Of Grief and Mourning:  Thinking a Feeling, Back to Robert Solomon

-Dedicated also to Renuka M. Sharma



by

Purushottama Bilimoria

in 







SOPHIA STUDIES IN CROSS-CULTURAL PHILOSOPHY OF TRADITIONS AND CULTURES
)edited by Purushottama Bilimoria & Andrew Irvine, Assistant by Any Raynet(
Volume 1, 2012, DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-4650-3
Passion, Death, and Spirituality
The Philosophy of Robert C. Solomon
Kathleen Higgins and David Sherman 

pp. 149- 174

     Troubled Passions and the Dark Night of Gloom

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.  I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep swallowing . . . (C.S. Lewis, 1976: 1–3)

This paper presents a novice’s reflections (with a delicate personal touch) on the aftermath of the death of a loved one, discussing the process of grieving and mourning, with a comparative focus, i.e. straddling across continental, cross-cultural and analytical philosophical treatments. I shall also indulge the reader in a couple of anecdotal narratives, personal communications, and poetical musings to illustrate how grief is viewed, and how it affects its sufferers, from somewhat different cultural perspectives. This will be followed with an attempt at an analysis and survey of some current thinking among psychologists, psychoanalysts, and philosophers on the enigma of grief, and on the associated praxis of mourning. Since Robert C. Solomon (beloved Bob) was concerned to make his own reflections on the ‘extreme emotion’ of grief in his extensive and groundbreaking theorizing on the emotions, particularly in one of his last books, True to Our Feelings (2007),  and in his chapter ‘On Grief and Gratitude’ (2004)—close to a period when he has also thinking deeply about death and perhaps his own mortality—I shall be taking this opportunity to dialogue with the spirit of his thinking on this challenging subject-matter. Solomon comments that grief is ‘often described as a very private, personal emotion, characterized by social withdrawal and shutting oneself off from the world’ (2006: 73). Indeed one’s wishes when struck by an experience of death of someone very near and dear  re as W. H. Auden  (1976) describes in his moving poem:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone.

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. 

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun.

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

All these things seem unnecessary now; in colloquial terms their ‘use-by- date’ is over and Nothingness has come to be.

Couldn’t the world and speeding motorists just stop for a moment to notice—as the hearse moved towards the crematorium after the last rites—that the cosmos, nay Existence (sat, ens, esse, eksistere) itself, has come to a grinding halt? Its underbelly of the inseparable Non-existence (asat-ca-sat, nihil)) has emerged triumphant against traditional Brahmanic wisdom and promises (its ab-solutumi); perhaps the Buddhists, Jains, and nihilists have it right. It is as one beholds in bardo: existence is just another appearance, an illusion, a mirage, emptiness all around. The Pascalian wager (bet) I had gratefully placed—staked on game-theory determined probability against the nihilationist condition (unclinically termed cancer)—has now been lost; we are returned to the cascaded parade of ‘all souls of the faithful departed’. ‘Where the hell is God or gods?’(Leonard, 2010).

 “So this is the end, my friend, love of my life?” - the first words that came to my mouth as I had held her still warm-hands minutes after the fatal moment—echoed resoundingly in the defiant darkness that had slowly been enveloping the earthly horizons and the terrestrial realms, and inwardly too (Masel 2011).

Betake thee (deceased) to the lap of the earth the mother, of earth

Far-spreading, very kind and gracious.

Young dame, wool-soft unto the guerdon-giver, may

She preserve thee from Destruction’s (Death’s) bosom.

(Rig Veda, X, 18; Funerary Ritual, antyeshti, incantation).

gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā

(gone, gone beyond the other shore - of suffering - well-gone), (Prajñaparamita mantra, Heart Sūtra).

And when the mind was freed from death

it became the moon (candra).

So having gone beyond death,

the moon now shines up there. (Brhadrāranyaka Upanishad 2.5.7, Olivelle 1996)

Beautiful face, mind heart

The dark/Shadow…

The wakening in brightness

(‘Obituary’ Hutchings, in Charlesworth 2003).

