Is Culture Independent to Grief?

Grief will find and affect us all one way or another.  For me, the inevitability of that statement was disturbingly profound. 

Researching grief and coping mechanisms felt like wading through a pool of murky water. I first started out looking for blogs like mine that talked about a specific loss. Most of the blogs I found I couldn’t relate to because a lot of them were about spouses or people who lost their parents later in life.

I then moved on to watching Ted Talks to see what some of their speakers were saying about grief. I even searched the self-help section of Barnes and Noble for information. 

What I did find got me meditating on an assumption that grief can be very reliant on culture. Thus begging the question: If culture really is a independent factor, how are we supposed to grieve?

When I started researching grief I found there were some cultures out there that, in a way, celebrated the end of life—one with jazz music.

An article on the Ted Talk by Kelli Swazey, a cultural anthropologist, titled “Life that doesn’t end with death” noted that in New Orleans where the culture is a mix between West-African, French and African-American, they have funerals that find a balance between sorrow and joy.

A marching band begins by playing “sorrowful dirges” which leads the mourners in New Orleans in a procession. After the body is buried, the musicians shift to a more upbeat note which is often a precursor for "cathartic dancing" that is done "to commemorate the life of the deceased."

We didn't dance at my father's memorial. Would he have wanted us to? Was how we honored him something that was predestined in our minds of how his service was supposed to be?

I found myself reading books such as "The Book of Calamities" by Peter Trachtenberg or "Grief Is the Thing with Feathers" by Max Porter. There are plenty of books out there that deal with grief and loss. Sometimes these books will delve into religion, philosophy, psychology or are just memoirs.

In the short novel "Grief Is the Thing with Feathers," Porter personifies grief as a character that many might not think to use- the crow from "Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow" by poet Ted Hughes. 

The father in the novel, who is a Hughes scholar, loses his wife and has two small boys to take care of. The crow "moves in" with the family and says he will stay as long as he is needed. The following quote is an excerpt of one part of the novel's imagery that really stuck with me. 

"I opened my eyes and it was still dark and everything was crackling, rustling. Feathers. There was a rich smell of decay, a sweet furry stink of just-beyond-edible food, and moss, and death, and yeast. Feathers between my fingers, in my eyes, in my mouth, beneath me a feathery hammock lifting me up a foot above the tiled floor."

This is at the very beginning of the book when the crow moves in with the family. It is told from the father's perspective at this point (it goes interchangeably between the boys, dad, and crow). 

After this, the crow comes unexpectedly into the house and makes the father say hello to him multiple times. The crow asks the dad to say hello "properly" when he senses his reluctance.

This passage highlighted for me what it was like the first couple of weeks after Howard's death. 

Everything felt odd, as if it was out of place. It felt foreign and like all of us were living in another dimension apart from everyone else around us. The world seemed gray in a sense. Grief had moved in with us. It was unwelcome, just like the crow was.

I think that is what Porter is trying to say here. Everything is shadowed, covered, stained, dirtied by grief. Happiness is absent in moments like those. But again, after everything I have researched, is it because of our culture?

I found solace in another Ted Talk I watched; partially because the speaker had lost her parents in a tragic way and had studied journalism.

This Ted Talk was a personal story by Marieke Poelmann, an author and freelance journalist. At 22, Poelmann lost both of her parents in a plane crash in Tripoli in 2010.

She spoke how, at first, she didn't know what to do with herself. She felt that because they had died, she didn't have a life anymore either.

"I thought, 'if everything I used to know is broken, it doesn't matter anymore. I might as well do what I want.' It changed my focus. Why waste time on things that don't feel right?" Poelmann said.

Poelmann said it took her several years to understand that bad things do not have to define you. She also truly believes that life has a way of always coming through to the other side. She wrote her novel "Everything around them is still there," about her experience with grieving.

"After the crash people kept saying to me 'there are no words to describe what you are going through right now,'" Poelmann said. "But at a certain point I thought, 'What if those words are there? What if I start trying to write those words down?'"

Why do we assume that people cannot describe their grief? Why do we try and downplay peoples’ pain to justify our words? I don’t have any answers to this... but that is the rub about researching culture and grief.

American culture, as well as many other Western civilized countries, seems to suppress grief, loss, coping and death in general. The consensus seems to scream, '"Well, if we don't talk about it, it doesn't exist."

This is just false.

Anyone who has gone through grief will tell you otherwise.

In short, there are multitudes of ways that people honor their dead. Research them. Learn about different cultures. Not all of us have to have caskets and dress in black. After all, the last thing any mourner wants to be told is how to grieve.

Sources:
http://ideas.ted.com/11-fascinating-funeral-traditions-from-around-the-globe/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztnn8W4qE2o 
"Grief is the Thing With Feathers" by Max Porter (page 6)
http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/africa/05/12/libya.planecrash/