Performing Grief
Grief wounds: it strikes; it overwhelms. It convulses the body, threatening to shake it apart like a flimsily constructed toy. It is an almost physical thing: we bear its weight; we break beneath it. Grief is an emotion, not just of the brain, but of the entire nervous system: it reaches the legs and lungs. It can crush the air from us, enervate our limbs, hurl us to the ground; some never rise again. Asked to speak, we choke as if gasping for breath: unhappy as we are, we cannot heave our hearts into our mouths. Sometimes silence speaks love best.
In the face of this shuddering sorrow, performance would seem its opposite, its negation. We perform that which is not true. The ancient suspicion of actors flows from this: their emotions are fake, their tears frauds, they can smile and smile and be a villain. To say we perform is to say we are not what we seem to be, that we are lying. That we are not.
Asked to perform her love for an audience—we might almost say for pay—Cordelia cannot speak, for her love is real. Tinny articulation would be no articulation at all; hence, any speech would be false, for no speech would convey. To speak is to lie. The crafted speeches of her sisters are portrayal, hence betrayal: mockery of the feeling they ape. They speak love finely because they feel none. None to speak of—which is to say, none to not speak of.
Love—ours for others, others for us—is the warp and weft of who we are. We are a pattern defined in our relation to others: our identity is outward, not inward. We are who we love, and who loves us.
Grief is love's shadow. Non-existent without it; cast by it; as inevitable with it as the coming of day. To belie our grief with the cries of a bellman, with sung sobs, is to belittle our very selves. Considerately, within the Jewish tradition when entering a house of mourning one does not speak to the mourner unless spoken to: to speak to them would be to ask them to perform. Of all the multitudinous demands upon the grieving, performance is the cruelest.
And yet still, always, at the very moment of grief, we are compelled to perform. Prostrate with sobs, crushed under grief's mysterious mass, we are called upon: we have functions to perform. We must file paperwork, inform authorities, disperse possessions. All of us are distributed around the world, as belongings, bureaucratic files, habitual actions, contractual or social roles. Some of our extensions when ripped out leave wounds; others leave corpses, dry simulacra of the once-living. These things must be dealt with. We must pick ourselves up off the floor and call a funeral home, buy a casket, write a eulogy; inform the IRS, the bank, the insurance company; dispose of their clothing and shoes. The true inevitabilities are death and errands; if we are not ourselves dead, we prove our lives by bustling.
But of course that is the least of the performances to which grief obliges us. We need not merely sweep up the remains of life. We must perform grief itself. However suddenly alone we, bereft, feel, death is a public thing. A person, a web of connections—of friendship, bureaucracy, role, knowledge—has been severed. The visible body has fallen, but the roots are deep in the entangling earth. Note must be taken; attention must be paid. When those closest to us are newly gone, we may feel cut in half, and wish seclusion to privately heal or suffer or die ourselves. But death is public: it is an event for all: we cannot sit solitary in sorrow. We must be with others. Sometimes that can be a type of mercy, since ultimately it is our love for and from others that will allow us to heal—almost against our will. But that forced company is also a burden, an imposition, at times an intense pain. We must endure: this pain, like so many, is unavoidable. Death is a public thing: public, of the people. We are one less. No man is an island; if a clod be washed away by the sea, the mainland is the less. Attention must be paid: grief must be performed.
And so we go to funerals, wakes, shivas, and must there perform our grief. Private grieving is disrespectful to the dead: they are silent, and so must have noise made for them; forever still, and so must have clamor and riot.1 The ancient tradition of hiring actors to perform at funerals flows from this: we must ensure a sufficient lamentation, and so hire those who are not too broken and numb with grief to adequately perform grieving: they wail and moan with fine style, and the public is reassured by the quality of their tears.
This does not, however, absolve us of our personal obligation to adequately perform grief. In days and weeks and months to come, we will be stopped by friendly acquaintances and acquaintantly friends, and asked, with very genuine shallow concern, "How are you?", with a stress no mere italics can convey. Eyes will be pools of empathy, but kiddie pools: the rest of life concrete at its shallow bottom. And we must reply. We can be all right, or not; that is up to us; they do not demand continued sorrow. But there must be the sigh, the catch in the throat, the labored "wellll.....", to at least speak of sorrow overcome, of the storm passed.2
Meursault was executed because he didn’t weep at his mother’s funeral.