The rituals that many of the ancient (perhaps so-called ‘primitive as well as  ‘civilized’) traditions bring to the last rites, honoring the deceased in a gesture of sending the parting ‘soul’ onto its yonder journey, tend to ease if not blunt the devastation and the avalanche of sensations and feelings that continue to flood the body and mind - as if for one unending eternity - of the survivors. But this reprieve may not last too long. Associated with the gloom of grief is a  series of  unsettling sensations and feelings: not least, an arresting sense of hopelessness, loss, fear, anxiety, wrath, if not indignant anger, a ‘collapsing of the house of cards’, a throbbing of the heart in deep pain, swallowing, tightness in the chest, and perhaps also in the stomach that has all but lost its usual appetite, and insomnia. Because of the intensity and insufferable ‘jab of red-hot memory’ whence all this "common-sense" vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace (C.  S.  Lewis, 1976), followed by doubts about what one is actually feeling, sometimes denying the obvious only to be hit with wave upon wave of discomfiture, tears and inexplicable sensations in various parts and organs of the body, grief is often said to be the most negative of “negative” emotions—though Solomon seeks to de-emphasize this presumed polarity between positive and negative emotions. His argument "is not that there is no such thing as valence . . . but rather that there are many such polarities and oppositions” (2007: 171).

(And so in a moment of confessional guilty grief:) ‘Why did I not see her pain and agony more consciously? How could I have been, my beloved, so self-possessed? Whose is the blame here?’

In that vein, taking upon oneself the responsibility for the woeful pain of the other even as the person is passing, C. S. Lewis (1976: 62) perspicuously compares his pain with that of the deceased (in this instance his own dear wife) while she struggled through her illness, being stricken down by cancer. ‘It comes in waves . . . and it goes in waves.’ Lewis goes on to describe an experience he later had, as he puts it, inside his mind, and one of immense intensity, but absent of any intentionality or motivation or trigger for action. He valued it not for the probabilistic evidence or any quantification of the lessening pain it might provide, but for its intellectual quality and unemotional character; he notes:

Just the impression of her mind momentarily facing my own. Mind, not ‘soul’ as we tend to think of soul . . . just intelligence and attention . . . Certainly the reverse of what is called ‘soulful’.’ Discounting the presence of any voice, message, re-union . . . rather ‘un-love’: ‘I had never in any mood imagined the dead as being so –well, so business-like. Yet there was an extreme and cheerful intimacy. An intimacy that had not passed through the sense or the emotions at all’ (Lewis 1976: 62).

The chilling idea that emotion could be absent had repelled him; but now he is at peace with it—with the ghost of his own mind as the other mind—his will is back, he is a rational man again. So it might seem.

A harrowing anecdote from my own experience in the last mystifying moments brings out Lewis’s reflection here rather poignantly, namely that emotions could be at abeyance momentarily, and one is overpowered by the sense of the sheer intellect of the receding other that does not stop being the strong presence it always has been, as well as continuing the intimacy. When my philosopher colleagues arrived at the hospital to find me tearless and in a frantic state by the bed where my just deceased beloved lay, a calmness and peaceful demeanor shrouded her otherwise long fatal battle with a cancer (of the fiercest endometrial ovarian variety). I was—as described to me later—unselfconsciously livid, like Nietzsche’s madman (who came down from the mountains with a lit lantern in broad daylight, looking for God upon being given the unexpected news ‘God is Dead!’) or as if suffering from stage fright, but nonetheless loquacious for that:

‘We had been talking since this morning, and just moments ago before I left the room we made plans to go abroad again . . . to India actually, where our to-be-adopted child [from an orphanage in Bangalore] awaited ‘the picking’ and bringing back home.  Howcould [the] mind and language simply vanish: just like that? That’s bizarre! . . .’

(Someone dares to mention on an incoming phone-call:) ‘Regarding her matti (funeral) . . .sorry, but we cannot come for it.’ ‘Whose funeral, baba? Who has died? (Turning toward the nurses:) ‘What do you mean, she has passed, passed to where?’ The nurses seemed terribly anxious to whisper into my ears ‘She’s gone; she just passed as you walked out the door . . . there is no pulse . . . look closer, the eyes are not responding’. ‘Hummmm, bloody hell, what has pulse to do with consciousness? . . . look here, her eyes are focused on me and we are talking as we have been all morning . . .’

The somber voice of one of my colleagues standing across chipped in: ‘Young man, you are asking metaphysical questions’.

‘Goddamn-it, what  else  should  I  be  asking  .  .  .  doing?  Singing  “Old Aquinas”?’

‘You should be crying’, another sermonized ever gently.

‘Crying? I have not known tears in all my life!’

‘You will . . . and you will see her.’

