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Who Do We Grieve?
By Lead Storyteller Melanee R.
Folded inside my grandmother’s old family album is a collection of newspaper cutouts of obituaries remembering great-grandparents, great-aunts, uncles, and cousins. Along with memorial service information, each obituary highlights each person’s greatest achievements, the people they left behind, or who preceded them in death. The longer the list, I suppose the more reason to grieve.
But what if there’s no one to pen the obituary or to orchestrate the celebration of life service? What would that mean?
Not long ago, a staff member at Haywood Street asked a congregant about the death of a community member, commenting, “I didn’t see anything in the obituaries.” The congregant replied matter-of-factly, “People like us don’t make it to the obituaries.”
In her book The Precarious Life, Judith Butler suggests that grief is not just a personal experience, but a political expression that reflects how we perceive humanity, what composes humanity, and how we respond to what is human or what is not human. She argues that when we deny the room for grief, we lose our sense of mutual interdependence. We simply pass over the loss, identifying some humans as ungrievable and, in turn, unlovable (32).
Such a profound act of love it is to grieve another person, then! To have seen someone for who they are as a child of God and as a human being, lovable and worthy.
Remembering the saints among us, celebrating lives, and holding space to grieve what’s been lost—regardless of how “grievable” the world labels us—is how we recognize our common humanity and how we confess our interdependence with one another. And it’s the opportunity we have to put our hope in what Christ tells us is yet to come.
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