What does it mean?
Feb 02, 2008 by
libjpn
I take the liberty of reposting Jes' comment from the mothership from the Andy thread because I think it is important
My own thoughts below the fold
I post it here because commenting on it at ObWi might seem a little too inside baseball-ish.
I struggle with the same thing that Jes talks about, and I've spent all sorts of time wondering about it. On one level, I have no doubt that Jes is correct, and we do have to move on. I have been trying to find an essay that compares Shakespeare's view of tragedy and mourning to Homer's, and the evidence was that while Shakespeare often had his characters consumed by grief, Homer has Ulysses crew, after losing many men and being washed up on a foreign shore, first take care to make their meals and prepare shelter and then turn to grief, suggesting that Homer had a more realistic notion, because people get on with their lives and that grief always has to take a back seat to the question of living and surviving.
But, when our basic needs are met, what do we do with ourselves? Lincoln said in the Gettysburg address
It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us
That tolling of the word 'dedicated' seems to be related. I think it was John Thullen who noted death as an ultimate irrationality, a hole that suddenly appears, in defiance of all mental models. No matter how much we prepare, suddenly, there is this gaping hole where a person was. With the death of a child, I can't really imagine what sort of mental models are left in tatters. With Andy's death, we have this strange suspension of trying to honor what he believed in and trying to have it make sense with our own mental models, especially if we are strongly opposed to the war.
This ia an incoherent addition to Jes' eloquent comment, but I thought that maybe the discussion might continue here, in a quieter corner of the bar.
Comments
Feb 02, 2008, 08:32:40 Turbulence wrote:
I understand the notion of refraining from using Andrew's death in political arguments because he explicitly asked you not to and because you respect him. I don't understand most of Jes' argument beyond that though: it makes no sense to me.
[i]But one thing I think could destroy it - really terminate the process of mourning in an unnatural kind of way, make the pain unreal and unordinary - is to use the death of a friend as a political point, as anything other than that intimate personal pain that must be worked through.[/i]
Who is to say what is an "unnatural" way of terminating mourning? Why would fighting for a cause "terminate" mourning in any event? Since mourning always ends anyway, what is it about other means for ending mourning that make them more "natural"?
I mean, if you think there's a longstanding cultural norm that we all share that says "using death to make a political point is wrong", then by all means make that argument, but I don't think that's what you're saying here.
Who is to say that political action isn't the optimal way for some people to "work through" their political pain? If so, I see no reason to deny them. There is tremendous human variety and a great variability in how people cope with loss; while you may have certain preferences, I don't see any reason to believe that they're even close to universal. Or that imposing those preferences on others would be just.
[i]You see it happen with parents who lost a child and turned that loss into a cause.[/i]
No, actually I don't see that in such parents. You seem to, but again, you're perceptions are not universal. Replace the "You" with "I" and that statement may become correct. I'm kind of repulsed at the thought of judging parents who lost a child in that way.
[i]However much sympathy I have for the parents, something has gone wrong when you can't mourn for someone you miss because instead there's a cause to be fought. I could see the risk of it happening with Andy - with anyone who died in Iraq whom I knew and I miss - to feel that the political cause matters too much not to feed mourning into it.[/i]
I don't understand why having a cause to fight for and mourning are mutually exclusive. I mean, most mourning people go back to work at some point...is working also mutually exclusive with mourning? Again, some mourners will benefit from having an associated cause to fight for.
It seems that there is a long social tradition of activism that springs from empathy brought about by a death. I don't see why that's wrong. If you have preferences about what's right and wrong, by all means share them. But the assumption that your preferences are universal or well founded slightly bothers me.
Feb 02, 2008, 08:44:59 Jeff wrote:
[i]I don't understand why having a cause to fight for and mourning are mutually exclusive. I mean, most mourning people go back to work at some point...is working also mutually exclusive with mourning? Again, some mourners will benefit from having an associated cause to fight for.[/i]
Assuredly, it's right for the family of a murdered member to work to bring the killer to justice -- wouldn't we wonder at a family who seemed indifferent? If a child dies of a disease, surely the parents, in their grief, might wish that grief on no other parent.
So I think it depends on the friend. If a friend died protesting the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, wouldn't it be right to raise awareness of that cause even as one is grieving the freind.
