The Daily: 8 August 2023

Last week, someone I love dearly left this world in body. So I am grieving. As it happens, this person was so central in my life that most of the people I know are grieving also. We are a community of loss right now. Not much is happening beyond that loss and its immediate effects. We are incapable of doing for the time being…

Our culture doesn’t know what to do with death, loss or grief. We have few rituals acknowledging these central facts of living. We suppress images and ideas that relate to and make clear these things. We treat them as aberrations, illnesses that can and must be cured. But all life is bound up with loss. Life is temporal change. Death comes to all things. And that is how it should be. It is not a condition to be overcome.

Nor is grief. Grief is the expression of love when love meets its inevitable end. It is the manifestation of spiritual severance. Grief is how we adjust to loss of love — the deeper the love, the deeper the grief. If we do not grieve, then we do not adjust, and we fall prey to all sorts of delusion and harm. Grief is our biophysical response to temporality, and it is just as necessary as death in maintaining healthy lives.

Grief is not, however, an innate response in practice. It is learned, just as love is learned. It is also learned in the body that experiences it, so it varies. Obviously. My manner of adjusting to loss is to mindfully note every thought and emotion that flows through my head and to write down a good deal of it. I tend to spend more time doing small things that engage my body but leave my mind free to churn. I also tend to withdraw from community when I am grieving. I am like a cow mourning her calf, wandering off to the hills in order to be fully alive to this newfound alone-ness.

These are not universal reactions to loss. This is just how I learned to be. My Irish ancestors would think I am strange. For them grief was expressed in a drawing together, howling the loss to the world, and vigorously celebrating the life that used to exist and all that continues after that loss. I don’t think I could participate in wake games. I’m just not made that way. But that is a highly effective method of grieving for many people.

What is not effective is ignoring loss and getting on with life without taking time to adjust to this new condition, and that is how our culture approaches grief. We are perhaps allowed a day to demonstrate our sadness, usually with some degree of ostentation, a day to eulogize and then bury the loss out of sight and out of mind. We are not encouraged to take time in our grieving. We are taught to hide it and suppress it as soon as the loss is physically tidied away. We are urged to get back into normal life quickly, as if that busyness will mute and eventually kill the pain. As if there is a normal to get back to when there is this loss in the center of a life.

This loss in my center was not unexpected. Truthfully, this death was perhaps prolonged into the realm of unnecessary suffering. This too is how our culture approaches death. We believe that we ought to do everything we can to hold onto this bodily existence. In the absence of consent from the dying, others will always make the decision to keep the body alive — even when that life is a husk that will not recover former vitality. We spend much time and resources keeping dying bodies alive, and yet they die all the same. They must die or there is no continuance of life. They must die to relieve their pain.

Similarly, we prop up dying ideas and emotions. We go to counseling even when it is apparent that there is no love to bind a relationship. We hold on to anger and betrayal — and even love itself — long after those emotions serve any purpose in our lives. We loathe change and will do all in our power to prolong the existence of dying things — such as our economic and political systems — even when those things are causing rampant harm… in addition to causing grief responses that we must repress.

We need to acknowledge mortality in all things. There is no permanence in this universe. All is flow and change and cycling. It is, in fact, random, caused by relationship within temporal states. But we make sense, we bestow order and narrative upon the universe, through expressing relationship, both love and grief at loss. This expression is itself bodily and temporal and must be lived if we are to resolve our lives within a matrix of constant change.

We must grieve. And we must grieve with our whole being.

There is a need to break from daily life in order to grieve, to adjust to the new order of life that does not contain that loss, to heal the rupture caused by that loss. Some may do this communally, with loud tears and vigorous mourning. Some may withdraw into memory and emotion and silence. There may be stages of adjustment, where one day of keening with your family gives way to a day of contemplative solitude. All the expressions of grief are valid. The only thing we should not do is suppress the pain and skip the process.

We should not go on with life as we knew it because there is no life as we knew it. There is no recapturing that time before loss, and we suffer when we try to ignore this central fact. We need this time away from routine in order to learn the new routine. We need a time of rest and different focus in order to recover from the loss. This is as true of coping with illness and physical harm as it is with the loss of a loved one. Recovery time is not something that should be rushed so that we can get back to the grind. The grind will never allow for healing, and what is left in that rush is permanent damage.

I believe that we live in a time of general grieving. There is so much loss in every life right now that we can’t make sense of our lives if we just carry on and ignore that loss. We are the dead husks that are merely existing in a state of prolonged suffering, and most of what we do in what passes as normal routine is actually causing the ruptured relationships that must be grieved to be understood. We need to take time away from what we call normal. We need to grieve and we need to recover and we need to acknowledge that there is no returning to the state before loss. We need this as living beings. We also need this as cultures. We need to break with normal and let it die. We need to mourn the losses that have come to us through this normal. And we need to create a new normal that does not overburden each of us with loss.

