Death, Bereavement, and Mourning

Samuel C. Heilman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351322065
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

An encounter with the death of another is often an occasion when the bereaved need to be sustained in their loss, relieved of the anxiety that the meeting with death engenders, and comforted in their grief. It is a time when those left behind often seek to redress wrongs in themselves or in the relationships that death has shaken and upset. In both collective and individual responses to the trauma of encountering death, we witness efforts to counter the misfortune and to explain the meaning of the loss, to turn memory into blessing, to reconcile life with death, to regenerate life, and redeem both the bereaved and the dead.

Sometimes loss may transform the bereaved in ways that lead to growth and maturity; other times a loss leads to unremitting anger or melancholia. There may be a variety of spiritual expressions that the bereaved experience in their time of loss, but there appears to be some common elements in all of them. Overtime, survivors' feelings are transformed into growing exploration of the spiritual, a profound sense of rebirth, newfound feelings of self-mastery or confidence, and a deeply held conviction that "life goes on."

The contributions to this volume are based on a conference held in New York on the first anniversary of September 11, 2001. Contributors include Peter Metcalf, Robert Jay Lifton, Ilana Harlow, Robert A. Neimeyer, Samuel Heilman, and Neil Gillman. This sensitive and heartfelt volume relates specifically to issues of death, bereavement, and mourning in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center, but the applications to other individual and catastrophic events is obvious. The contributions do not simply explore how people deal with bereavement or are psychologically affected by extreme grief: they address how people can try to find meaning in tragedy and loss, and strive to help restore order in the wake of chaos. The multidisciplinary perspectives include those of anthropology, psychology, theology, social work, and art.

1

Introduction

Samuel Heilman

Faith, as anthropologist Clifford Geertz has written, “sustains, cures, comforts, redresses wrongs, improves fortune, secures rewards, explains, obligates, blesses, clarifies, reconciles, regenerates, redeems, or saves,” when it manages to work for those who have it.¹ The human encounter with death is often precisely the occasion when the bereaved need to be sustained in their loss, cured of the anxiety that the meeting with death engenders, and comforted in their grief. It is a time when they often seek to redress wrongs in themselves or in the relationships that death has shaken and upset. In both the collective and individual responses to the trauma of encountering death, we discover efforts to counter the misfortune and to explain the meaning of the loss, to turn memory into blessing, to reconcile life with death, to regenerate life, and redeem or save both the bereaved, and in some ways, the dead. And often, it is the brush with death that moves those who are bereaved but have survived to take on new and often solemn obligations.

Sometimes these obligations transform the bereaved and mourning in ways that lead to growth and maturity; other times they lead to unremitting anger or melancholia. The repercussions of either of these reactions are significant for they largely shape the life for those who have survived, either for good or for bad. But in either event, the starting point is death and bereavement. This is no less true for individuals as for groups.

Given these parallels between the elements of faith and the response to death and bereavement, it is therefore no surprise that even those who have no or little contact with matters spiritual often find themselves turning to faith or something that they often call “the spiritual” when confronted by death that has touched them personally. Nor is it surprising to find that some scholars argue that concern with and response to death is among the primordial elements and core concerns of the spirit, and a kind of deep wellspring of religion. Religion or spiritual notions often emerge as powerful influences in the life after death. They play a part in constructing meaning out of grief, human suffering, and ultimately death. This too can lead to maturity and growth or, it can lead to obsession and a desire to fantasize. The bereaved and grief stricken look to religion to somehow solve the problem of death, to “cure” its cause, to defeat it. Faith can accomplish this when it leads to a belief in an afterlife or sees meaning in a life lived but lost. Yet religion can also lead to what Robert Lifton in this volume has called an “apocalyptic face-off,” the fear of vulnerability that a brush with death engenders and that leads to a desire to purify life by hastening the end, heaven on earth.

To be sure, there are a variety of religious or spiritual expressions—some steeped in tradition, others unique and new—that the bereaved and mourning experience in their time of loss, but there appear to be some common elements in all of them. Among these are an intensified self-awareness, a fear of or at least an anxiety about the propinquity of death and dead bodies (at its most rudimentary, a feeling that death is somehow contagious and rapacious, still hungry for more) and a sense of vulnerability. In time, these feelings, once their chaotic overtones have been stilled, also may become transformed into a growing exploration of the spiritual, a profound sense of rebirth, newfound feelings of self-mastery or confidence, and a deeply held conviction that “life goes on.” At the personal level, the aftermath of death often brings as well that religious experience that William James called “the individual pinch of destiny,” which moves the bereaved to ask the most existential of questions: “Who am I? What am I supposed to do? What is to become of me? Where does finality lie?”²

While the answers to these questions are by no means simple or unequivocal, the asking of them is in fact an expression of and often the stimulus for even more spiritual reflection, which may in time expand and grow increasingly complex. Indeed, one often finds that the close encounter with death, the feelings of bereavement, and the process of mourning lead for some to an intensified devotion toward their own religious traditions (ironically, even among many who have otherwise become alienated from or remained ignorant of those traditions). For others, it may be expressed by a shift from no spiritual commitment to a devout spiritual life.

