Philosophy Final
Grief
For my presentation, I will be talking about the
concept of grief from the book Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find
Our Way by Kieran Setiya. Setiya writes that there are three forms of
grief: relational grief, “grief at the harm that befalls someone who dies,” and
“grief at the sheer loss of life.”
The first type of grief relational grief is
grief due to the loss of a relationship. Setiya talks about feeling this grief
over the loss of his first relationship when he was 15 with a girl named Jules.
After 6 months, Jules had seemed to grow bored of him and ended up breaking up
with him. To make it worse, she gave him no reason as to why she broke up with
him. I experienced a similar situation less than a year ago when my high school
boyfriend broke up with me over text just a week before our third anniversary.
Like Jules, he seemed to grow tired of me slowly over the last 2 years of the
relationship, eventually ending it with very little reasoning. Setiya writes
that romantic grief revolves around the death of a relationship rather than the
person. You could say that with relational grief you are also grieving all of
the time and effort that went into a relationship that has gone to waste. Though
with relational grief, no one has died, it is still a valid form of grief. When
we care about someone deeply, and they are suddenly gone it feels like you’ve
lost of yourself. I believe with relational grief, we are also grieving that
part of ourselves that has been taken.
The second form of grief is “grief at the harm that
befalls someone who dies,” is centered around the deceased’s experience. Setiya
writes that both ancient Greek and Roman schools agree that it makes no sense
to grieve for the dead because “death does no harm.” Epicurus argued
that death causes no pain to the person who is dying because when we die, we
simply lose consciousness and never regain it. Setiya argues that when we die
we lose the privilege of living. What we lose is all the experiences, relationships,
moments that we could have if we were still alive. He argues that what we lose
is life itself, especially when the deceased died young.
The third form of grief is “grief at the sheer loss of
life.” Setiya writes about how for different cultures, there are different
traditions for how we grieve. How we grieve in the West ties back to ancient
Rome. Setiya cites historian David Konstan on the ancient Roman laws
surrounding the mourning of the dead. You can mourn parents and children over
the age of 6 for one year. You can mourn children under 6 for a month. Husbands
can be mourned for ten months. Close relatives can be mourned for 8 months. We
still see these rules, though not stated explicitly, in our culture. I think
these laws are still an outline for our societal norm of what is considered an “appropriate”
amount of grieving time.
Over time, we have become more private in our mourning
process. Setiya writes that in the West, we used to have conventions for dying
at home, surrounded by loved ones. The nineteenth century was when death become
more private. This change took place around World War One when so many people
were dying outside of the home, like in the hospital or in combat, that death
surrounded by doctors and nurses became our new norm.
I researched and compared death customs in early America versus modern Americans. Puritans had silent, somber funerals, but had very different wakes. Puritan wakes were actually communal events involving feasts and liquor. Not what you’d expect from the Puritans, huh? Now funerals and wakes are considered more private events for friends and family to reunite and ponder over the life that the deceased lived.
The COVID pandemic impacted every part of our lives, and we still feel that impact. Setiya writes about how the pandemic disrupted already fragile death and mourning rituals. One sentence that really stuck with me was “there is a great mass of suspended grief,” which I feel is true. Even now, nearly 5 years after the pandemic, we face consequences of it every day. Some of those lasting effects may be good, like how almost every business has curbside pickup, and people are more likely to social distance or stay home when sick. But we still have negative effects like the virus itself sticking around and continuing to infect people and disrupt lives. I feel like most of us would agree that the pandemic doesn’t feel like it was 5 years ago, which I think is part of the suspended grief Setiya was talking about. I think that it will take probably decades for our generation to fully process the trauma that COVID caused, especially because it impacted us during crucial social developmental years.
Setiya ends the chapter with the sentences, “If life is a story, grief reminds us, then it does not have a happy ending. Perhaps it’s not a story after all.”
Discussion Questions:
How do you feel about the Roman laws surrounding
mourning periods?
Do you think COVID has a lasting effect on our
generation, and if so do you believe it left a positive or negative impact?
Do you agree with Setiya that relational grief, or the
loss of a relationship, is a valid form of grief?
Nice presentation, Alayna. (And at 920 words this is a good template, everyone, for the blog post.) You'll just want to sprinkle in some bloggish content (links, video, pic), especially links to sources and relevant other stuff.
ReplyDeleteSee the blog post guidelines near the bottom of this page. I'll talk about it some more soon in class.
"when we die we lose the privilege of living... all the experiences, relationships, moments that we could have if we were still alive"- But the privilege of having lived cannot be lost, to the extent that our lives have impacted other lives. In that sense, our relational experiences are not lost to the world; and they were not lost to us either, if we've attended to them while we had the precious privilege of living, breathing, thinking, enjoying, loving.
Delete