On Hearing News of Prince Philip’s Death During the Derek Chauvin Trial
Public Displays of Grief and the Politics of Mourning
Charlie Stross has a great thread on Prince Philip’s death and what it means to perform compulsory mourning for a stranger, which I recommend everyone checking out. In particular, I really appreciate the way he notes the divide between public discussions of sex versus public discussions of grief; in the Victorian era, death was omnipresent, while sex was hidden, and now, it seems, the poles have reversed, with talk of sex everywhere even as death has become increasingly hidden from view in the modern world.
But I want to separate out two halves of the question of mourning that are embedded in his opening statement, “Compulsory mourning for a stranger sucks.” Compulsory mourning is indeed a wretched affair, be it for a head of state or celebrity or other public figure. The bizarre obligation to muster tears for Prince Philip, or to have to endure forty-one minutes of cacophony throughout the Commonwealth, strikes me as nothing less than suffocating. But this is not just true of strangers; it also sucks to have to engage in compulsory mourning for someone you knew — a family member that you actually hated, for example, for whom you’re expected to wail and bemoan and shed tears.
