Mourning in America

We have no idea how to do it.

Mourning cloak butterfly on the shore of Lake Harriet in Minneapolis. Photo by August Schwerdfeger via Wikimedia Commons.

As a child, I loved butterflies. I pored over books full of colorful butterfly photos, and I tried to find the same ones in our yard. In late summer, my friends and I would shake the trees in the park across the street and hundreds of monarchs would fly out.

I learned the names of many of the local butterflies, but I was stumped by one of the most beautiful ones, the mourning cloak. Not knowing what a mourning cloak was, at first I thought the name was “morning cloak,” which didn’t make sense either. That’s English for you.

I knew nothing then of mourning. And being the idealistic Flower Child I was, I preferred the more positive connotations of “morning.” As an adult, I’ve learned that our society prefers those, too.

Why can’t we acknowledge mourning?

I’m always happy when meetings are canceled — even though, as a consultant, that means one less billable hour — but when my usual Friday morning meeting was canceled last week, I was practically giddy. One more hour during which I didn’t have to interact with anyone!

If you know me, you know that although I’m an introvert, I’m what they call an extroverted introvert. I like to talk. That doesn’t mean I like meetings or Zoom; I don’t. But I crave a certain amount of human contact.

Since my father died a month ago, though, I’ve wanted much less human interaction. I’ve needed even more down time than I usually do. The first two weeks it was hard to do anything at all, but even now, I need more solitude and contemplation than usual (though to be fair, I’m more likely to fill my solitude with doom scrolling or bad TV than with contemplation).

Do I get that? No, I do not.

It’s no news flash that our society doesn’t allow for mourning. Time and space for mourning is just not built in the way it used to be.

Mourning used to come with specific expectations. Those could include prescribed periods that let you know how many months were appropriate to mourn based on your relationship to the person who’d died: a year or two for a spouse, half a year to a year for a parent, different amounts of time for children depending on their age at death. Mourning clothes, which in many times and places have been white rather than black, would signal to others that you were in that special state and maybe you should be left alone, or at least handled with care. You were allowed to retreat from society.

None of that is compatible with late-stage capitalism. We’re lucky to get a few days off work, and then we must resume our places as cogs in the machine. There’s no time or space to mourn, and no signal to others that we’re in a tender emotional state.

How we mourn

I’m not actually a fan of set mourning durations. Just as each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, each person mourns each death in their own way. That includes differences in the amount of retreat time we need.

But at least those prescribed mourning periods acknowledged that people don’t recover in a few days or weeks.

These days, there’s pressure to “get over it” and move on, no matter how you’re feeling.

My father was 93 and had been very unwell for years. He was dizzy all the time and losing weight, and his extreme blood pressure fluctuations caused him to faint on multiple occasions. He had an abdominal aortic aneurysm that we knew could burst at any time, which had qualified him to go on hospice care last summer. So although we weren’t expecting it at that particular moment, his death wasn’t a total surprise.

It also ended the suffering that he and everyone around him had been enduring for the past several years, as his lengthy decline accelerated. Of course we felt some relief about that, and that he died quickly and presumably painlessly, at home. In those past few years, we did a lot of grieving in advance. Father lived a good, long life, and he made it clear he was ready to go.

All of that lessens the blow. And yet, it’s still a blow. It’s still the death of a parent, and it’s still something to be honored and respected. But do we do that? No, we do not.

Not taking my own advice

Though my work slowed down for a couple of weeks after my father died, which coincided with the already-slow holiday season, I’m back at full speed now. I kind of need to be, since I only get paid for hours when I actually work. But it wouldn’t be much better if I had a regular job.

I could slow down on my Flower Child posts, and I came close to skipping this week. But I keep writing because I feel better when I do. It’s a much better option than doom scrolling or watching bad TV.

Even as I keep writing, though, I’m not fully here. In my normal state, I’d read at length about the way we mishandle — or avoid — death in our society. I’d write about how most of us rarely see death, how few people die at home anymore, how rare an experience it was for me to hold the hand of my dead father and wonder where he had gone — as people have been wondering for millennia.

I’d write about how much more perplexed I am than ever about what makes us humans, how much we are our bodies and yet aren’t our bodies, how odd it is that our bodies remain after we’re gone, what the heck that “we” is that leaves our bodies when we die.

I’d write about how I’m feeling more and more detached from my body as I get older, how I haven’t made any progress on that since I wrote about it nearly a year ago, how I’m not sure I ever will.

I’d write about being stumped when I try to capture the essence of my father in words — a man who was described by one of his doctors as having “old-world charm,” a man who was stoic and uncomplaining and kind, and who could also be distant and hypercritical and kind of mean, a man who became gentler late in life but who I never felt I could measure up to. I’d write about how in the midst of all that, a sweetness about him lingers in my mind and heart.

I’d write about how my grief for him is mixed up with my grief for our country, plunging this week into a scary oligarchy, and for our Earth, being ravaged by the pestilence known as humans.

I might even have to write several pieces on all this, as there’s so much to say. And someday, I probably will.

But for now, I can barely write at all. So this will have to suffice.