself with chores so that I don’t have to speak to anyone. I think I am yet to register in my mind what has happened. Will I ever be able to process this?

– Diary (25^th August 2020) 

I have been visiting your Facebook page, again and again, to see you, to read your conversations. Your words make me feel that you are there with me. Sometimes I weep when I see the messages we shared… at other times I stare at the messages thinking that there will be no more. I remember, frantically searching for all your pictures and messages so that I can save them…scrolling through them again and again… numerous times in a day. It gives me the strength and warmth that I felt when I talked to you… when you were here. Today, when I got up in the morning, I woke up with a startling realisation… that you are gone… it is real. This is what life will be… without you physically being here.

I want to talk, and I want to talk more about what it is that I have lost, what you meant to me. I want to talk about every insignificant detail because my heart hurts with pain, and the cracks are screaming with your memories. How do I convey all this? Will anyone understand or is everyone busy creating their own ways of processing the reality?  

– Diary (8^th September 2020)  

Grieving is a metamorphosis inevitable for the individuals that we are and that we are to become. Grieving our losses and pains is not about strength and weakness. It is about the process of life and how we reconstruct ourselves through it. Grieving is not just about crying and venting out our emotions of losing someone. It doesn’t end. It is cruel, and it is painful. You realise what heartache feels like; it hurts everywhere. Hollowness feels eternal. People repeatedly weep and repeat the same stories and try to create a solidarity of shared memory. But you feel too exhausted to reciprocate and at some levels, you don’t want to reciprocate because if you do then your loss is real. It is the reality.

For some of us, the repeated narration becomes a process of accepting reality. For people sharing our grief perform all the rituals and norms of our shared cultures, the language in which they imagine our loss and pain. Anthropologists suggest that each culture has its traditions, rituals, norms and ways of expressing grief and mourning. As humans living in a society, we learn through experience and the practice of rituals. Rituals come alive through enactment. These patterns are a part of our socialisation. Thus there is a solidarity in grieving too for there is a shared vocabulary. When we witness the performance of the rituals by different cultures, we realise what is shared in one culture is not shared by another. Yet if we care to see beyond the visible differences,  there is also a common humanness of life, death and grieving that binds us all.  

Grief, Culture and the Self in Contradiction:

Stroebe and Schut (2014) suggest that grief is a universal reaction understood in terms of our biological heritage and survival of species. Reactions identifiable as grief have been documented for diverse societies and species, animals and humans. The authors argue that the ‘normal’ reaction or the healthy way of coping to grief is largely a western and ethnocentric construction. Therefore, through a cross-cultural comparison of diverse cultural perspectives, they suggest how grief, mourning and bereavement are interrelated, and how the visible signs (manifestations), personal perceptions (symptoms) and health consequences of grief vary significantly across cultures. Therefore, grief may be a universal reaction to the loss by death of a significant other. In the authors’ imagination, thus, the grieving process is largely defined by the macro aspects of society and culture, and not the individual self and their multiple identities, and the relational dynamics of experience of grieving (Rosenblatt, 2017).

Culture and rituals provide a medium for expressing grief and processing our loss of the beloved, but in practice, one may sense a loss of agency. Since these rituals and norms are largely accepted and rehearsed patterns of societal guidelines, one does not have space, if not freedom, to choose one’s expression of grief.

Rituals and norms anonymise the loss and disregard the question of diversity of conditionings and agency and diversity in the expression of our grief. Suppose we can’t identify with the culture and the rituals it provides us with. What if  we do not find space in it for ourselves? Can we construct new dimensions within the community for acceptance of the emerging narratives? Is there a marginalisation in the process of identification of loss and what one may or may not grieve about? Are all our losses acknowledged and ‘accepted’ as grief, or do our cultures, rituals and realities value specific forms of losses more than others (not based on the degree of permanence, but the ground of social and morally ethical losses)?