And yet from the grieving performance is demanded not, or not only, by the careless considerateness of the casual, but rather by the structure of the situation, the mathematics of being. Bereft we may be; but we must, as bodies in space, do something—if only sleep or sit numb. We must perform some action, take some measure, as we move through a world which has not obligingly ended with the beloved. Shaken, shuddering, we still need a place to stand, or sit. To reconcile the palpable absence of others with the endurance of our quotidian selves, we perform grief.
So I have slandered ritual by calling it a stage for unwelcome performance. It is that, but it is much more too: it is a brace when our legs give way. Ritual gives us a channel dug and dragged by others; we can let flow our grief without the burden of cutting a crevice for it. It eases steps to walk a well-trod path. Ritual can be, within the eclipse of grief, a burden, but it is also a relief from burden. And if we are among those who modernity's acid have left no solid space of familiar ground upon which to stand, we may miss that rock when in our earthquake we find for it a sharp and sudden need.
Ritual above all allows for easy performance of grief. We need not display real feelings in front of others: we are acquitted if we take the steps that all must take. It absolves us before everyone: the public, our selves, the imagined spirits of the dead. We have done what needs doing, performed as we should. If Meursault had sat shiva in sackcloth and ashes, or gotten drunk at a wake, he would not have been found guilty.
But generous as ritual can be in providing a script, we must still perform it. The inevitable variations in our performance of it—the moments when we have a breath to improvise, the tiny details of poise and breaking voice that give any particular rendering of ritual its character—paradoxically undermine its purpose, or anyway its point. We walk along well-laid stones: but our gait is scrutinized. Even as we perform within the safe space of ritual, we also must give, to some extent, a performance. The script is given: but the playing of the notes is not mechanical; it must be felt. Perhaps Meursault is doomed after all.
This faltering of ritual's pre-spoken steps is most intense, of course, in that inevitable part of death's services which are bespoke. We may have a score, but there is always a section which calls for improvisation, a passage of jazz within the crafted sympathy. We must speak of the dead. This form, made for all, requires as part of its universal character the acknowledgement of the unique. All of us break apart eventually; that is common; we cannot speak just of that. We must speak about what is gone. About who is gone.
Yet the necessity is inward too. Emotions strike; but they strike from within. They must be worked out, like a splinter near the heart dangerous to abruptly remove, which might yet be massaged so as to slip out over time. We must make grief our practice, live with it as part of us, as our habits and characters are.
Sometimes we must perform grief to make it real: to make the death itself real, to convince our bones and our blood that the lost has not just gone on a trip or decided to hide in a closet. Or we may even know, really know, that they are dead, but not yet feel grief; we may feel merely numb, nothing. Nothing will come of nothing: we must perform grief to give it flesh. To bring it into being by displaying what it was all along.
The very best actors fake emotions by letting what is true inside them out.
Performance, then, is not for propriety or others; it is for us, our very selves. We perform grief to make it real; we perform grief because the performance is the grief. Grief is not an emotion, but an undertaking. We must perform it, because without the performance, the grief is not done. It is not.
Grieving is a task, a commission: as with so much else, it too must be borne. We must endure our going hence even as our coming hither. But we must endure others' going hence, too, and that bites deeper.
And this collides with an ugly fact: not all of us are equally talented performers.
We are resistant to the idea that those who have achieved mastery in the building of words have an edge in their use to express grief. We want the performance of grief to be the great democrat, equaling all. Talent always wrestles equality, like Jacob the angel, and cannot go unblessed. And to be sure rough simplicity is skill too: they say an amateur boxer or chess player can sometimes be hard to beat as they make moves sufficiently crazy to overwhelm experience. Yet in the end, most often, skill shapes best: a poet can speak better than the rest of us.
We do not want to hear that; do not want it to be true. It is characteristic of our time that we are hesitant to admit the unavoidable fact that those who are better at things will do them better. We like to think all inequalities can be remedied. Certainly any of us can nail together a handful of rough boards, and say of them, a man may rot even here. But would any deny that a practiced carpenter has an edge in building a fine final home?
