Toolkit

I was hunting for containers for the tools we brought from Connecticut, having inherited my father’s love of tools but not his mastery of them, whether for building big, such as a porch for the house my siblings and I grew up in, or making smaller objects such as fine wood carvings of birds and fish or lures made of hooks entwined with tiny copper fish and feathers to sway and sparkle in the water, inviting trout to come dance with them.

My father owned a wondrous tool box that sits now on a work table at the house of my youngest brother, the sole carver among four siblings. It’s made of hard gray steel with shallow drawers holding screwdrivers, drill bits, punches, and other out-of-the-way tools and objects. The faint but clear whir of tiny ball bearings that the drawers run along when you pull on their small handles, the smoothness of their ride on your hand, are a sensual pleasure. The toolbox is a testament to my father’s love for making things and his passion for the natural world that it called him back to in his basement shop, evenings after work. 

When I think of my father’s toolbox I often end up thinking of the sociologist Ann Swidler’s ‘toolkit.’ Swidler writes that people pull ideas from the toolkit of their society’s culture, not for shaping grand personal lifetime projects but for figuring out how to act in the world day by day. 

But what is the toolkit for grief? When my father died, friends at Covenant United Methodist Church in Rochester, New York spoke and sang of their grief and love for him. I think of that year, 1989 (the year the Berlin Wall fell), as a dividing line between traditional funerals in houses of worship that aimed to balance grief with what the deceased left behind for others, and increasingly secular ‘celebrations’ of the person’s life, sometimes in houses of worship but often in funeral homes. These relative newcomers deserve a place in the toolkit. 

There are support groups for people who grieve, often parents for a deceased child and often during the early months and years of harshest grief. They belong in the toolkit. Various ethnic cultures and religious groups have healthy traditions of grief. Modified for other groups, places, and times, they may have a place in the toolkit beyond their current bounds, while continuing to serve their current members. 

But I wonder if the toolkit for a society that struggles with grief needs more groups focused not solely on grief, but able to attend to it when it is present. Examples are support, and sometimes advocacy, groups for people with mental health conditions, substance misuse, homelessness, and/or previous incarcerations. In these groups, people support each other personally and collectively, with a complementary focus on their and others’ belonging in society and the right to benefit from its resources. Of such groups, the ones I know best are sponsored by faculty and staff at the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health. (Disclosure: I used to work there.) When people grieve, they are supported by their peers as they are supported in other aspects of their lives. 

There must be other examples on the horizon—tools and traditions, longstanding or newly being identified—that can support those who grieve and who, like everyone else, sometimes must grieve alone, but not only.

What do you think? About the idea, and what’s out there? 

Swidler, A. (1986). Culture in action: Symbols and strategies. American sociological review, 273-286.