For most of us, the topic of grief needs little explanation.

We have all lost something, and most of us mourn the things we have lost—a parent, a friend, a puppy, a prized heirloom, a job, a belief, a religion, a way of life. As most intuitively understand, grief is our response to loss, the set of thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors we adopt in response to the incomprehensible experience of losing something forever. 

Because grief is difficult to define, psychologists, anthropologists, and other apparent experts in the realm of human sentience have historically confused grief with loss, mourning, and bereavement. As a result, we’ve come to perceive the terms as interchangeable—though each carries important etymological and connotative distinctions.

Loss is the painful experience of deprivation that follows the death or misplacement of a person, object, event, situation, belief, or faith. 

Grief describes the psychological responses we adopt when faced with loss—either retroactively or proactively (as in Kubler-Ross’ model of anticipatory loss).

Bereavement is the indefinite period that follows a loss. It drags with it various tedious normative connotations and prescriptive behaviors, such as public expressions of sadness, funerals, and endless conversations about that which has been lost.

Mourning describes the set of behaviors we adopt during bereavement to express, process, or repress grief. Mourning is a human construct. It is context-dependent and culturally circumscribed, and mourning behaviors are typically social behaviors.

Because we cannot assess, measure, or really understand anything about grief, we frequently confuse gestures of mourning with expressions of grief. This confluence of terms is not unique to loss; despite what the impregnable ideological fortress of science may suggest, we cannot reliably assess the quality of any internal experience since we are all barred from objectivity by the limitations of perception.

Historical treatment of the subjectivity problem culminates in the word of Renee Descartes, whose infamous armchair utterance has only further complicated the whole business of human cognition and behavior. Descartes’ conclusion—that the seat of the self is nested firmly in the mind—marks the beginning of the long and unfortunate reign of mind-body dualism, a misleading philosophy of mind that complements the worship of science and quantitative analysis and dismisses the relevance of the amorphous mind.

Until the contents of the mind were themselves subject to scientific study—in the late 19th and early 20th century—the concept of grief did not exist because there was no need for it. Anthropologists limited themselves to studying mourning behaviors, and doctors cared for those rendered insane with heartache.

The treatment of grief as a noun and worthy topic of psychological study begins (roughly) in the early 20th century with the publication of Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia. While Freud operated from the coeval assumption of mourning-as-grief, he sought to distinguish normal bereavement behaviors from the prevalent pathology of the time: melancholia.

The contents of Freud’s paper consist mainly of observational features of normal versus pathological grief and are, in the main, archaic and largely semantic. Yet the very endeavor of reducing grief to its psychological rather than behavioral features suggests a shift in popular thinking about grief and mourning.

In Freud’s work, grief represents a psychological milestone on the path to self-actualization, a developmentally appropriate task for the average adult navigating his first major loss. It is not so much a unilateral response to the death of a loved one as it is a gesture towards understanding, accepting, and internalizing one’s ultimate demise.

Enter the world wars. 

Millions die. The press is given unprecedented access to battlefields and trenches. The threat of death is not only omnipresent but proximate. Everyone knows someone lost to the wars. As historian Patricia Jaland explains, the scale of death during the first world war promoted a culture of avoidance and “private grief,” marked by the absence of mourning rituals and traditions. 

The second world war intensifies this “culture of repression.” Nihilism is the fashionable ideology (as it still seems to be for adolescents). Mock acceptance and dismissal of grief are the norms. 

Modern technology allows us to efficiently wipe out scores of innocent people and watch them die. But too much exposure to trauma is inevitably met with cognitive repression. This is the era of the Baby Boomer generation, infamous for their stoicism, emotional repression, and resistance to psychiatric treatment. The same technologies deployed to kill people are those we use to distance ourselves from death and dying. Now, we have a choice. And when given a choice between discomfort and denial, human beings respond predictably.

That is why the Vietnam War shocked so many people. 

Americans had grown accustomed to their blinders, resistant to the realities the marginalized and oppressed faced. 

Some maintain that the Vietnam War re-invigorated collective mourning in America. Still, the public response to the war, coupled with the unfortunate treatment of returning veterans, suggests something else altogether.

Conscientious objection is not the same as collective grief.

The counter-culture of the 60s represented not a return to communal mourning practices but a commodification of suffering. The Vietnam War was a convenient excuse for political opposition, a sexy stand-in for profound economic and social dissatisfaction. It is far more compelling to cite the burning bodies of children as a reason for a demonstration than to enumerate one’s aggrievances.

If the collective response to the war were grounded in empathy and collective mourning, we would perhaps have greeted returning troops differently. As it stands, Vietnam veterans continue to face discrimination and restricted access to resources.

Despite the coverage of and resistance to the Vietnam War, the topic of death remains taboo. As Michael Simpson wrote in 1979, “death is a very badly kept secret: such an unmentionable and taboo topic that there are over 750 books in print asserting that we are ignoring the subject.” Simpson’s sarcasm points to an essential cultural paradox in the modern treatment of death: as explicit mention of death and loss is driven further underground, we develop more ingenious euphemisms and metaphors ever to speak of it indirectly. As Graeme Griffin writes, “death as a subject of both serious and casual concern had almost disappeared in the Western world—” almost.

The arbitrary destruction of war had given way to the stubborn insistence upon finding meaning and value in everything. In a progressively more conservative United States organized explicitly around economic principles, grief has no value. We must give it value. Feminists begin to write of grief as a motivator for change. Queer critics write of grief as an essential catalyst for revolutionary action. Grief becomes a functional component of social change—and grief that is not functional is pathological.

By the 1990s, grief was widely perceived as a tool of political transformation. This represents the beginning of the commodification of grief in earnest. 

A unique feature of technocratic, post-modern society is its commodification of all things—including cultural values and emotional responses. Reality television constructs an empire around the commodification of emotional reactions. Suddenly the sincerity of emotion is assessed by the degree to which it fulfills others’ expectations of that emotional expression.

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ stages of grief represent the culmination of the commodification of grief; by reducing a complex emotion to disparate (action-based) steps, Kubler-Ross (unintentionally) solidifies the pervasive assumption that grief exists to fulfill a purpose. Whether that purpose is political transformation or self-actualization doesn’t matter. The bottom line is that there can be no valueless human experiences in a post-modern, technocratic world. Grief ceases to respond to death and loss and becomes instead an opportunity to gain. Grief, in essence, is converted to the grievance.

Consider:

The families of Columbine victims (and all victims of school shootings thereafter) become gun-control advocates. Those mourning extrajudicially executed African Americans became civil rights advocates. Victims of heat waves, hurricanes, and earthquakes become sustainability advocates. There is the pervasive urge to make suffering mean something, to promote one’s personal or political agenda with one’s grief.

Grief is less a response to the death of another and more a gesture of anguish, a protest against the loss we perceive as having been inflicted upon us. To accept that death is meaningless, indiscriminate, as Kierkegaard argued, is so intolerable that we either shroud it with metaphor, fearful of the intimacy that proximity brings, or we endow it with significant personal meaning, to give it purpose after all.

What we really fear is not the death of others but the loss we experience because of it. This is grief.