American Grief
I want to explore grief in this blog. From what I see, we don’t do well as a society in supporting people who grieve, and we do worse the longer their grief goes on.
Years ago I watched a news segment about a plane crash in which more than 150 passengers and crew members died. The news anchor noted there would be a gathering on the beach for family members the next day to help them gain ‘closure.’ Mercifully, such use of this term has waned, and at least some parts of the media do a better job than this news anchor did. But an invisible hand still pushes at our back, letting us know it’s time to move on.
The biography of the grief matters. The death of a child elicits more sympathy than the death of a grandparent, for example. and there can be added elements. A mother’s grief over her son’s death at the hands of police is personal, and collective. But the death of a grandparent can be a harrowing loss for a person, too. Across all these areas, attention to others’ grief tends to wane before grief does for the grieving.
My schooling in grief comes mainly from the death of my son Jesse at age 19 from complications of a liver transplant. Thus grief for me is linked with critical illness, high-tech medicine, medical errors or mishaps, and doctor-patient and doctor-family relationships. But my experience has led me to reflect on the topic in other forms, and so I’ve named this blog American Grief: A Journal to leave room to explore them, too.
I’m an emeritus professor of psychiatry (a sociologist) at Yale and am best known for my studies of citizenship and mental health outreach to people who are homeless. I’ve also written in the areas of medical humanities and narrative medicine, including the silence around grief.
I hope this blog can be a conversation with others who experience grief or would like to support those who do. I expect to post a blog once a week and see how things go based on people’s interests.
Grief is homeless in America.
