Surviving the Dead
Grief is a problem in modern secular societies. For one, we don’t quite know what to make of the dead. The idea of an afterlife no longer holds sway and if the dead aren’t there, it is easy to assume that the dead are nowhere and nothing. What is said of customs of mourning that are increasingly felt to be antiquated, we’re now tempted to say of grief, too: it’s for the living, not the dead. But if grief is for nothing or perhaps for ourselves alone, it’s hard to resist the conclusion that grief is, in the best case, a kind of self-pity. Yet grief also continues to feel urgent, even necessary. We feel dehumanized by modern bureaucracies that reduce death to a medical, legal, or logistical problem; alienated by a work culture that offers little to no accommodation for grief; offended by the social pressure to move on and to feel better quickly; and troubled by a mental health establishment that, much like the surrounding culture, can rush to judge grief “complicated” or excessive. Given these conflicting modern attitudes, can we make good sense of the idea that grief isn’t just something we might grudgingly tolerate, but something that might be vital to our humanity? More fundamentally, can we learn to take the dead seriously?
The most intimate, detailed, and accessible sources we have for understanding the complexity of grief in modern secular societies are the first-hand observations of grief or “grief memoirs” that began to emerge in the mid-twentieth century. C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed (1961), a contemporaneous record of his grief following the death of his wife, is a notable early example, but works of this kind have proliferated in recent years following the seismic cultural impact of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2005). Surviving the Dead is the first attempt to articulate a secular philosophy of grief guided by these groundbreaking writings. It makes the case that these works are profound and consequential philosophical examinations of matters of life and death, thereby doing justice to Didion’s observation that ‘memoir’ is too “soft” a word for what a book like hers is doing. The book also expounds the argument that is implicit in this literature, namely, that there is a deep cultural need to bring grief properly into view and, further, that attempts to theorize grief thus far have been premature, tending to simplify grief beyond recognition or to miss it altogether. What these writings show is that there can be no acknowledgment of grief in anything like its full complexity without an acknowledgment of the dead.
These first-hand writings bring our anxieties about the dead to light, but they also detail the profound entanglements between the living and the dead revealed by grief. These bonds can be so profound that grief is often initially experienced as a “vicarious death,” accompanied by the sensation of being buried oneself, of being exiled from the warmth of human community, or stranded outside of time. Many in grief experience an urge to search for the dead—coming close enough, it can seem, to join them if not to retrieve them. Even the life to which one returns in the aftermath of profound loss can seem totally colored by another’s death: for some, this can be an experience of having more life, akin to rising from another’s grave, and for others, it is an experience of having too much life, of living past one’s time.
In grief, we are sometimes left grasping for clues as to the ultimate reality of the dead, but this is as true of those who have the terrifying impression of being cut off from the dead as it is of those who experience awe before those who seem in death to have become larger than life. In either case, these concerns have to be seen alongside the intimate, up-close-and-personal experiences that we also have with the dead, when we find ourselves closer to the dead than to the living, moved by an empathy that leaves us unsure of and rightly unconcerned with the differences between us, and so close to another’s death that we can be said to have survived it. The result of taking these writings seriously may be the upending of theory, but the cost of the failing to do so may be our very humanity. It is time to recall what cultures have long known: that our relations with the dead lie at the foundations of human society and that proper concern for the living will often require concern for the dead.
The most intimate, detailed, and accessible sources we have for understanding the complexity of grief in modern secular societies are the first-hand observations of grief or “grief memoirs” that began to emerge in the mid-twentieth century. C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed (1961), a contemporaneous record of his grief following the death of his wife, is a notable early example, but works of this kind have proliferated in recent years following the seismic cultural impact of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2005). Surviving the Dead is the first attempt to articulate a secular philosophy of grief guided by these groundbreaking writings. It makes the case that these works are profound and consequential philosophical examinations of matters of life and death, thereby doing justice to Didion’s observation that ‘memoir’ is too “soft” a word for what a book like hers is doing. The book also expounds the argument that is implicit in this literature, namely, that there is a deep cultural need to bring grief properly into view and, further, that attempts to theorize grief thus far have been premature, tending to simplify grief beyond recognition or to miss it altogether. What these writings show is that there can be no acknowledgment of grief in anything like its full complexity without an acknowledgment of the dead.
These first-hand writings bring our anxieties about the dead to light, but they also detail the profound entanglements between the living and the dead revealed by grief. These bonds can be so profound that grief is often initially experienced as a “vicarious death,” accompanied by the sensation of being buried oneself, of being exiled from the warmth of human community, or stranded outside of time. Many in grief experience an urge to search for the dead—coming close enough, it can seem, to join them if not to retrieve them. Even the life to which one returns in the aftermath of profound loss can seem totally colored by another’s death: for some, this can be an experience of having more life, akin to rising from another’s grave, and for others, it is an experience of having too much life, of living past one’s time.
In grief, we are sometimes left grasping for clues as to the ultimate reality of the dead, but this is as true of those who have the terrifying impression of being cut off from the dead as it is of those who experience awe before those who seem in death to have become larger than life. In either case, these concerns have to be seen alongside the intimate, up-close-and-personal experiences that we also have with the dead, when we find ourselves closer to the dead than to the living, moved by an empathy that leaves us unsure of and rightly unconcerned with the differences between us, and so close to another’s death that we can be said to have survived it. The result of taking these writings seriously may be the upending of theory, but the cost of the failing to do so may be our very humanity. It is time to recall what cultures have long known: that our relations with the dead lie at the foundations of human society and that proper concern for the living will often require concern for the dead.