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Getting to “After”
“There is something noble in the love of the dead.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have been thinking for the past few days now about Molly Osberg’s recent piece in Jezebel, “There Is No After.” In it, Osberg describes the incalculable toll of the past year, both in terms of human lives lost and in emotional and psychic trauma for those of us who remain: “Now, staring down the oft-invoked ‘return to normalcy,’ I don’t know how to metabolize such a towering sense of collective grief, and one that’s infused practically everything I’ve ever known.”
Osberg describes the surfeit of advice for that return to normalcy, on how we can transition back to our former, normal lives, advice that ranges from the well-meaning to outright denialism. “In the place of a shared sense of reality or collective expression of mourning,” she writes, “I see a torrent of advice on how a person who managed to survive can feel more self-actualized once they return to the shuffle between the office and after-work drinks. To me, this looks like denial, the first tentative step towards what I’m told are seven distinct stages of grief.”
I share Osberg’s frustration with this move, and I share the sense of dismay that we’re going to come out of this moment with no real accounting for what actually happened. It feels overwhelming, how fast we’re moving, even as I find myself yearning to speed things up. Once again Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History comes to mind, the figure who both wants to stay amidst the ruins and try to make things right, even as winds from a storm in Paradise are blowing us into the future. How do we hope to stay with the past even as we are pulled inexorably forward?
Where I pause is in the framing of her piece as a “before” and “after,” organized as it is around the motif of the Evangelical Rapture. This kind of apocalyptic thinking, I’ve found, makes it far more difficult to approach grief and mourning, precisely because it organizes time around a traumatic rupture, rather than as a continuum.
The problem with grief in Western capitalist countries is that it’s relentlessly conceived of as a thing to be “gotten over.” We’re given support groups, grief counseling, therapy, even medication — all in an effort to move the bereaved past the stage of mourning into the rest of their life…
