Another fantastic post! I remain in awe of your ability to weave together personal anecdotes and philosophy articles in a convincing manner.
I think there is a lot to be said about how we quantify grief, especially for animals; for many people it seems perfectly reasonable to grieve a beloved family pet, but not to mourn the loss of a cicada on which you accidentally trod on your way to Jewel-Osco.
I don’t really know the answer here. I cry about spiders and roadkill. But I think it’s kind of a wonderful aspect of the human condition to extend empathy in this way to beings who, as you note, are so wonderfully different— if we find ourselves mourning those who, say, haven’t even died (something I know many people do: grieving the collateral damage of breakups, friends who have moved far away, childhood companions from which we’ve grown apart), then how can it be unnatural to mourn a jumping spider, when it is right there in front of us?
Anyway, I particularly enjoyed the Iphigenia mention in the footnotes; as the author of many a questionable poem about animal loss explored through the lens of Penelope and Odysseus, I think we can make some really interesting connections to contemporary living and, for lack of a better term, the weird Greek poems of the past. Speaking of: I really do enjoy your poetry. The enjambment in this one is on point. Would you mind sharing a link to purchase your book when it comes out?
Again, 10/10 post. Thank you for sharing all this with the world. I hope you have a wonderful weekend, and hallelujah to the squirrel. Is that how you use the word hallelujah? Who can say?
Good mornin! Yeah I also do not know the answer 🤷♀️ I prefer these posts to be suggestive and conducive to further inquiry and reflection instead of bein the "final word."
A few things your post remind of from Janet's article: One is a small thing, she makes a distinction between grief and mourning, where mourning are the acts and rituals motivated by grief (I think. I'm on vacation and writin this sleepy in the mornin before breakfast. I suggest her article it's really awesome); Two, she argues that one can feel intense sorrow and depression about losing something that can be theoretically retrieved, but grief requires an apparently objective loss, irretrievable and concrete. Her reasoning is that, e.g., in the case of a bad breakup where one likely will never see them again, it is not objectively irretrievable and, more importantly, if one's sorrow approach grieving levels (immense sadness over multiple months, say) then one's communnity would counsel her with things like "This is not a matter of life and death. You have to get over him." And in the cases of something like a house that has been in a family for generations taken by a storm, that seems apparently irretrievable, but she argues that we don't have the same dedicatory sense of obligation to grieve it: i.e., if someone had a torrential breakdown, it would make sense, but if someone kept their emotional stability, we might find them honorable, praising them for keeping a "stiff upper lip" at losing an "inanimate object." (143) But! of someone were to lose their mother and prevent themselves for feeling sorrow, or perhaps genuinely did not grieve in any way, we would find find them virtuous: it would even be rather disturbing. Now I am not wedded to the account she gives. I wanted to draw out some differences between you and Janet's account, in case you wanted to further reflecting on your ideas about grief.
My BIGGEST curiosity about this article is this: if you are a Muslim, or one of many types of Christian, or spiritualist in one variety, then you oft believe in an afterlife (Judgement Day, Heaven, ghosts, etc). Let's be Christian: someone dies, they may well be in heaven, and you may well go to heaven. Can you grieve that person as a Christian?
Well. Maybe the believing Christian grieves that they may not be in heaven, or that they may not get there. But that is grieving the possiblity of irretrievability, not the actuality. And I suppose we could say they grieve the earthly form of the person, but we are a few gradations away from being able to say that whenever a major enough change happens we grieve the person they were (and perhaps we can, but isn't grief often about the WHOLE person)
I do think when someone dies and someone who believes in ghosts, for example, counsels them that they "are not really gone" is icky. I am repulsed by it and it feels more like repression. Now. The other thought I have is my ever-haunting agnosticism, that manifests as "X could be true." So the Christians/Muslims/Spiritualists could be right. But then, even if they are, it still stands whether they can grieve?
And thank you! I will make a post when the book of poems is out, should be soon. Audrey is makin' some drawings for it right now.
Thanks for reading, as always. I'm gonna go eat breakfast and go kayakin.