Most often, although surely not always, I have found that established religious traditions are the receptacles for the spiritual transformations engendered by death, bereavement, and mourning. This should not come as a surprise to students of religion; for both in so-called “primitive” and “modern” cultures, among the most widespread occasions for turning to traditional religion and ritual are the encounters with death. The way the body is disposed of, the processes of separation from the dead, and the practices of mourning to which the bereaved turn are frequently those that are time-honored, wrapped in mystery and tradition. The comfort or at the very least the spiritual and practical shelter these offer is often in their capacity to transform the chaos of death into the order of continuity. The fear of death subsides as the anxiety of bereavement gives way to the relative calm of mourning, which turns in time to a sense of renewal.

While what I have described here operates at the personal level— an area that is certainly worthy of more investigation—the aftermath of the events of September 11 demonstrated that this turn to the spiritual functioned at the collective level as well. It did not matter who those who lost family members or loved ones in the disasters of that day were, the entire nation (and certainly the people of New York) were devastated. All felt bereaved; all were grief stricken. And the collective response stimulated an outpouring of spiritual expression— or at the very least a public display of a turn toward spirituality. It was as if the occasion of the death and bereavement of so many at once created a mirror that forced all of those who had survived— and everyone who felt touched by the loss felt like a survivor—to reflect not only on the lives lived and lost but also on essential existential questions of what is most meaningful in life. Perhaps nothing more vividly articulated this than the featured obituaries in the New York Times or the memorial service held at New York’s Yankee Stadium. This service, a collective expression of a multiplex spirituality in which a variety of religious traditions of mourning were played out, was held in a “temple” of the physical. As such it transformed that place from a location where baseball is played into an outdoor cathedral where the dead had the power to raise the living to a new consciousness of the sanctity of life. Imams, rabbis, ministers, priests, public officials, celebrities, and the bereaved shared in a spiritual experience that was at once rooted in traditional expressions of particularistic religion while also expressing a kind of universalistic civil religion—and the place of peanuts and Cracker Jack became the place of prayer and memorializations. Spirit triumphed over flesh; spirituality trumped physicality.

This gathering was unusual but by no means unique. The practice of public reflection and memorialization, the lighting of candles, the sanctification of space and time has occurred in many places where death touches the collective. Thus at the site of assassination of public leaders or figures, where mass death has occurred, or even at the place where an accident has resulted in sudden death, one repeatedly discovers signs of monuments and memorials that are nothing less than exercises in spiritual symbolization, markers left behind to not only note a death but also remind all who see them of the spiritual experience of bereavement in which they may thereby share. Whether at bombed cafes in Jerusalem, at Ground Zero in Manhattan, at Dealy Plaza in Dallas where John Kennedy was killed, or Central Park in New York near John Lennon’s murder or the renamed Yitzhak Rabin Square in Tel Aviv or even along the interstates where car fatalities have occurred, we have all seen the often spontaneous memorials, the candles, the offerings, the signs that remind us that the spiritual overwhelmed the mundane here. In a sense one might argue that these sorts of spiritual transformation constitute the beginning of the healing and regeneration that begins within the mourning experience.

But the events of 9/11 and their reminder of our vulnerability as well as the ever-lurking presence of death and destruction that can intrude upon life even from a blue, cloudless sky on a glorious autumn day may also lead to (and have) a descent into the culture of death. Death can beget more death if its does not lead to reconciliation, regeneration, and rebirth. In the aftermath of 9/11, we have seen healing but also war, comfort but also increased insecurity and terror, enhanced collective memory but also a sense of collective dread. We have looked forward to a sense of peace, but we have also seen intimations of Armageddon. And we have seen expressions of unending bereavement, of dead and death that cannot be laid to rest, at least not yet.

Geertz tells us that “the communal dimensions of religious change, the ones you can (sometimes) read about in the newspapers are underresearched, the personal ones, those you have (usually) to talk to living people in order to encounter, are barely researched at all.”³ This volume, and the conference out of which it grew, makes an effort to see what we can learn in the aftermath of those devastating events of September 11, 2001 about both the personal and the collective response.

