(no subject)
Feb. 2nd, 2003 10:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kuangningOh we never know where life will take us;
I know it's just a ride on the wheel...
And we never know when death will shake us,
And we wonder how it will feel...
-- Goodbye, My Friend
by Karla Bonoff
In the midst of yesterday's loss, I noticed again something that I noticed first more than a year ago -- a divergence in the reactions people had to the news. Some were unaffected entirely, others shaken to the core. Among both groups, there is another marked division. One camp avers that mourning is the natural, the most proper action in this time. The other holds that these deaths mean no more than any other deaths, and should be treated similarly. I watched someone argue that unless we grieve equally for all, it is somehow a shameful thing, to grieve for any. After all, death comes every day, and not just to the gifted or the celebrity.
Why do we mourn the ones we mourn? What sets some apart in our minds, singles them out for special notice and attention? I don't have a definitive answer to that, nor do I have an inclusive one.
What I can say of myself, though, is that I need a focus for my grief. I need a human touch, a face, a personality quirk that makes someone real to me and brings the situation into my home and my heart and my space where I sit. I can weep for a planet, if I know that planet's curvatures, its rhythms, if I have tasted of it and have, perhaps, some secret spot upon it that I think of as my own. I can weep for humanity as a race, because I am human and I know, as we all know, of what things humanity is capable, and how far short of that we've fallen. I could have wept for yesterday's seven simply because they were humans also. I did not. I guess that makes me less than the ideal myself, and I can accept that judgment.
But it's not that these seven were celebrities. I had never seen their faces before yesterday, had seen their names in text twice. Until yesterday morning, they were part of the nameless, faceless entity of Other People. Bright, brave Other People exist, I know, and I'm glad of them, and proud of what they accomplish, but they're not very immediate to me. They're amorphous, nothing there to hold onto. So were the seven astronauts, until I came across David Brown and his "do we really have to come back?" He changed it, in my mind. He became the peg upon which I could hang my sadness and my fear and my pity and my hope, became the reason I was sad -- and brought the others with him.
I think that's the way the majority of us grieve. And I believe we're wired that way for a good reason. If we wept every time a child died, each time someone was murdered or starved or suicided, we would never see an end to grieving. There would never be closure, unless we went the other direction and grieved none of the losses at all. I have known a few people who grieved for no-one. None of them were pleasant or compassionate or sane. It's impossible to grieve everyone equally and stay sane. Some of them have to matter more than others, have to stand out in our minds and be the reasons we can grieve. Who should those people be, but the ones who have qualities we admire, who do the things we dream of, who accomplish the remarkable?
With as much tragedy as the media serves up to us every day, and as constantly surrounded as we are by the horrifying, the saddening, the gruesome, the unfair... is it surprising if we become too jaded to weep at all? If we can grieve at all, for anyone, no matter whom or why, well, I believe that's a step in the right direction. And I believe that anyone who attempts to dissuade another from grieving any loss, for any reason, is at best misguided. One of the things about us is that sometimes things come out of a clear blue sky that shake us deeply, that make us look around and take notice. Whenever something like that does, it's not something that's going to be made better or somehow alleviated if we're too ashamed of showing special favour and attention to let ourselves feel what we feel.
And that's what I believe.
I know it's just a ride on the wheel...
And we never know when death will shake us,
And we wonder how it will feel...
-- Goodbye, My Friend
by Karla Bonoff
In the midst of yesterday's loss, I noticed again something that I noticed first more than a year ago -- a divergence in the reactions people had to the news. Some were unaffected entirely, others shaken to the core. Among both groups, there is another marked division. One camp avers that mourning is the natural, the most proper action in this time. The other holds that these deaths mean no more than any other deaths, and should be treated similarly. I watched someone argue that unless we grieve equally for all, it is somehow a shameful thing, to grieve for any. After all, death comes every day, and not just to the gifted or the celebrity.
Why do we mourn the ones we mourn? What sets some apart in our minds, singles them out for special notice and attention? I don't have a definitive answer to that, nor do I have an inclusive one.