‘Good grief, I see her, there she is, here!’

My interlocutor could be said to be anticipating the surge of memories and paradoxical desires verging on an occult aspect, ‘as if those memories and details might be used to “conjure up” the lost one, as in a séance or an invocation’ (Solomon, 2004: 85). In a dream, I hear, ‘It is natural (for one) in the physical state to mourn’, echoing Krishna's sermon to Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gītā? (2.11): ‘but grief (śocya, grieving, lamentation) is for oneself not for the departed . . . have resilience; you have work yet on earth's platform . . . attending to tasks and bodily health, with diligence and self-love . . .’

As if prophetically, some weeks later in a dream or two I am reflecting,

‘You mean I should be loving myself; a self that is hanging on in threadbare smithereens . . . a self negated?’

(Still in the twilight state I hear) Tring-tring tring—the cell phone goes off:

‘Honey, remember to bring me organic pasta from the supermarket, the one I like . . .’

‘Okay, I will . . . but hang on, aren’t you supposed not to be . . . well  . . . alive, no?’

Another night, like the owl of Minerva, the dream-voice whispers Hermes' message to me:

 ‘Let us get up and leave the hospital beds now.’’

‘But what will people think, you’re supposed to be dead?’’

 ‘Who cares what people say . . . I am here with you, am I not? Here take my hand—can’t you feel the warmth?’’

A Buddhist monk and Indian sadhu may well identify with this sentiment, or vedana, which I go on to briefly discuss. But as I argue shortly, drawing on Solomon, grief is not all about sentimentality either. It is more a moral episteme entangled with a deeper emotional response than might be thought. It may even be more, as one moves to consider variations to this theme cross-culturally and in psychoanalytic wisdom.

The Sanskrit terms śocya [pitiable] or duhkha (Pali dukka) [suffering] are not specific enough to cover the deep sense of loss, (kampāva) and pain of mind (sanvegaya), and sorrow (kalakirima) —from kala [time] and kriya [completed action; ‘termination of time’, that is death](Obeyesekere, 1985: 144).   Here folk psychology proceeds through legends or parables, a famous one of which is that of the mustard seed, which goes like this: Kisā Gotamī’s first and only child died in infancy. Distraught with pain and grief, she went from place to place seeking some medicine to resurrect her child. She eventually came to the Buddha and asked the sage whether he could revive the dead child. The Buddha said that he could if only she would bring a mustard seed from a house in which death had not occurred. Elated, Kisā Gotamī’s went from one house to another seeking the impossible mustard seed. She soon came to the realization that her own personal grief is simply a part of a larger universal problem of suffering . . . in this recognition lay her redemption.

In Indian traditions (Jain, Hindu, and Buddhist) the stark reminder that a deceased person is to be sent onwards to her own journey and that she may be reborn in another body—even possibly in the same-household—is intended at the same time to help one to cathartically confront one’s grief and be consoled that all is not lost and that one could, perhaps should in due course, be ready to move on—with life’s sojourn here and its spiritual trajectories being preparation for the eventuality of one’s own demise as well (Gielen, 1997: 52–71).

In the Jewish tradition the principal mourners withdraw indoors from public life for a set number of days, a sharing of the grief of the living, in  an observance known as Shivah. It is obligatory to formally mourn (not necessarily to grieve). There are prescribed rituals associated with  an  almost  ascetic existence; one refrains from domestic chores, as well as entertainment, driving, work,  and other mundane preoccupations. The recitation of the Mourner’s Kaddish, lighting of candles, and sharing of food brought by family members and other visitors occur as well (Heilman, 2001: 21; Alpert, 2010: 25-40).  

In some cultures, wailers are paid (indeed handsomely compensated like our professional therapists) not only to join the mourners in expressing their remorse and sorrow, but also to take part in other practices.  In the highland village of Kaluli in Papua New Guinea, an elaborate commemorative ritual involves dancing around a bonfire in the middle of the night, ending with the enraged survivors leaping up and stamping a burning torch on the shoulders of the hired dancers. The intensity and scope of the ritual performance permits the mourners or the survivors to let their repressed anger, rage against the gods and righteous indignation at the gratuitous loss to surface from the soul, in all its dark shades, and to be thereby ‘cleansed, cleared and purified’ (Lutz, 1985).

