In western culture, we’re mostly death-phobic. That is, unless you’re talking about the death of a celebrity. Then, we go all out: we send scores of flowers to the star’s apartment or scene of death; we attend massive vigils or city-wide movie marathons; we tune into a funeral procession, wake, or tribute in droves when it’s televised; and, most recently, we hold open manifestations of praise, prayer, and adoration on social media. When a celebrity dies, we grieve together as a culture. One needs only to look at the recent outpouring of grief for stars such as Natalie Cole, Alan Rickman, or David Bowie to see direct evidence of this.
The way we mourn celebrities in our culture can seem over-the-top when compared to the standards of our “regular” mourning, for those we know more intimately. Perhaps there’s a reason for this. Mourning a celebrity can be an act of catharsis, as Caitlin Doughty says. It is an outward display of grief, something that might have been forgone for others more intimately known. But why do we seem to mourn celebrities more deeply than our own fathers, mothers, sisters, or brothers? The reasons can include the “human complexity” of our relationships with them, as Caitlin Doughty suggests, as well as the way our society has failed us when it comes to how we channel public grief.
After Rickman’s and Bowie’s deaths, the nature of public grief was hotly debated in the media. Journalist Camilla Long was direct (and controversial) in her thoughts about the social media outpouring of grief in response to Bowie’s death: “I think grief should be private,” she argued. “This is to do with the utter insincerity of social media grief, the odd mimicry and circle-jerkery of it” (1). Yet how we mourn the famous reveals that perhaps we don’t want to grieve in private–in fact, grieving in private is the antithesis to the way we have mourned throughout history. Individuals have turned to social media to express grief because we no longer have tangible rituals or customs that are practiced by the community at large. These rituals used to succeed in uniting a community after a death.
We used to die in our homes, surrounded by our families and friends. We used to keep a lock of a loved one’s hair to remember them by, or have it worked into a piece of jewelry or artwork that was displayed in our home. We used to have special ways of announcing the death of a child, with white crepe on our doors and white-clothed pallbearers at the funeral. We used to lay out and bury our own dead, both physical acts of labor that brought with them a special type of physical, exhaustive catharsis. And we used to wear black for a significant period after a death to signify to others that we were mourning, and to treat us with kindness.
For the most part, we are now removed from these tangible rituals of grief and burial, and in some ways, we have done ourselves a disservice. We have lost our relationship with death, so to speak. Now we are grasping for any outlet that will allow us to work toward rebuilding that connection. Many have found that outlet in social media, where to participate in the remembrance of a celebrity is to participate in a cultural event.
These changes to the way we mourn collectively are not entirely our faults. Mourning rituals and outward signs of bearing grief changed drastically with World War I, when many of the previously aforementioned practices were put to rest. Britain was at the forefront of this change: “Families of English soldiers were encouraged to avoid mourning,” says Bess Lovejoy, “lest the whole nation appear swathed in depressing black” (2). Death was occurring on a massive scale without cessation, and to have an entire nation donning black and participating in mourning was deemed bad for morale. Because of this, mourning rituals very quickly found their demise.
Our society has also transformed dramatically since the days these mourning rituals were last practiced. We live in a more secular world, where we shy away from our religious roots, including the death rituals that were once part of our religious customs. For example, Last Rites is a ritual process in Catholicism that includes Penance, Eucharist, and The Anointing of the Sick, a ritual that offers as much comfort to the near-dying as it does to their family members.
Even more impactful is how our world moves at a much faster pace than it did just 15 years ago. Everything is connected. We work on-the-go and remotely, and our work lives blend into our leisure. We are measured by our job titles and our output; if we’re not producing, well, there’s not a lot of room for us in the workforce. New widows and widowers, grieving parents, and siblings are not so different from new mothers in this regard: taking time off from work is not guaranteed, and taking too much time threatens job security. We can no longer gradually re-acclimate ourselves to society after a death; we must do it quickly. This technological empire also affects how we treat those who are in mourning. Is a Facebook wall post a sufficient way to tell someone you are sorry for their loss? For many, it is–for it is sometimes the only condolence extended.
Today’s world makes it difficult to grieve communally or to offer condolences meaningfully. We have to fight to build a period of mourning into a world where fleeting ephemera takes precedence over meaningful acts of permanence. Some communities have fought to maintain their rituals surrounding death and mourning, both on and outside of social media:
Recently, with the highly publicized and alarming numbers of young black youths being shot by white police officers, the African American way of mourning–and the importance of the open casket wake and funeral service, as author Sheri Booker describes–has become even more important in memorializing a life lost. The #BlackLivesMatter movement on social media has also revealed that sharing the loss of a black life with the greater national and global community communicates something that transcends that one life, that the violence towards, and injustice against, all black lives must change.
The Mexican community and the Assyrian community are two groups of people who have also continued to uphold their communal ways of mourning, ways that exist outside of social media. Most poignantly, both groups have also been deeply affected by violence in light of recent events, though in different ways: the effects of the Mexican drug war in Mexico and the southwestern U.S., and continued Assyrian persecution as a religious minority group in the Middle East. In the face of so much tragedy, cultural mourning rituals, such as the Mexican ritual of visiting the local cemetery with treats and gifts for the dead during Día de Muertos, or the Assyrian custom of eating the sweet halva in a shared meal after a burial to taste something sweet “in the midst of a bitter day,” are vital to the healing and strengthening of a group of people (3). These rituals, in part, are what allow these communities to endure.
When evaluated against how we mourn less-famous members of our society, how we mourn the famous reveals that our culturally normative way of handling grief–individually–is perhaps not sufficient. While we have attempted to use social media as a platform for our shared community grief, perhaps this is also not enough. This is why, in recent years, communities such as the Death Positivity community have gained support, achieved notoriety, and attracted a wide following of people from all different backgrounds and ages. People are meeting at Death Cafés and Death Salons, in person, to talk about what it means to die, to grieve, and to outwardly mourn in today’s world. Traditions such as mourning jewelry are being revived, to offer the bereaved a piece of tangible comfort in a world where everything seems to evaporate after a 24-hour media cycle. As a community, we are actively seeking new ways of displaying public grief and new ways of remembering lives lost, whether those lives are famous or not.
Top photo: David Bowie memorial, Brixton, photo by Mr Seb/Flickr.
Sources:
- Saul, Heather. “JK Rowling Joins Debate about Public Grief after David Bowie’s Death.” The Independent. Independent Digital News and Media, 16 Jan. 2016. Web. 26 Feb. 2016.
- Lovejoy, Bess. “Mourning As Memory: A Brief Primer on Victorian Mourning Customs.” Beyond the Dark Veil: Post Mortem and Mourning Photography from the Thanatos Archive. N.p.: Grand Central and Last Gasp, 2015. 144-46. Print.
- Sarkis, Nardin. “How the Assyrians Endure: Mourning and Burial Traditions.” E-mail interview. 28 Jan. 2016.
