Grief That Dares Not Speak Its Name

I am a psychotherapist who specializes in bereavement and loss. For over a decade, my work

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has involved accompanying the bereaved on their grief journeys. Grief work has taught me a great deal about our society’s attitudes towards loss and bereavement. We are socially pressured to “get over” our losses quickly and without any fuss. We are told to “pull it together” regardless of our pain and suffering. We have devised categories of inclusion regarding what we identify as legitimate or illegitimate grief. Certain losses command formal recognition by all of us, while other grievings are relegated to the sub-basement of our collective psyches.

Our emotional stinginess when faced with the very urgent neediness of the bereaved has been addressed by innumerable contemporary writers from Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, On Death and Dying (1969) to Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (1975). Americans take offense at the mere mention of the word death. We rail at life’s incomprehensible messiness. Like Melville’s ill-fated Ahab, we shake our fists at the heavens and challenge the sun, the moon, and the stars.

Perhaps, we should call this our manic defense against life’s inevitabilities. If we cannot beat death and its attendant feelings of loss and grief, at least we can narrow our frames of reference — make sure that we don’t have to deal with too many unwanted losses, too much inconsolable grief. We divide our losses into those that are true and worthy of our attention and those that happen to “other people.” We view those “others” as experiencing insignificant losses, losses not worthy of wider public concern. Kenneth Doka in his groundbreaking work, Disenfranchised Grief (1989), defined disenfranchised grief “as the grief that persons experience when they incur a loss that is not or cannot be openly acknowledged, publicly mourned, or socially supported” (p. 4). He goes on to say that this concept “recognizes that societies have sets of norms — in effect, grieving rules — that attempt to specify who, when, where, how long, and for whom people should grieve” (p. 4).

So many of our losses and so much of our grief falls outside the acceptable norms. Our society angrily declares, “No, we will not join you in publicly acknowledging your losses if your grief involves pets, jobs, status, friends, divorce, chronic illness and disability, childlessness, abortion, miscarriages, suicide, the death of a same-sex lover, the death of a lover with whom you are having an extra marital affair, aging, and the losses incurred as a result of sexism, homoprejudice, racism, and ageism.” Surely, all of us can add many other forms of societally invalidated grief to this list.

Losses take on a surreal quality when there is no acknowledgment by others. All of us need to tell the story of our lives without having to repress or edit out vast sections because these aspects do not fit into acceptable social categories. When your grief receives public recognition, you are given the space to engage in much needed mourning rituals. Grief that is unacknowledged and illegitimatized has no prescribed ritual. As a therapist I have found that helping clients create their own rituals helps to facilitate grief resolution.

Loss that goes unacknowledged by either the individual or society must be looked at as a response rooted in denial. The message is “No, I am not recognizing ‘this’ as someone or something to which I am attached.” Society recognizes only certain forms of attachment as worthy of support. Hence, when your lesbian lover dies, society does not know how to respond to such a relationship. To this way of thinking a lesbian relationship is itself an oxymoron — it is not a relationship because it is not heterosexual. Therefore, there really has been no loss since there has been no legitimate attachment. Or, if your animal companion of 15 years dies, society once again dismisses your bonds of attachment by callously advising, “Just get another one.”

The subject of unacknowledged and disenfranchised grief is worthy of further investigation and research. Whenever we study loss we inevitably study attachment as well. By focusing on the interplay between the two, we will work toward broadening our concepts of attachment, loss, and grief. As a society, our traditional ideas about the nature of family are changing. We are being challenged to expand our definitions and consider new and different familial attachments and arrangements. As we progress with this so, too, must we become more legitimating and responsive to new categories of loss and grief.

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