This process of grieving, of stepping away from the normal things we do, has great potential for healing not just our own selves, but also all the things that are harmed by our norms. If we all stop and take the necessary time for mindful and embodied healing, then what is left of normal will be left un-done. It will soon fall apart and melt into air. There will be nothing of it to return to even if we wanted that. Which, I suspect, would not be true for most humans, and it would certainly not be desirable for all beings in the more-than-human world.

Since I am a rather highly embodied and practical being, my grieving process tends to revolve around things that can be done to feel better. This is not to say that the loss is any less felt, any less central, but that this time out of normal time tends to breed thoughts for healing pain of all sorts, not just the immediate loss.

This morning I woke up wondering if there were better ways to deal with the inheritance after loss. This is the one aspect of death we focus upon intently, much more so than the death itself. What to do with the material and symbolic possessions of a given body is really all we do address in death. And our methods of dealing with this transfer of stuff and nonsense are extremely harmful. It is, in fact, one of the defining and sustaining features of our destructive culture.

What if we were to stop inheritance as we know it? What if the only things that get passed on to an heir are things of material use, or even more stringently, things that will be physically used by that heir? What if accumulated wealth is not transferred from one body to another, but rather all wealth reverts to communal use upon death?

I’m not the first to consider these ideas. Actually, I think this is the common way of handling wealth accumulation and transference in human cultures as a whole. I also think that cultures that approach wealth in this fashion tend to last rather longer than ours has, though they are easily destroyed by contact with our culture — because we take their communal wealth and make it our own, our owned. There is, in any case, much less drive to accumulate. There is almost no motivation for stockpiling symbolic value like money. There is also much less opportunity for any given small group to dominate a community over a long period of time. Power cannot become entrenched in few hands when all hands have equal access to the needs of life.

I thought on a scheme that could deflate this problem without destroying the resources that have gone into its making. When someone dies, all monetary and unused material wealth goes to a community pool that is administered by the whole community. Perhaps it would be normal for most wealth to stay within the community that generated it — where a person dies is where that person’s legacy is bestowed. But people might want to designate the transferal to another community. For example, if someone did not live long in the place of death, maybe a will could send money back to where they did most of their living, or maybe even merely where they wanted to live. Perhaps someone really would have loved living by the ocean and yet never got there in life. Maybe propping up a coastal community is something they would like to do. Or maybe, in this culture of distant relations, the wealth could go to where loved ones live. But the point is that this wealth goes to building up a community, not an individual or small group.

A will could similarly entail what it might build. Maybe a person has no desire to see their life rewards building up a militarized police force or a destructive industry. Wealth could be transferred positively — towards a particular goal like building soil or funding a library — or it could be laden with negative conditions — away from whatever it is they do not believe in. But most wealth would just go in a common pool, the bereavement fund, if you will. It would build and sustain the community as the community sees fit. It might also be a good idea to turn the monetary wealth in this pool into physical wealth in a rather short time. It isn’t doing any good in the bank. It needs to be invested in real life.

Property is a bit trickier. I would not support a system that kicks the grief-stricken out of their homes, nor that forces a family to rebuild every generation. This would probably be a waste of resources, and it would be terrible for any land use that requires continuity over more-than-human timescales — things such as growing soil or maintaining anything involving trees. However, this is really where we are now, in practice. When a head of household dies, it is rarely the case that the home or land is not sold for money that can be split among heirs. Prioritizing the use rather than the value might make for more coherence over time. It would certainly discourage trading land for money and all the trends that go with that.

But how to transfer property equitably has always been a dilemma. So maybe the requirement is that the use is maintained for at least a certain long period of time into the new life. If a house is a family home, then it continues being the home of that family for at least a decade or so. If land is used for farming, then the inheritance is the farming, not the land. If one or more of the heirs object to the use, then they relinquish the inheritance — because the inheritance is the use, not the property. If no heir wants to live in the home or do the farming, then this property passes to the communal bereavement pool with the same use restrictions. If nobody in the community wants to live in the home or farm the land — or whatever the use — then after a rather long period of time and debate, the property will be transformed into something the community wants.

(As a side benefit, this has the advantage of not incentivizing the production of so many heirs that they can’t share in the inheritance. It is a natural check on human population. It is actually a quite common method of population control in human cultures. These are not novel suggestions spewing out of my grief-stricken mind…)

In any case, I think we could do better with the legacies of our lost loves. Turning everything into money tends to devalue the life. Remembering a life by continuing it nurtures both the inheritance and the memory of the life that built it. A blacksmith remembers the person who passed on this livelihood every time she pumps the bellows. A baker celebrates his ancestors in every savory loaf. A granddaughter physically remembers her grandmother every time she sees or smells the flowers tended by those beloved, aged hands. A son honors his lost father whenever he carries on, caring for what his father loved.

I am unable to do much to carry on the life that I am grieving. That makes the pain all the greater. I am grasping at that lost relationship and coming up with air. So I am grieving more generically than is perhaps good for me. But it is good at revealing the flaws in our relationship with death and loss and grief. So maybe some good will come of this since there will be one more idea lying around to replace the ones that are harming us, as those ideas die… That is my hope anyway…

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©Elizabeth Anker 2023