Our approach is interdisciplinary because we know there is no single view that can provide understanding of so complex a set of experiences. Some of the chapters here are by psychiatrists and psychologists—both those who are clinicians and those who deal with collective experience. The papers draw as well from the disciplinary perspectives of the historian, sociologist, literary critic, folklorist, anthropologist, social worker, theologian, poet, and undertaker. Each has something essential to teach us about what we can learn as we reflect on 9/11, and its death and bereavement. Death, bereavement, and mourning have multiple meanings.

Thomas Lynch, poet and undertaker, tells how much we need to take our leave of a body; no matter how broken and devastated, for, as he puts it, “we cannot let go of what we do not hold.” That lesson is central to the pain that so many of those who lost loved ones in the disaster but were never able to take leave of their bodies, and accordingly who may not yet have been able to let go. These are people who are still trapped with their missing others, waiting for the disaster to end. Those who have lost control over their dead in some sense, he shows us, have likewise lost control over their lives.

There is an irony in this, Lynch tells us, since so many Americans have become so uncomfortable with the funerary caskets and dispatch the dead with a minimum of contact with the remains. Hence an understanding of this lesson from the missing bodies of 9/11 tells us, perhaps, that we have needs in mourning that we have allowed to remain unfulfilled for too long. We need to learn how to make the missing dead and stop allowing the dead to go missing. That, Lynch tells us, is what will allow us “to grieve in meaningful and manageable ways.”

Peter Metcalf asks a more fundamental question, comparing our response to death of the Nyakyusa of Tanzania, for whom the encounter is fraught not only with sorrow but a fear “that unquiet ghosts will bring more deaths.” That, however, Metcalf asserts is not our fear in the wake of 9/11. Ours is a fear, he suggests, born of incomprehension—“we understood that the attack had deep political significance, but we did not, and do not, understand what that significance is.” Accordingly, we do not know how to respond, and that “exasperates” us. Yet that exasperation is precisely what Metcalf finds valuable for it forces us to maintain the search for meaning.

Folklorist liana Harlow, in her consideration of the shrines and memorials following the attacks, shows us the popular expression of the quest for meaning and remembrance. She reminds us as well that, “bodies are important components of rites of passage. The presence of a corpse at funerary rites is necessary not only for the psychological purpose of making death real to the bereaved, but is also necessary for transition rites to be performed, for the dead to be incorporated into the hereafter. Without a body there are no funerals, only memorial services.” But she also tells us how so much of what the shrines that emerged—including even the anthropomorphization of the twin towers themselves—were an effort on the part of the living to avoid the natural tendency to forget, telling us that, “creativity counters the destructiveness of death.” The creations include everything from tattoos to shrines. In effect, her description and analysis of the various mementos and reminders of the dead and the disaster show how the living go on living and the dead go on living with them. This is particularly striking when she describes how certain mourners chose “to be inscribed with names or portraits of loved ones,” thereby “incorporating their dead (or their sweethearts) into themselves.” Beyond this, she shows us how the mementoes and shrines became the enduring expressions of how the dead go on living with the living. This is particularly important since in the aftermath of 9/11, as Harlow explains, “the plurality of Death was so overwhelming as to threaten awareness of its singularity.” That was why, she argues, the New York City fire department abandoned the idea of doing a single memorial service for all the dead and chose instead to arrange individual funerals and memorials.

There are mementoes of grief itself, something extraordinarily important perhaps because there remain so many missing victims. Here the process of collective memorialization becomes especially important, but there is always a risk of these becoming fetishistic images or, what some might argue are even worse, expressions that verge on kitsch. This does not require only massive monuments; small items have served in some cases as touching mementi mori— and anyone who has seen the pile of shoes in the Holocaust memorial in Washington, D.C. and felt its power to recall the murdered millions cannot deny this. Yet the question of what makes an effective monument—particularly for an event of the social and cultural proportions of 9/11—is an enormous challenge, as Harlow’s descriptions show us. Moreover, it is a challenge whose aim is to make the dead alive again, an expression of mourning’s mental and imaginative labor. But, there is no less a risk that in the dissemination of this memory, indifference may overtake even the impetus to memorialize. Hence, the ultimate challenge of 9/11 memorializing is to provoke thoughts of revitalization and metamorphosis rather than indifference.

Psychiatrist and anthropologist Henry Abramovitch suggests that ironically it is the many missing, and the inability of those whom they have bereaved to fully mourn them, that insures that 9/11 memorialization will not devolve into indifference. The memorials have the capacity, he argues, to transform the “bad death” of 9/11— with its brutality and unexpectedness—into something closer to a “good death.” He sees much that has transpired since 9/11, and that will likely emerge as the space called Ground Zero is restored, as being something like the end of the provisional and liminal period in which the bereaved nation (and the many who have not completed or even begun their mourning) now find themselves, more than two years after the disaster. He crafts his argument by looking at a wide variety of rites of mourning, and demonstrates that we who still grieve after 9/11 are repeating some fundamental archetypes of culture.