Feb 02, 2008, 08:58:17 OCSteve wrote:
For myself, I’m not going to analyze it. Reading that was most likely my closest moment with Jes ever. I know we connect at certain levels from time to time, but it is fleeting. That was special. That is the Jes I knew was back there behind the curtain.
Jes: You may not believe it but I love you and you are one of my favorite people in this online world.
Feb 02, 2008, 09:08:47 Phil wrote:
Turbulence, further to your point, I'm thinking of someone like John Walsh, who used the death of his son to accomplish amazing things with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, America's Most Wanted, AMBER Alerts, etc.
Feb 02, 2008, 09:13:38 nous wrote:
This sort of ambivalence is something that I've definitely been struggling with myself. I'm 20-some days out from my Ph.D. qualifying exams and one of the major topics I've been researching is representations of war and soldiers across media (literature, cinema, video games, blogs). This is the topic of my orals.
Andrew's death, coming when it did, has fed into and intensified a lot of what I have been reading about trauma and and loss and feelings of betrayal. So I can't read this or talk about it without circling back upon six months worth of reading and dozens of books. I can relate to your thinking about Odysseus because I've been thinking about Achilles and Priam and finding thoughts of Andrew stuck together with passages from Tim O'Brien.
And I can't separate the personal from the political and the academic. It's all part of the same thing. I just try my best to be very careful to be fair to all viewpoints and represent them accurately as I try to map out how they relate to each other. I'm treating it as a sort of reflexive ethnography.
Feb 02, 2008, 10:00:37 libjpn wrote:
Turbulence,
I agree with the point that you make, and I don't want to claim this is Jes' point, but when we see some people have their life totally consumed by their commitment to a cause that I pull back. I guess that in some way, I am 'judging' them, but if you totally refrain from any sort of 'judgement', you end up leaving your own life unexamined, I think. And the time when we see a parent's efforts, it usually means that it has become large enough to be noticeable. Which is part of the problem with our wired world, has it really gotten as big as we think it has, or because we can see it more readily, the smaller things become much much bigger?
More, later, I'm running around on a rainy Saturday between office and home, but ditto on OCSteve's comment.
Feb 02, 2008, 10:31:03 Turbulence wrote:
[i]when we see some people have their life totally consumed by their commitment to a cause that I pull back[/i]
LJ, sure, I agree that such cases are problems. But Jes' comment didn't limit it to such cases: I read her comment as having much broader applicability. After all, she wrote about her own experiences and she's hardly "completely consumed" by Iraq.
Also, if people completely lose themselves in a cause for any reason, that's a problem. Becoming completely obsessed and imbalanced is bad regardless of what role grief plays, is it not?
[i]And the time when we see a parent's efforts, it usually means that it has become large enough to be noticeable.[/i]
I think we have to be careful extrapolating here. Whether or not parents devote themselves to a cause after a child dies, their life is going to be really screwed up for a long time. Just because they're not crusading doesn't mean they're any less screwed up. I think there's some selection bias here: yes, effective people tend to be very devoted. But I haven't seen tons of cases where parents have become totally consumed for many years. If someone is totally consumed by a cause for a year or two after their kid dies, well, what's the problem? They weren't going to have a normal life for that year anyway, right? If it brings them some small measure of peace and its not hurting anyone, who are we to judge?
Feb 02, 2008, 13:08:20 OCSteve wrote:
People – it isn’t that complicated.
Jes: That was the best thing, the most beautiful thing your fingers ever typed as far as I am concerned. That is that…
Feb 02, 2008, 16:07:32 Jesurgislac wrote:
Goodness. Okay.
(I just saw lj's comment on ObWing.)
The process of mourning is so internal and so personal, that I certainly don't feel anyone else can judge that another person got it wrong, or is doing it wrong - <I>except</I> that sometimes it seems absolutely clear that something <I>has</I> gone wrong - I mean with <I>that person</I>. I am thinking of specific examples which obviously are difficult to share precisely because you have to know the person both before and after, to know that something is <I>wrong</I>.
I'm not going to go up and change all those angular brackets to square ones, sorry.
There's a certain stage of really intense grief and pain after someone's died that you cared for that you just hvae to get through. You have to keep making meals and doing housework and all the regular things, and dealing with that [i]never again[/i] thing. That's my experience at least, for myself and for others I was close to who lost someone.