“it's a terrible day for rain”
- Colonel Roy Mustang
shhh. the last line being a reference to roy mustang (🥵) is a S E C R E T.
Another fantastic post! I remain in awe of your ability to weave together personal anecdotes and philosophy articles in a convincing manner.
I think there is a lot to be said about how we quantify grief, especially for animals; for many people it seems perfectly reasonable to grieve a beloved family pet, but not to mourn the loss of a cicada on which you accidentally trod on your way to Jewel-Osco.
I don’t really know the answer here. I cry about spiders and roadkill. But I think it’s kind of a wonderful aspect of the human condition to extend empathy in this way to beings who, as you note, are so wonderfully different— if we find ourselves mourning those who, say, haven’t even died (something I know many people do: grieving the collateral damage of breakups, friends who have moved far away, childhood companions from which we’ve grown apart), then how can it be unnatural to mourn a jumping spider, when it is right there in front of us?
Anyway, I particularly enjoyed the Iphigenia mention in the footnotes; as the author of many a questionable poem about animal loss explored through the lens of Penelope and Odysseus, I think we can make some really interesting connections to contemporary living and, for lack of a better term, the weird Greek poems of the past. Speaking of: I really do enjoy your poetry. The enjambment in this one is on point. Would you mind sharing a link to purchase your book when it comes out?
Again, 10/10 post. Thank you for sharing all this with the world. I hope you have a wonderful weekend, and hallelujah to the squirrel. Is that how you use the word hallelujah? Who can say?
Good mornin! Yeah I also do not know the answer 🤷♀️ I prefer these posts to be suggestive and conducive to further inquiry and reflection instead of bein the "final word."
A few things your post remind of from Janet's article: One is a small thing, she makes a distinction between grief and mourning, where mourning are the acts and rituals motivated by grief (I think. I'm on vacation and writin this sleepy in the mornin before breakfast. I suggest her article it's really awesome); Two, she argues that one can feel intense sorrow and depression about losing something that can be theoretically retrieved, but grief requires an apparently objective loss, irretrievable and concrete. Her reasoning is that, e.g., in the case of a bad breakup where one likely will never see them again, it is not objectively irretrievable and, more importantly, if one's sorrow approach grieving levels (immense sadness over multiple months, say) then one's communnity would counsel her with things like "This is not a matter of life and death. You have to get over him." And in the cases of something like a house that has been in a family for generations taken by a storm, that seems apparently irretrievable, but she argues that we don't have the same dedicatory sense of obligation to grieve it: i.e., if someone had a torrential breakdown, it would make sense, but if someone kept their emotional stability, we might find them honorable, praising them for keeping a "stiff upper lip" at losing an "inanimate object." (143) But! of someone were to lose their mother and prevent themselves for feeling sorrow, or perhaps genuinely did not grieve in any way, we would find find them virtuous: it would even be rather disturbing. Now I am not wedded to the account she gives. I wanted to draw out some differences between you and Janet's account, in case you wanted to further reflecting on your ideas about grief.
My BIGGEST curiosity about this article is this: if you are a Muslim, or one of many types of Christian, or spiritualist in one variety, then you oft believe in an afterlife (Judgement Day, Heaven, ghosts, etc). Let's be Christian: someone dies, they may well be in heaven, and you may well go to heaven. Can you grieve that person as a Christian?
Well. Maybe the believing Christian grieves that they may not be in heaven, or that they may not get there. But that is grieving the possiblity of irretrievability, not the actuality. And I suppose we could say they grieve the earthly form of the person, but we are a few gradations away from being able to say that whenever a major enough change happens we grieve the person they were (and perhaps we can, but isn't grief often about the WHOLE person)
I do think when someone dies and someone who believes in ghosts, for example, counsels them that they "are not really gone" is icky. I am repulsed by it and it feels more like repression. Now. The other thought I have is my ever-haunting agnosticism, that manifests as "X could be true." So the Christians/Muslims/Spiritualists could be right. But then, even if they are, it still stands whether they can grieve?
And thank you! I will make a post when the book of poems is out, should be soon. Audrey is makin' some drawings for it right now.
Thanks for reading, as always. I'm gonna go eat breakfast and go kayakin.