Who Cares?
‘Who cares?’
It’s a great American phrase. There’s a risk-taking, shouting-down-the-corridor-of-the-hospital kind of edge to it, as Norman Mailer wrote of Ernest Hemingway upon his death.
‘Who cares?’ can be tender, too, as in reassuring your partner who just got suckered out of a bundle of money in an online scam: ‘Who cares? Can you move your fingers and toes? You’re OK, we’re fine, that’s all that matters.’
‘Who cares?’ also implies its opposite. If it didn’t matter, you wouldn’t have to say so.
But who cares when it comes to grief? I’m thinking of three types of situations that could nurture a caring response at the social level.
The first. In The Life and Death of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs wrote about New York City neighborhoods in the 1960s where it was friendly, but not deep, relationships that held the neighborhood together. The guy who runs the deli your apartment sits above keeps a lookout for bullies when your child comes home from school and you’re going to be a few minutes late. A couple days later, you keep an eye out for a delivery you can accept for him when he closes the store to run an errand. It’s not tit for tat, though, and you don’t have to invite each other over for dinner to show your appreciation.
The second. Dori Laub, a child survivor of the Holocaust, was the psychiatrist for the homeless outreach team I ran in the 1990s. He was also a founder of the Fortunoff Archives for Holocaust Testimony at Yale. The structure and impact of the testimony process resembles that of a stone dropped in the middle of a pond. The stone, the witness, sends ripples out to the interviewer. The ripples move out to the tech crew and friends who have brought food or offered their house for the testimony. Finally the ripples reach the shore, where others hear the recorded testimony, and tell others still.
And the third. This one involves neighbors too, but its structure is more network-like. My wife, who becomes the emotional center of any neighborhood she lives in, gets a call, in Connecticut, from a neighbor in Durham, North Carolina, where we’re moving the next day to a house we’ve and lived in before only for visits. A tree has crashed into our next-door neighbor’s house. She’s at work, and the caller doesn’t have her phone number. My wife calls the neighbor at work. An hour later our daughter, who lives down the street from us in Durham, comes to the neighbor’s with a key to our house, in case she needs to spend the night.
The testimony approach is the most obviously relevant to grief and requires no comment from me. But picture yourself living in a neighborhood like the one Jane Jacobs describes. How does that contribute to caring for those who grieve? Well, to me it seems like a neighborhood where almost everyone who lives or works there will come to the funeral. Beyond that, you’ll confide in only a few close friends, but others won’t forget your loss, no, not so quickly as they might in a go-it-alone neighborhood.
And the social network example? Person-to-person communication is still a reliable means for gossip, but it’s also a means for marshalling aid and comfort for those who have come to grief.
These are modest examples of what might be ingredients of an ‘American Grief,’ a topic I’ll get to, but not too quickly, like the snail for the 18th Century Japanese poet, Basho:
Oh snail
climb Mt Fuji
but slowly, slowly