This is not to say that flowery words are prettier. Genuineness is all; and we will see poignancy in the true coincidence that we would despise as trite in the artificial. But those with a facility for words will wield them better, all things being equal, than those without. This inequality bites deeper when we think how much performing grief is necessary, not just for others, but for ourselves.3
Of course the skills called upon here are multiple. It takes skill to wield word; it takes skill of a sort to howl, or to shudder. No human endeavor is without its experts; no human endeavor is without its subdivisions and parts which will be the strengths of different masters. Those who have a deep skill at navigating the rough waters of their own emotions—"processing" them, we say, as though emotions were a bureaucratic form that needs stamping and filing—will navigate the storms of grief better too.
But if to grieve is a task we must perform—not just once, but with ongoing maintenance and editing over the course of our injured lives—then those with skills in the area of emoting or expressing or enduring will do better than those without. Some will grieve better than others.
We want this to be not so. It is unfair. Democracy seems to demand equal facility in all things, especially those things every man has honestly acquired and can honestly claim. To say that some of us can do better the very things of life—and what is more central to life than tending and bewailing the dead?—deeply offends our modern notions of justice.
But, as has so often been said, neither life nor death is even slightly, remotely fair.
Thirty-two years ago, less than a month after I had turned twenty, my mother, Mary Joe Frug, was murdered a block from the house I grew up in. (No one was ever charged or even suspected; its perpetrator remains entirely unknown.) I was at college; earlier that evening, at a holiday dinner—it was the seventh night of Passover—I had a discussion, in a collegiate way, about the famous first sentence of Albert Camus's novel The Stranger: "Aujourd’hui, Maman et morte." Mama died today.
When I quoted those words, they were not yet true for me.
As a brutal killing in a safe (privileged) community, it set off a media circus. (A year later, a viscous bit of trolling on the murder's first anniversary set off a still-larger one.) A death is a public thing; a murder all the more so. Various reporters and journalists called us up, asking us to slice a piece of ourselves off in order to spice up the stew they are making. It was nothing personal for them, of course; just business. Every day there are many pages to fill, many readers who want just a taste of sweet and sour before they go on about the errands of living. It helps to have human hearts sliced into the mix. Stew tastes better that way.
I was not silent after my mother's death. No one, the late writer Harlan Ellison once said, should go into the darkness with too few words. We had a memorial service four days after her death: over a thousand came; eight spoke, of whom I was one. What I had to say about my mother then—my performance at that moment of grief—has been printed, and you can read it, if you wish. Suffice to say what I attempted was to perform grief not by indulging it, but by motivating it, by doing my best to recall her as she was when she was alive. Invoke her spirit, and the grief will take care of itself.
That was perhaps the most public of performances my family gave that week, that month, that year; but it was far from the only one. Most were private, and I shall not let the town crier speak their lines. Rest assured that they were done, both as and after she was put to rest.
But what we did not do was perform grief in the manner which one of our basest cultural rituals—a ritual truly more honored in the breach than the observance (in the originally intended sense of those words)— asks: speak about it in the press.
This has been received as strange. News stories that have run (and there have been some) have mentioned our silence as though it were mysterious and (at least once) implying it was somehow sinister. Why don't they want to talk about this?
I have tried, in this essay, to at least partially explain. Grief is a wound; it is also simultaneously always a performance—a performance we do not just for our others but for ourselves. A performance which not of grief, but which is grief. To ask us to perform our grief in the narrow confines of a newspaper column or a television clip is to ask us to perform it badly, for their reader's pleasure and their own filing deadlines. What reporters do, on those occasions when they swarm around the bereaved, is ask them to perform grief badly—that is, to grieve badly. This is not, or is not merely, an invasion of privacy: it is hurting our grief—hence, hurting our love—which is to say, hurting us, the stuff of which we are woven.
You are surprised we do not wish to do this? You assault us, and fret that we do not scream. To be sure, unlike the primal assault that killed her, and thereby wounded so many—and unlike the trolling that occurred in its wake—this harm is not intentional. But it is harm. If performing grief is necessary, then to ask us to perform it badly is inexcusable.