As gendered bodies in modern society, the transition of the self often becomes non-negotiable and comes in conflict with the society that one comes from. The constructs and imaginings of one’s self vis-à-vis one’s context results in a trade-off between the community comfort in collective mourning, and isolation. In such a situation, the departure from one’s culture of origin towards a need for a counterculture where one can talk and share their reflections and grieve seems inevitable. Here, what one often feels challenged about is that while there are ‘socially identified and accepted’ forms of losses like death, the reason for death and ‘who’ dies may also determine the narratives that emerge through the condolences and queries in the culture, like in the case of death by suicide, crimes, accident, or illness/ medical condition, or the death of a person from a marginalised community (LGBTQIA+, Dalits and other oppressed communities, the minorities, communities of ‘unaccepted’ forms of labour like the sex workers). The rituals, in such a case, may vary depending upon the societal narrative of the construction of these bodies. Likewise, the expression of grief and the pattern of mourning may also be verifiably distinct.

Yet, what about the unaccepted or unidentified forms of losses? Do identities and the ‘self’ matter in what we can and cannot grieve about? Will the manifestations and perceptions of loss matter in what we choose to grieve publicly and what we grieve about in private? For instance, a miscarriage, a loss of a partner (outside the recognised norms of law, society and community), experiences of physical and sexual assault, abuse and exploitation at the hands of a society that we experience in everyday life, loss of an animal friend, trauma, etc.; can we grieve all of these in similar ways? Do we find rituals and norms that help us express and ‘deal’ and negotiate with the space that we are in? Will we all process these losses in similar ways if we share the same culture? Maybe not. Will the narrative and construction of motherhood, a partner, victim (a person who has been wronged), or a friend in the person that we are, not vary? Maybe that is where the cultural perspective of grief and mourning seems inadequate at times. Can we make grieving more inclusive? Can we create new collectives and new solidarities by sharing our losses with the ‘others’?

Grief is a kind of education. It becomes a part of you. It doesn’t end. It takes you through a process that shows you different meanings of life and different sides of your ‘self’. It changes with time as you find new meaning. It is the death of emotions and what they mean for someone. Grief is rooted in memories and stories and the missing parts of the puzzle of our life that we may never find. That gap change gets reshaped as we process the grief. When we feel we miss you, it is that you are missing from our life, our narrative and we no longer know how to make meaning of this life as we used to. We are learning new ways of meaning-making. We miss you, and that is why we still often talk about you several times a day. What you used to say, what would you do, what you like and dislike… Every memory breathes life into our days. I see a different side of grief now; it’s not only about pain, loss and missing presence, it is also about building new stories and ways of how we cherish people, loving them more and making them inseparable parts of our everyday life. But, the sadness…the sadness lingers and looms like a shadow. It reminds me of the fact that one is alive, and therefore one must feel.    

– Diary (10^th September 2020)

Is grieving a private act or a social code of conduct?

Grieving offers a sense of security and stability, a form of collective social learning of the ritual, culture and norms through practice. Expressions otherwise resorted to only in the privacy of our lives, become the accepted behaviour and norms, as we perform the rituals of accepted physical demonstration of our loss. And abide by the symbolic gestures that are expected of us. Cross-cultural studies suggest that all cultures have defined what they are going to grieve for and how they are going to grieve. This may depend upon the attachments that one forms. Therefore, grieving as a process is closely related to the attachment theory and the culture of attachment to some,  and not to others in society. Likewise, the expression of grief also varies, as some cultures expect a dignified and quiet response while in other societies, mourners are expected to display their raw emotions (Doka, 2012) openly. Grieving as an act of collective mourning provides us comfort, and reaffirms community codes.

But do these rituals not reinforce the oppressive and unequal constructions of identities and strengthen the divide in a hierarchically structured society? Can we cultivate an intercultural understanding of grief amongst ourselves? Can we be a part of the grieving and mourning of cultures different from ours?  Are men ‘allowed’ to cry and mourn their grief without being labelled? Are women ‘free’ not to share their loss in public?