And there is anger . . . why did you die on me? Couldn’t you have lived on, like everyone else we know? Is that you David? The cats are fine . . . What is it like being dead? (Stephanie Lewis on David Lewis—conversation in Princeton)

Renato Rosaldo the anthropologist, describes his experience at the site of the fatal accident overlooking the body of his lifeless wife, Michelle Rosaldo, at the bottom of a 65-foot sheer precipice: ‘I felt like in a nightmare, the whole world around me expanding and contracting, visually and viscerally heaving.’  He found himself embattled by ‘rage, born of grief’; and he began to understand the force of anger that is possible in bereavement (2004: 167-8).

Months later, someone whispers . . . ‘You getting over the sorrow ok? Seeing a counselor, getting professional help?’ ‘You must stop worrying “Why she die?” You[r] ki’ney-lever no’ functioning well . . . brain over-working all [the] time. Yu’needa som’acupun’ure.’ ‘Not your fault.’ ‘Heal yourself.’ ‘She’be right, mate.’ It seemed almost obligatory, a grid-like pattern to follow, set stages one supposedly goes through:

‘You must be on stage three now . . . displaced anger, irritability.

Open to a few possible goals, testosterone count coming up . . . you must be strong and resilient, my friend, life must go on; you've got responsibilities . . .’

‘I’m rather finding it more helpful splitting my time between the streets of the East Village (in New York)—“going mad in anonymity,” and mostly solitary in my retreat by beachside Venus Bay (outside Melbourne), as also sequestered stoically in our village home, research enclaves, ashram retreats and Ayurveda clinics by the holy rivers and towns up and down the Indian subcontinent (after the last rites with the ashes got completed).  Sacrifice sacrificing itself to sacrifice.’

This latter “escape” route is somewhat reminiscent of the ‘twice-phoren’ sojourn of the uncontrollably cantankerous Indian character in Salman Rushdie’s moving novel, Fury (2001). One Professor Malik Solanka is the ingenious inventor of masked “dolls” that debate philosophical imponderables and scientific verities and engage in fiendish feuds on multi-mediated web-channels. One fine day, with his immense dividend earnings intact, he stealthily flees his stable suburban home, leaving behind his loving wife and a young son, and a cozy job in Cambridge University.  The philosopher, of great esteem to the popular audience in the U.K., decides to “black-out” in New York, “the seductive World-City” of expanding and contracting māyā, that he much loves and resonates with at some deep level, but is disdainful of its horrendous pretensions —devoured gullibly by upper-Manhattan’s mechanized, rudderless selves—and its scary politics laced with theo-babbling fundamentalism.  He is burdened by a double-dose of wrath and indignation in the altered states of America. ‘Those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad’ (184). The rupture he sought from his now all but buried pasts—erstwhile in Bombay, followed by in the U.K.—drove him toward a schizoid frame of mind, and he struggles to unearth the mysterious forebodings within his soul. Hoping to overcome his faults and foibles and to retreat from his darker, counterfeit self, the self of his dangerous fury, through renunciation, through ‘giving up’, he falls into new and more grievous denizens of fury and other demons within.

Or as Rusdhie’s narrator exquisitely captures in non-prosaic psychoanalytic flourish the sinews of the catastrophic perturbations gyrating within,

Malik Solanka who had latterly become conscious of the inexplicable within himself, had been firmly of the prosaic party, the party of reason and science in its original and broadest meaning: scientia, knowledge. Yet even in these microscopically observed and interminably explicated days, what was bubbling inside him defied all explanations. There is that within us, he was being forced to concede, which is capricious and for which the language of explanation is inappropriate. We are made of shadow as well as light, of heat as well as dust. Naturalism, the philosophy of the visible, cannot capture us, for we exceed. We fear this in ourselves, our boundary-breaking, rule-disproving, shape-shifting, transgressive, trespassing shadow-self, the true ghost in our machine. Not in the afterlife, or in any improbably immortal sphere, but here on earth the spirit escapes the chain of what we know ourselves to be. It may rise in wrath, inflamed by its captivity, and lay reason’s world to waste (Ibid 128-9).

We are a sign that is not read

We feel no pain, we almost have

Lost our tongue in foreign lands.

