Grief

In the modern world, ‘grief’ is the term most often used to refer to our emotional response to the death of a loved one. It is a painful emotion which we almost all experience several times in our lives.

Since 2013, a controversy has been raging among psychiatrists and psychologists about the limits of ‘socially appropriate’ grief. Previous guidelines had established two months as a healthy and appropriate length of time to experience intense mourning. Now medical professionals are advised to offer therapies and treatments after just two weeks of mourning.

Listen to a short podcast about grief

The contemporary debate about what kind of responses to death are natural or healthy throws a spotlight on an older conundrum: what do we mean by ‘normal’ grief? What types of emotion can possibly be reasonable in the face of an experience as unique and catastrophic as a loved one’s death? Grief is frequently compared to a sort of temporary insanity, a moment when our rational and ‘human’ faculties are overcome by uncontrollable animal pain. Yet it is also one of the most ritualised and culturally specific experiences in cultural life. Three hundred years ago, the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico identified mourning and burial rites as one of the three pillars of civilisation (along with marriage and religion).

Nowadays it is commonplace to think of grief as a ‘process’ involving several distinct stages: denial, anger, bargaining depression, acceptance. But this grief ‘process’ was not even initially supposed to apply to bereavement: the famous ‘five stages’ model comes from a 1969 study of people coming to terms with their own diagnosis of terminal illness. Yet while most psychologists and psychiatrists dismiss the idea that grief follows this linear progression of emotions, it is still the way in which many people order and interpret the emotional turmoil that follows a difficult loss.

Niccolo dell’Arca’s late fifteenth-century representation of the mourning Marys, in the church of Santa Maria in Bologna. (Jenny Audring/Flickr)

The contemporary debate about what kind of responses to death are natural or healthy throws a spotlight on an older conundrum: what do we mean by ‘normal’ grief? What types of emotion can possibly be reasonable in the face of an experience as unique and catastrophic as a loved one’s death? Grief is frequently compared to a sort of temporary insanity, a moment when our rational and ‘human’ faculties are overcome by uncontrollable animal pain. Yet it is also one of the most ritualised and culturally specific experiences in cultural life. Three hundred years ago, the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico identified mourning and burial rites as one of the three pillars of civilisation (along with marriage and religion).

Grievers in the past might have been perplexed at the notion that ‘anger’ was a necessary component of grief. In the nineteenth century, when Christianity heavily shaped interpretations and experiences of mourning, to be angry at death would have been not only unusual but even sinful: to rage at death was to rage at God. Even less pious writers, when describing deaths in their novels, tended to value self-restraint and view any outburst of grief as a sign of mental weakness.

Questions about the boundaries of normal and appropriate grief have a long history. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, those deemed insane were sometimes admitted to asylums with a diagnosis of pathological mourning. The Scottish psychiatrist Thomas Clouston described one such case:

She wrings her hands; sways backwards and forwards, contorting her body; rushes about from place to place, and cannot settle for a minute… Though the misery is very real to her, yet the effect is often ludicrous, as if you were looking at the overdone misery of an Irish wake on the stage.

Yet at the same time as bereft women were being institutionalised for the extravagance of their sorrow, others went to enormous expenses to put on displays of deep mourning. Accounts from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries describe young boys with a naturally doleful look were draped in black robes and hired out as ‘mutes’ to stand beside the doors of death-stricken houses, wearing black robes.

Families spent large fractions of their fortune on funerals far more luxuriant than anything the deceased had experienced in life. In the novelist George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss, published in 1860, a comparatively wealthy member of the village community weeps demonstratively to show that she is capable of refined emotions: grief carries a certain respectability as well as a stigma.

Today, psychologists and anthropologists increasingly argue that grief has many faces and forms – perhaps as many as there are grievers: there is no one path that we take on the emotional journey that death begins. History supports this idea: death may be as close as we can get to a universal human experience, but emotional reactions to it are constantly shifting. Grief is always being redefined, often in terms of other emotions. Tracing these changes can tell us much about a culture’s changing relationship to death – and by extension to life.

A nineteenth-century funeral ‘mute’ by Robert Buss. (Museum of London)

Further reading

Books

  • Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes Towards Death
  • Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family
  • Thomas Lacqueur, Bearing the Dead: A Brief History of Mortal Remains
  • Brandy Schillace, Death’s Summer Coat
  • Julie-Marie Strange, Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870-1914
  • Geoffrey Gorer, Death, Grief and Mourning in Contemporary Britain

Other online sources

The Emotions Lab