I think sometimes we are negligent of the violence that we perpetuate through our efforts to comfort people who need to grieve, by repeating ourselves and making people narrate their pain. But that is what becomes of this process, this cruel process. We too often repeat ourselves to people who try to comfort us, about our loss, narrating the incident, again and again, every insignificant detail we think about the person, that reminds us of them. Maybe that is the make-believe process that helps us grasp the reality. But what happens when this sharing and repeating of our cycle of emotions are not received and comforted leading to reverberating impacts?

Grieving with someone demands empathy, for when we devour our sorrows and pain, something incomprehensible goes on in our hearts. We hate everything, and we feel no one understands what we are going through. No one can get through to us, comfort us and reduce the pain. It is only through grieving that we internalise the pain and it becomes a part of us, exhausts us of our feelings and leaves no more thought to be thought about the person. You see your people getting old in front of your eyes.

A new side of people who have always been the caregivers and nurturers become visible, who now need your care and support, and, that is when you realise that grief is not only rooted in the loss of people to death but also the demise of the everydayness, security and narratives of our lives. Nothing no longer remains the same. The meanings, the roles, the relationships, dependency everything changes, and, with time, we only learn how to weave the threads of our lives with the new threads of losing the loved ones. Grieving thus becomes the closure for the love that was felt for the ones we lost, and it never really quite ends… one more moment, one last word, one last memory.

Today, as I sit on my bed looking outside the window waiting for daylight, I feel calm and poised. I realise the newness of this life that I am living. I feel the calm of the winter, and at that moment, my eyes tear up. These tears are not of pain, but possibly of disbelief of how I have learnt to live ‘one day at a time’. I am learning to design my way of expressing what I feel. I have learnt to be more compassionate towards myself. Maybe now I will be able to reclaim myself. Perhaps now I cherish the present more than anything else in my life. I take a moment to breathe, and at that moment, I feel how proud you would have been of me… of the person that I am becoming.

– Diary (5^th November 2020)

Notes:

The aspects that have been articulated here is probably a small slice of what grief and grieving are about. The anthropological, socio-biological, cultural and psycho-social discourse around grief suggests the expanding horizon of it, through available literature. The perception shared in this write-up is a discussion piece and not prescriptive in any way. The purpose for sharing this write up is to encourage the readers to judge less and talk more, share and understand the intangibles of life that make it difficult for many of us to carry on with our lives. We often feel that no one will understand us, but maybe we need to begin these conversations ourselves and rediscover the joy of healing through sharing. 

Bibliography:

Adichie, C. N. (2020). Notes on Grief. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/notes-on-grief

Anu Harju (2015) Socially shared mourning: construction and consumption of collective memory, New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, 21:1-2, 123-145, DOI: 10.1080/13614568.2014.983562

Doka, K. J.(2012). What Culture Teaches us about Grief. Huffpost. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/whitney-houston-death_b_1300060

Kuehn, Philip D.. (2013). Cultural Coping Strategies and their Connection to Grief Therapy Modalities for Children: An Investigation into Current Knowledge and Practice. Retrieved from Sophia, the St. Catherine University repository website: https://sophia.stkate.edu/msw_papers/215

Paul C. Rosenblatt (2017) Researching Grief: Cultural, Relational, and Individual Possibilities, Journal of Loss and Trauma, 22:8, 617-630, DOI: 10.1080/15325024.2017.1388347

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15325024.2017.1388347?scroll=top&needAccess=true&journalCode=upil20

Stroebe, M. S. & Schut, H.A.W.. (1998). Culture and Grief. Bereavement Care. 17. 7-11. 10.1080/02682629808657425. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/239789673_Culture_and_grief

Anuradha Bose is a doctoral scholar at National Institute for Educational Planning and Administration (NIEPA), New Delhi. She can be contacted at mail.abose@gmail.com.