What I can say of myself, though, is that I need a focus for my grief. I need a human touch, a face, a personality quirk that makes someone real to me and brings the situation into my home and my heart and my space where I sit. I can weep for a planet, if I know that planet's curvatures, its rhythms, if I have tasted of it and have, perhaps, some secret spot upon it that I think of as my own. I can weep for humanity as a race, because I am human and I know, as we all know, of what things humanity is capable, and how far short of that we've fallen. I could have wept for yesterday's seven simply because they were humans also. I did not. I guess that makes me less than the ideal myself, and I can accept that judgment.
But it's not that these seven were celebrities. I had never seen their faces before yesterday, had seen their names in text twice. Until yesterday morning, they were part of the nameless, faceless entity of Other People. Bright, brave Other People exist, I know, and I'm glad of them, and proud of what they accomplish, but they're not very immediate to me. They're amorphous, nothing there to hold onto. So were the seven astronauts, until I came across David Brown and his "do we really have to come back?" He changed it, in my mind. He became the peg upon which I could hang my sadness and my fear and my pity and my hope, became the reason I was sad -- and brought the others with him.
I think that's the way the majority of us grieve. And I believe we're wired that way for a good reason. If we wept every time a child died, each time someone was murdered or starved or suicided, we would never see an end to grieving. There would never be closure, unless we went the other direction and grieved none of the losses at all. I have known a few people who grieved for no-one. None of them were pleasant or compassionate or sane. It's impossible to grieve everyone equally and stay sane. Some of them have to matter more than others, have to stand out in our minds and be the reasons we can grieve. Who should those people be, but the ones who have qualities we admire, who do the things we dream of, who accomplish the remarkable?
With as much tragedy as the media serves up to us every day, and as constantly surrounded as we are by the horrifying, the saddening, the gruesome, the unfair... is it surprising if we become too jaded to weep at all? If we can grieve at all, for anyone, no matter whom or why, well, I believe that's a step in the right direction. And I believe that anyone who attempts to dissuade another from grieving any loss, for any reason, is at best misguided. One of the things about us is that sometimes things come out of a clear blue sky that shake us deeply, that make us look around and take notice. Whenever something like that does, it's not something that's going to be made better or somehow alleviated if we're too ashamed of showing special favour and attention to let ourselves feel what we feel.
And that's what I believe.
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no subject
Date: 2003-02-02 08:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-02-02 09:02 am (UTC)I'd been feeling...really guilty, yesterday, because at first Columbia didn't really impact me. It wasn't until I found your entry, and read about what David had asked, that the seven astronauts on board really clicked into the grieving category for me. And so many of my friends broke apart immediately (in a fashion remarkably similar to how Columbia dealt with atmosphere), that I was feeling like there was something wrong with me.
You're very articulate.
no subject
Date: 2003-02-02 03:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-02-02 09:44 am (UTC)Because whilst the media feeds us the tragedy in 5-minute soundbites they simultaneously tell us that that is what we should be doing.
no subject
Date: 2003-02-02 12:11 pm (UTC)Case in point. Last year, or maybe the year before, there was a really nasty accident in Israel. During a wedding reception, the floor gave way and quite a few people died. The news made it all the way to Australia, and for several nights in a row, we were told how much of a tragedy it was, and how sorry we must feel for these people.
Why were these people singled out? Well, it was a wedding reception. This meant somebody had a video camera. This meant that the TV news had footage of people falling through the floor. This made it worth running repeatedly until the public lost interest.
Why do we need to mourn? Why do we feel vicarious loss? How many of us could name any of these astronauts, who we are now raising as paragons of the human spirit, before Saturday? Sure, we liked them as a concept, and were quite happy they were sitting there in the background of our psyches doing whatever the hell it is that astronauts do up there, but we only ever took interest in them as people when they burnt up on re-entry.
Which is, perhaps, a little too late to take a personal interest in somebody.
no subject
Date: 2003-02-02 02:30 pm (UTC)It is possible to have some kind of personal attachment to something like this without being propaganda's tool or something.
Then again, maybe I'm not cynical enough to fit in to society.
no subject
Date: 2003-02-02 03:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-02-02 10:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-02-02 12:04 pm (UTC)Your words, as always, are remarkable. I'm only sorry that you were seemingly compelled by what I wrote as my intent was to vent a friend's passing and not to compel anyone to defend
no subject
Date: 2003-02-02 03:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-02-02 01:24 pm (UTC)