(Friedrich Hölderlin, in Heidegger, 1977b: 359)

Fast-forward to a nimble apartment on Rue B in the East Village (when not on the LIRR to Stony Brook): I left behind Melbourne, hounded, mystified, overwhelmed (or rather underwhelmed) and brought ‘to the knees’, that woefully lonesome wandering and wondering went on intermittently for some good four long years (in between teaching at local universities and wide reading). Whence also I reluctantly submitted to analysis and ‘healing’ therapies (thanks to recurrent advice).  Especially insightful were the regular weekly sessions on the couch, as it were, with an astutely gifted psychiatrically-trained Buddhist psychotherapist on the upper East-side (Manhattan). He had me work through, among various modalities besides ‘talk’ therapy, Atīśa’s ‘Seven-Point Mind Training’ and Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra, interspersed with yoga, long hours of meditation, visualization and introspective contemplations. This would be followed by peregrinations, mostly in Central Park, so as to find some ‘direction home’ or for a little solace and company, taking long strolls along Riverside, by the Hudson, with my friend and erstwhile colleague Hazel Rowley (whose untimely gate gate pārasaṃgate in 2010 in New York simply exacerbated the residual grief. Hutchings, 2011:313), Needless to say, of course, much more came up in the sessions than just the numbing melancholia of bereavement, especially, to note a few such tropes, issues of childhood, overbearing parental expectations and their own domestic turmoils, sibling relations and rivalries  –  hence early-life traumas. Additionally there surfaced signs of mendacity, a plethora of follies, particularly combativeness, self-defensiveness, obsessive compulsive reactions, aggression, bashful hostility, judgmentalism, temperamental moodiness, obfuscations, being strung-out, forgetfulness, impermeability, alleged emotional abuse, and relationship difficulties. Not to mention certain inane suspiciousness, insecurities, lashing out with blaming accusations, criticisms and empty words (even against those who brought care, love and new relationship opportunities). There were also signs of various deficiencies—such as the capacity for compassion, empathy, vulnerability, gratitude, openness, humility, or being able to be present to the moment. Alongside were symptoms of a dysfunctionally asinine mind, embodiment dissonance, sexual disorientation, flirtations, other infelicities, mild addiction, and the failure to come to grips with my own oblivion to the vanishing present — a veritable drama of absurdities, hypocrisies and contradictions­. Every act and gesture of surrounding persons seemed to become calculated occasions for antics and foibles of the petty ego and the confrontational, mystifying intellect, confounded by confusion and baneful unmindfulness, overseas jaunts and long absences in elusive pursuits, especially during the drawn-out process of the other’s illness, discomfiture or vulnerabilities. Nothing was any longer what it appeared to be; and the hitherto buried psychic traces (samskāras, or kleśas [hindrances], those of the sedimented crusts of karma itself) would spill over or become enmeshed in the embodied (or more aptly, disembodied) state one is blindly  walking around in, or insufferably clinging onto meanwhile and living through day-to-day regularity (rather irregularity).

Why was it necessary in attempting to deal with the present grief to delve so deeply into the inexplicable psyche and early childhood issues? Because, as I came to understand later in dialogue with another psychotherapist: ‘Oftentimes when a person suffers a major loss in adulthood, they are unexpectedly confronted with unresolved earlier grief and losses from their childhood.  The extent to which they were able, or unable, to fully grieve and process those earlier losses impacts their ability to fully meet, experience, and process the present grief.  It is not unusual, therefore, for latent feelings, unresolved emotional traumas, and maladaptive emotional responses and behaviors to surface during periods of extreme loss and grief’ (Tinara M. Benson, personal communication). 

The Work of Mourning and Grieving

Grief shows in the face.

—Wittgenstein

I should now like to offer some theoretical reflections.[1] Following the painful or unacceptable loss of a loved and/or esteemed one, both grief and mourning are undergone. While grief is the more immediate response, an episodic act or experience, mourning, it is noted, is a state, whether a state of mind or state of collectivity.  The feeling of grief is experienced as  ‘acute emotionality that is insistently conscious; while mourning need not be conscious at all: hence its many vicissitudes, including those of hating the lost one’, being angry with them, or identifying with him or her intensely  (Casey, personal communication). There may be no conscious recognition of this state as mourning until a close friend or an analyst points this out; thus the variety of ritualistic enactments, almost underscoring the difficulty of mourning—or as Derrida would say, ‘the impossible mourning that nonetheless remains at work’ (2001: 95), and thus its tendency to be unconscious, which makes way for its public performance with others, or by their intervention in the mourning process.