And then afterwards, there's a kind of ordinary pain when you think of that person, or talk about them, that's much easier to deal with, and that is the point at which I feel it works to go into the political/activist mode with regard to that person's death, and talk about why it mattered.
I think I'm saying something slightly different from what I said on ObWing, because I was speaking very personally and specifically there - about the impulse to use Andy's death, why I didn't, and why I'm glad I didn't/won't.
[i]In general[/i], if someone in the first stage of grief/pain wanted to use it for a political campaign to change things so that other people wouldn't die in the same way, I'd suggest to them - if they were on those terms with me - that they didn't. That they wait, do it later, if they still want to.
I wouldn't [i]judge[/i] them for doing it, or think they were bad people, or even probably try hard to argue them out of it, because only they could know what worked for them, and maybe it would.
Feb 02, 2008, 21:00:10 Phil wrote:
Man, I hate ( believe it or not) to poke a stick into a hornet's test, but I'll bet my last dollar that a couple of people on this thread were singing very, [b]very[/b] different tunes about this very same topic regarding a) 9/11 victims, b) Pat Tillman and c) Cindy Sheehan.
Feb 02, 2008, 22:12:54 libjpn wrote:
Lots of things to comment on and I'll take them a bit out of order.
OC, I totally see where you are coming from, that you find this common ground with Jes and you want it to remain, not picked at like a graduate student telling you your favorite story doesn't really mean what you think it did. Don't take the discussion as undercutting your agreement. It's just that, for obvious reasons, I've not only been consumed with figuring out how we are supposed to mourn, but also how we are supposed to relate our feelings to each other when only share fragments of text between us.
Jes, apologies if I elided your personal thoughts with your general thoughts. I tend to agree that there are standards one holds for themselves and they are often more stringent than what you would judge other people on. But on this, I really feel the need to talk about it, so please don't take any of these discussion as trying to judge you or anyone else, just trying to figure out what I think.
Phil, provocative comment, but I'm glad you brought those cases up. I think that while I agree with the points that are made on behalf of those three (I guess the last one shouldn't be Cindy Sheehan, but her son, Casey), what I think is the same tune is that I am sorry/upset/appalled that such a thing reaches a point where they have to use their grief to make a point. Who I am sorry for/upset with/appalled at, I'm not really sure, though it is not the mourners as such. However, when you see the kind of abuse that Cindy Sheehan got from the Redstate crowd, what bothers me is that the normal space for grieving is impinged. On the other hand (and now, Terri Schiavo comes to mind), when grieving parents use their grief to push an agenda, that too is problematic.
We automatically grant people who are grieving a certain amount of leeway in their expressions. Yet there is no real definition of that space. Now, that isn't surprising, because a lot of social spaces are undefined, but we generally can figure out about where the space begins and ends. But with grieving, I really have no idea.
Feb 02, 2008, 22:59:57 john miller wrote:
First and foremost. I am in complete agreement with OCSteve about Jes' comment.
Jes, I want to thank you for being open with all of us about your feelings on this and other subjects.
Grief is a very individualized process, despite the "5 stages of grief" theory. Different people handle it in different ways.
Some people need to lash out, some people need to be very private.
My personal feeling is similar to Jes' in that, although the temptation to use Andrew's death as a basis for a politically charged statement is there, it would be specifically going against his expressed wishes.
Once we cross that line, we are really no longer in the process of dealing with our grief. In fact, to a great degree, we use that action as a means of turning our back on the painfulness of the grief.
A personal note. When our son was in Iraq both my wife and I knew that we could receive a phone call or hear the doorbell at any moment. Every once in a while I asked myself how I would react, knowing that the local papers would want a comment from me. In my mind, I usually made some angry comment about Bush and the war.
In truth, however, I think that both my wife and I would have been too crippled by our grief to even consider doing that.
Ultimately, though, the only people with any justification to make a statement with some form of political, or caused based, impact are the people most directly impacted by the loss.
But it is important that they work through some of their grief first, or else they may never get beyond it.
Feb 03, 2008, 00:40:02 Turbulence wrote:
Jes,
Thanks for your explanation. It makes a lot more sense with your added clarifications.