Carrying on with this perspective, Eliezer Witztum, Ruth Malkinson, and Shalom Rubin explain why some of these objects and memorials—as described by Harlow—can serve as essential aids to the psychology of dealing with the trauma and pain of bereavement. Via these objects and memorials, the bereaved find a way of holding on to the missing and the dead, and of reconstructing their lives and making sense out of them. And that is something that each family and each person who felt the grief and pain of loss needed to do by themselves.

This, however, had unintended consequences, some of which we discover in reading Warren Spielberg’s personally revealing piece. Spielberg, working as a therapist and counselor in a Brooklyn firehouse, shows us the way in which these new American heroes were often overcome with survivor guilt. Not only the various memorials for the firefighters, but no less the realization of their absence created ripples of grief. He provides an insider’s look, coupled with the insights of a working psychologist who has provided the survivors with therapy, at how much the absent firefighters still constitute a presence—“ghosts” he calls them—in the lives of their fellows. He too, like Thomas Lynch, informs how the absence of the dead bodies of their fallen comrades plays upon the hearts and minds of those left behind, and how the absent dead can be a far harder burden to carry than anyone else that these firefighters have had to hold in their arms. As liana Harlow poetically captures it: “Death is an embodiment of the philosophical problem of the one and the many.”

Paul C. Rosenblatt reminds us that grief is not simply an individual experience, although in the individualism that is so much a part of the American experience it sometimes seems that is all it is. But, Rosenblatt shows us how we can look at the events in the aftermath of 9/11 and discover how much grief and bereavement mean to the family. The destinies and behaviors of people linked together in the family are so interwoven that the loss of one has repercussions for all the others, often in ways that are unexpected and not always realized for those who become bereaved. His argument that “if one loses a co-worker who nobody else in the family knew, can still become a family grief,” is particularly relevant to the realities following 9/11/2001. So many of the survivors of that day who lost co-workers, or even who felt the loss of people who shared the building with them, experienced a bereavement that often changed the nature of what went on in the survivors’ families. The sadness and sense of loss—often inexplicable in the quotidian logic—nevertheless played a role in unexpected ways, as Rosenblatt hints, when families either tried to “ignore the individual’s grief, try to suppress it, or try to connect with it.” In fact, Rosenblatt provides a key for seeing the nearly endless ripples of reaction to bereavement and felt grief in so many aspects of family life that it enables us all to see why the disaster continued to reverberate in the seemingly protected environment of the family. He shows us how it was possible for an attack on the American nation and people to be felt as a wound in the family life of Americans. As such he offers us information that may not cure the pain of the loss but by explaining where it comes from mitigate some of its anguish. Now we know why we felt what we did in situations and settings so far from “Ground Zero.”

Rosenblatt tells us as well how important it is to articulate the various meanings that such losses have for the family. Talking about what the attacks and the consequent losses represent to us as a family—nationally and in our individual families—is clearly not just therapeutic; it is essential to what we often call “closure.” In a sense, this volume and the conference on which it is based, is part of that process. One of the most remarkable things about what began as an academic effort to use the first anniversary of the 9/11 disaster as an opportunity to reflect upon and understand what we could learn about death, bereavement, and mourning is that participants at the conference drew more than simply academic knowledge from the papers and the sessions. In fact, in a way far beyond any other academic conference in which I had ever participated, the gathering took on characteristics of a therapeutic assembly. People came not only to learn but also to articulate the meaning of the event for themselves and for the New York family. Set against the backdrop of a plethora of commemorative happenings throughout the New York area, and indeed the nation, the conference became...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Local Heroes
• 3. “A Passion of Grief and Fear Exasperates Us”: Death, Bereavement, and Mourning—What We Have Learned a Year after 9/11
• 4. Shaping Sorrow: Creative Aspects of Public and Private Mourning
• 5. Where are the Dead? Bad Death, the Missing, and the Inability to Mourn
• 6. The Firefighter, the Ghost, and the Psychologist: Reflections on “The 9/11 Firehouse Project”
• 7. Grieving Families and the 9/11 Disaster
• 8. Traumatic Grief and Bereavement Resulting from Terrorism: Israeli and American Perspectives
• 9. Tragedy and Transformation: Meaning Reconstruction in the Wake of Traumatic Loss
• 10. Coping with Chaos: Jewish Theological and Ritual Resources
• 11. From Ground Zero: Thoughts on Apocalyptic Violence and the New Terrorism
• 12. The Apocalyptic Face-Off: The Culture of Death after 9/11
• 13. The Aftermath of Death: Collective Reintegration and Dealing with Chaos in Light of the Disaster of September 11
• Contributors