Often however, the experience of grief—or even the absence of it—is viewed more in pathological terms than as one of the regular everyday emotions because it seems so out of the ordinary. Philosophers have not refrained from asking if ‘normal grief is a mental disorder?’ (Wilkinson 2000). Solomon nevertheless avers that this is a misguided question: ‘If grief were simply a negative reaction to a loss, or even a physical condition that (it has often been pointed out) fits the definition of a mental disorder, a medical illness, this would be incomprehensible.’ (2007: 75)  On the contrary, like anger, righteous indignation, and wrath, grief is ‘a strategy for engaging with the world,’ despite the denials and obsequious self-obsessions. A closer survey of the symptoms of grief reinforces Solomon’s view.  Thus, Eric Lindemann describes the more general symptomology of grief, thus:

The picture shown by persons in acute grief is remarkably uniform. Common to all is the following syndrome: sensations of somatic distress occurring in waves lasting from 20 minutes to an hour at a time, a feeling of tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breadth, need for sighting, and an intense subjective distress described as tension of mental pain. The patient soon learns that these waves of discomfort can be precipitated by visits, by mention of the deceased, and by receiving sympathy . . . Another strong preoccupation is with feelings of guilt. The bereaved searches the time before the death for evidence of failure to do right by the lost one. He accuses himself of negligence and exaggerates minor omissions. In addition, there is often a disconcerting loss of warmth in relationship to other people, a tendency to respond with irritation and anger, a wish not to be bothered by others at a time when friends and relatives make special effort to keep up friendly relationship. These feelings of hostility, surprising and quite inexplicable to the patients, disturbed them and were again often taken as signs of approaching insanity. Great efforts are made to handle them, and the result is often a formalized, stiff manner of social interaction (cited in Lamm 2000: 142–3).

Mourning, although somewhat formalized in modern cultures, nevertheless, seeks to extend the grief to a more shared burden of feeling in the larger community or collectivity; the role of narration in mourning ineluctably takes us into the intersubjective sphere as well. Hence there are both personal and collective locations, especially of mourning, if not of grief itself. And as Solomon points out, in cultures that are less individualistic and more socially connected, grief is a tightly communal and shared experience. ‘The logic of grief is entangled with the social structure of mourning, and the peculiarity of grief as I will describe it is that the mourning is minimal’ (2004: 75); although perhaps not so minimal, as the anthropological work of Catherine Lutz (1985) demonstrates.

Psychological anthropologists no longer consider emotions to be mere private, psychobiological phenomena; they are substantially mediated by culture. Jenkins and Karno have argued that

a culture provides its members with an available repertoire of affective and behavioral responses to the human condition, including illness. In addition, it offers models of how people should or might feel and act in response to the serious illness of a loved one. This may involve anger and hostility in one context or sadness and sympathy in another (1992: 9-21).

As much as one would like to emphasize the cultural (extra-personal) dimension, the collective repertoire and resources thereof, over the intrapsychic processes, the internal (inward-tending) dimension, that acutely personal festering of the ‘dark night’, should not be overlooked (as it often is in reductionist and behaviorist psychologies, that overwhelmingly focus on the external symptoms and environmental stimuli or triggers at the expense of the deeper intentionalities, emotional and mental challenges), and for which a balanced spiritual response may be more apposite. ‘Indeed’, notes Edward Casey, ‘we cannot keep them apart, especially in mourning, given that virtually every state of mourning is at least interpersonal—minimally, between the lost one and the survivor—but also ramifies into larger social and political groupings. An even more concrete transition is made when there are expressive gestures mediated between affect and the law, and the ‘empathic projective identification’ encircles the outlying world of indefinite pluralities right up to the level of the state or the nation (thus, ‘A National Day of  Mourning’, or a Week or a Month, ‘The World Mourns Today’).

The quick theoretical reflection here is that there are both cognitive and affective aspects to mourning, just about throughout the process; however, there are differential emphases on the two dimensions in any given or particular case, as the anecdotes also well demonstrate. Thus, when I mourn, I must believe certain minimal things: that someone or something has departed forever, that there is no possible or adequate replacement for this loss; that my life has become that much more empty, etc.’ ‘By the same token, however ’, as Casey draws out well the implication here, ‘I feel the loss within; I not only notice it, I react to it emotionally.’[2]   I will say a little more on the distinguishable but inseparable status of these two dimensions as the epicenters of mourning in the final section. Meanwhile, the appearance of the loaded negativity associated with this emotion may have escaped us. So the question this raises is important to pause for.