Feb 03, 2008, 00:56:56 Phil wrote:
[i]Phil, provocative comment, but I'm glad you brought those cases up. I think that while I agree with the points that are made on behalf of those three (I guess the last one shouldn't be Cindy Sheehan, but her son, Casey) . . . [/i]
Well, I specifically named Cindy because, as you note, she was subject to the most vile slander imaginable by the movement conservatives out there, and a lot of people -- including not only me, but some people who are now saying some very different things about using the death of one's children or loved ones as political causes-- defended her actions, saying that nobody had any business telling her how she should and shouldn't grieve her son.
Granted it's not exactly contradictory, given that people are saying they're not [i]judging[/i], precisely, but that they find it problematic or what have you. But it shows that not only do we give a lot more leeway in the matter of grief, we give a lot more leeway in using grief for a cause when its a cause we agree with.
Feb 03, 2008, 00:59:15 Phil wrote:
And to avoid beating around the bush about it, and to the extent that she's inclined to answer me about it (which I will guess is not much): Jes, did you feel this same way about Cindy Sheehan's actions after the death of her son? If not, what is or was the difference? Is it Andrew's death that causes you to view her actions then differently now (if you do), or do you feel it's a horse of an entirely different color?
Feb 03, 2008, 01:33:33 Jesurgislac wrote:
<I>Jes, did you feel this same way about Cindy Sheehan's actions after the death of her son? </I>
Yes, I did, since you ask.
Not that I know Cindy Sheehan well enough to be able to say with any certainty that her political activism following the death of her son was the wrong thing to do [i]for her[/i] - how would I know what stage of mourning she had reached when she sat down to get an answer from Bush about why her son was killed? How would I know how her political activism helped her through her mourning? Certainly the right-wing acid spew vomited in her direction couldn't have been helpful, but that wasn't any of her doing: that was just the inhuman reactions of people who are so lost in their own political activism they have no room for any human feeling any more.
Feb 03, 2008, 01:45:30 Jesurgislac wrote:
And in case that wasn't clear enough:
Yes, I thought that Cindy Sheehan's political activism about her son's death was [I]probably[/I] the wrong thing for her to do.
Not [I]wrong[/I] in the sense that she deserved to be condemned for doing it or attacked for doing it, in any of the myriad ways the wingnuts had of condemning/attacking her. Just, quite probably, not the way for her to get through the necessary stages of mourning her son.
But a very small handful of people had the knowledge, the ability, and the right to judge that accurately or to tell her that - I certainly didn't, and nor did anyone else who knew of Cindy Sheehan only what the media had reported, which included everyone I saw doing the judgy thing.
Maybe it [i]was[/i] the right thing for her to do: certainly it wasn't for anyone else to decide on her behalf.
Feb 03, 2008, 09:12:15 John Thullen wrote:
I haven't much to add other than thanks to Jes for her thoughts, and thanks to lj for delving into it to tease out some meaning, something at which he excels.
John Miller -- I was relieved when you let us know your son had completed his tour of duty.
I've no opinion about how people approach loss -- whatever works.
As to Andrew's request to us ----
If you go to http://www.rockymountainnew... you will view a video, if you haven't already, of Andrew (he narrates) in training stateside before his tour of duty.
Let me add that I met Andrew over lunch early in the year. No two people were more unlike each other than we two.
Of course, I didn't really know him.
But I was struck by the fact that he was a perfectly rational guy. I doubt a single word came out of his mouth or that he took any action that wasn't first subjected to his obviously keen and ordered intelligence.
I think the key to granting Andrew his wish that we not use his name in our political expression about the war is that he thought out every nuance of what he was doing.
He was complete in his conclusions about his duty regardless of even HIS opinions about the war. Our opinions are ultimately irrelevant to his life and death and the way he chose to approach both.
His life and death were his statement and there it is. He took both to their end and there is nothing we can add or subtract in his name.
He might say have at it for or against, by all means. But it has nothing to do with him.
In the video you can see that he was direct, resolved, and calmly willful. He had thought about the worst and accepted it, or at least made a fair trade with it.
His wife speaks briefly too, and it is clear that there was nothing for her to add or subtract from his decision to serve in Iraq.
Imagine having a friend, a dedicated mountain climber, who scaled the highest peaks by the most dangerous routes, because he had too.