"Play your feelings," they say, and hand us a kudzu for sixty seconds. No truth can come from such instrument. What do we want after a bereavement, save to be true to those who are now no more?
With a mourning, there is no end, no after: it fades but does not conclude. We still live in the wake of Caesar’s death, and Abraham's; every one of us walks upon the graves of innumerable ancestors with every step. One of ritual's blessings is to artificially define an after: in Judaism, mourning a parent lasts a year. Then we doff the trappings and the suits of woe, and get back to full living, telling ourselves: thou know'st 'tis common. Life calls: so we are compelled to perform beyond our grief— to perform our tasks, to do our jobs, to care for others; in short, to heal.
But we cannot but think that to heal is to insult: if grief is love's shadow, then healing is love's limits. Their slaying did not slay us, for all that we howled it had. And so we perform our grief to ourselves, so that we may make our love look bigger, like a cat arching its back. Who are we trying to scare, or impress?
Jacob says, “I will continue to mourn until I join my son in the grave.” Yet he commands his other sons to go to Egypt "so that we may live and not die." He lives in mourning; yet he wishes to continue to live.4 But yet again, when Benjamin is taken, he says, "If harm comes to him… you will bring my gray head down to the grave in sorrow." There is a limit to grief, and it is death.
A wounded tree will not heal, but not die: it will grow around the foreign body, surround and become the injury, until to remove the intruder, to remove the hurt, would be to attack it, to harm it more.
We all lose more than we can bear, unless we ourselves are early lost. The loss becomes us, and scars serve as skin.
Death is life's shadow.
In the end, the wound, not the words, remain. The words are but the fragile form we seek to stuff the real within. Burning nerves and lacerated mind do not fit into syllables and serifs, however much we push and stuff and squeeze. In the end, the articulation of words frays into the cry, the scream, of raw grief: grammar and semantics dissolve, and all that is lost is the physicality of language: sound and vocalization and breath.
We have lost. They are gone. Never, never, never, never, never; oh howl, howl, howl.
Howl.
Howl.
In this connection, I will lament the trend (if the few distinct cases which have arisen within my horizon indeed constitute one) of people saying, before their own death, that they wish for no funeral to be held. This may be said considerately, seeking to spare the suffering of others (as though to cancel the ritual were to cancel the sorrow); or it may be said passive aggressively (I have been too long ignored; I will force ignorance when others wish attention paid). But funerals are not for the dead, and they have no right to lay their cold hands upon the necessary functions of the living. And how cruel it is, since the guiding star for the grieving, foolishly and inevitably, is to do precisely what those who no longer can will or wish would want, to deny permission for what needs be performed. We pretend it is for the dead that we follow their wishes; but they left their will with their bones, here upon this Earth they have quit. For them to deny us the performance of our grief is to rob us of what we and not they need, what we and not they have a right to. Let the living bury the dead; the dead should not interfere.
I write this from the perspective of the grieving. But we all have been and will be the bystander too. The world has many billions. Do you wish, writer, to have us feel truly the grief of all? We would not survive a percent of a percent's percent of it. Or do you wish, writer, that we should meet the bereaved with cheer and hail fellow well met? No. The cruelty here is not the cruelty of those who only slightly care, but the cruelty of a universe which has made such exchanges unavoidable, for us all, on both sides. Shallow grief is not a personal failing. The cruelty we inflict in performing sympathy is congruent with the cruelty of a world which makes us be thus cruel. We all, at various times, must perform grief; we all also must, at other times, be its audience. We must endure the latter role even as the former.
The liberal arts were originally understood to be those that enabled liberty, that is, the free self in society. Part of that freedom has always been self-mastery. The ability, one might say, to perform grief when we realize we need to: to act our grief in such a way as to make it real, to make it equal to the scale of the loss. To make it. We defame education if we make it about earning a living; it ought to be about how to live. We all will find ourselves in need, in some embittered hour, of a spirit brewed from a stem that scoured the hand.
But what does he say when he finds Joseph alive after all? "Now I am ready to die, since I have seen for myself that you are still alive.” He lives to grieve; without grief, he needs live no longer.
זכרונה לברכה
This was outstanding. I will likely return to it sometime soon, just to process what I might have missed.