The Analytic of ‘Moral Emotion’ vis-à-vis ‘Grief Pathology’

I don’t mind dying - I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

                                                                                                             — Spike Milligan

We are too late for the gods,

And too early for Being.

— Martin Heidegger

Just what happens when one is brushed by death? Heidegger answers that there is a deep anxiety that one is poised to becoming “nothing”, the challenge of “nullity” of any and all being, hence being-ness, as one is “thrown-toward-death”, which is always a possibility; so too for the other who now fully bears witness to this truth (1977a: 108). There is a practical affirmation of the finitude of one’s being, of the inauthenticity of existence, that the illusion of immortality has been totally shattered: what other illusion (read Hindu māyā) remains? The metaphysical fear of death that one experiences for the other is also at the same time, and perhaps as for Solomon, the real challenge here (1998:17). It is a reminder of one’s own, albeit temporarily submerged, fear of dying, and not of the suffering part of it. The first-person fears are inextricably mixed up with the loss felt in the dying of the second-person, whose presumed fears and suffering at the  hands of indiscriminate agent of death now become my burden also.

Hauntingly, with the onset of death of another, there is a reminder, impossibly, of one’s own death, as if remembering a future memory—as when a ‘wake’ for my friend with a terminal prognosis Murray of Venus Bay, is held where each of his 200 friends and family members recalls the good times they have had with him over the decades and what each would miss when Murray finally succumbs to the claws of death. Murray even organized his own funeral with the help of his dear friend, Effie, and narrated in his ‘swan song’ the choice of the coffin, the location of the burial site, the rites he prefers, the celebrant he has prepared for the sacred occasion, and what brand of beer would be distributed at the reception. (It was not unlike the dream Gabriel Garcia Márquez narrates of organizing his own funeral, 1993.) This seemed like a sanguine gesture and an humane acceptance of the inevitable; the difficult and painful thought of the passing of someone so close as Murray is to the village folks (and indeed to me)  was made part of everyday reality, though ttheir  is still very much with them (although one of their number, Brian, passed on prematurely in the interim.)

Still, why is it that grief is so often looked upon as a ‘negative’ and undesirable emotion—even as one of the ‘basic’ emotions (along with sadness)?  Why is it that the color black, darkness, and two-dimensional shades of colorless and timeless surrounds are so overwhelmingly associated with mourning and the funerary rites? The Mahābhārata’s list of negative emotions includes grief, alongside anger and sorrow (Bilimoria 2003). But why is grief looked upon as suffering in the way that sorrow is? Most approaches in folk psychology are all too readily disposed to deal with grief by healing one speedily of the malaise, ‘the shocking blow’, the physical pain and mental burden. Often many Westerners who help the bereaved, as Rosenblatt observes, hold to some notion or other of  ‘grief pathology’—for example, grief that is never expressed; that goes on too intensely for too long; that is delayed; that involves delusions, that involves threats to others, that involves self-injury (Rosenblatt 1997:41). Grief pathologies, like grief, may suggest a human universal, but what is forgotten is that symptoms of grief vary from culture to culture. Thus, Rosenblatt cites three instances that point to the differences: a mother in Cairo suffering from a seven-year depression over the loss of her child is really not perceived in her culture to be behaving pathologically.

A bereaved Balinese who seemingly laughs off a death is also behaving appropriately by the standards of her culture; in another society, a person who is possessed by spirits of the dead may be in line with what is entirely understandable and quite common in bereavement in her own society (Rosenblatt 1997:41).

Yet philosophers have waxed ambivalent on grief’s nature and especially its relation to other emotions and affects, and to morality, and indeed to the cooler rationality or primacy of intellectualization (rephrasing Stocker 2003: 144). Thus, Robert Solomon, in a paper read in Melbourne, also questions why this paradigm case of emotion is often listed (though typically as sadness) as one of the “basic” emotions and a “negative” and (thus) undesirable one? Instead, he wishes to argue that ‘Grief is a moral emotion . . . It is for this reason that grief is not only expected, as the appropriate reaction to the loss of a loved one, but in a strong sense obligatory, and much more.’

But grief is not merely “normal” or “natural,” for it would pass the test for a “duty” in the Kantian scheme of things. Some feelings are obligatory, and this is because they are deeply embedded into the fabric of our moral lives (Solomon 2004: 75-78).