Imagine he dies in the attempt.
Imagine using his name either in an effort to level every mountain in the world because of the harm we imagine they did him, or imagine using his name in an effort to justify the existence of mountains.
The mountains are there and he climbed them.
Case closed, as far as he is concerned.
Feb 03, 2008, 09:19:31 john miller wrote:
JT, beautifully said.
Feb 03, 2008, 09:37:45 Barnabas wrote:
I recognise the "lazy pain". When you lose someone if blows right through you like an icy wind.
Thankyou
Feb 03, 2008, 09:51:31 Turbulence wrote:
Perhaps I haven't been paying attention, but the video indicates that Andrew was out of the military (or at least not on active duty) and rejoined after the war started. Is that true?
Feb 03, 2008, 10:52:40 OCSteve wrote:
John Thullen: Thank you for sharing that. You are devastating with your wit. Yet when you are serious it has even more impact.
I’ve watched that video 20 times in the last month.
Feb 03, 2008, 11:04:02 OCSteve wrote:
Turb: As I understand it, Andrew was reserve. He was not activated to go to Iraq. He volunteered.
Feb 03, 2008, 11:37:20 Turbulence wrote:
OCSteve,
Thanks for explaining.
Feb 03, 2008, 17:05:44 JakeB wrote:
I want to add that I find the comment that lj reposted here to be deeply resonant for me, and I am grateful to Jes for having written it.
Having been an atheist for many years, I've had to grit my teeth and swallow a violent response when told that someone is in a better place now. Most of the time I've thought that's because I'm having someone else's (wrong) beliefs thrust upon me, and only because I recognize that said beliefs may be a comfort to my interlocutor do I remain silent (that's also why such comments are far more tolerable from someone who is also grieving than from someone who did not know the deceased well). But it occurs to me that one of the other reasons is it's a way of deflecting pain.
I'm not sure, though, whether I dislike that aspect of it simply because it's unavailable to me, or because it's a way of avoiding that look into the abyss which is necessary when someone you care for dies.
I hold no brief for Auden, and I don't even care for "Funeral Blues" that much, except that the line "Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead." is perfect. Because that's all there is to know and to bear.
On the other hand, the times that a loved one has died and I happened to be working at a physical job, I've always been grateful that I could live by my muscles and think as little as possible. The nights and mornings were horrible enough.
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I was thinking just the other day how very wise of Andy to say, firmly, to all and everyone, no matter what side they were on in this argument: that we were not to use Andy's death as a political talking point.
Because I've felt the impulse, twice, in the weeks since Andy died, to do so: and each time I've refrained because Andy had asked us not to. (I would like to say because my better self realised it was a bad idea, but the truth is, no: I refrained because I remembered that this had been particularly and specifically requested.)
On one occasion, I'm quite glad I didn't: on another, I still feel a bit dammit, Andy! about not doing it.
But dammit, Andy! or not: when someone dies, their death is a peculiarly intimate pain to everyone who knew them. It's a kind of lazy pain, like we call a certain kind of wind a lazy wind: it doesn't bother going round you, it goes right through.
It's real, that pain: the knowledge that someone has gone beyond reach, that never again. It's almost too real to bear. There isn't any way to deal with it that I know of except the process of mourning: it takes time. Eventually, it turns into a bearable nugget of ordinary pain that lives on, as memory, as moments.
But one thing I think could destroy it - really terminate the process of mourning in an unnatural kind of way, make the pain unreal and unordinary - is to use the death of a friend as a political point, as anything other than that intimate personal pain that must be worked through.
You see it happen with parents who lost a child and turned that loss into a cause. However much sympathy I have for the parents, something has gone wrong when you can't mourn for someone you miss because instead there's a cause to be fought. I could see the risk of it happening with Andy - with anyone who died in Iraq whom I knew and I miss - to feel that the political cause matters too much not to feed mourning into it.
This is different from anger - I don't think Andy would mind that I'm furious about this. I've been a political activist for over half my life: I've known political activists all my life. I don't know how many Andy knew: but I'm grateful that - dammit, Andy! - I was warned from the start not to go that road with Andrew Olmsted's death.
I am not at all sure that this has made any sense to anyone but me, but, for what it's worth, there it is.