Nearly 4 years ago I lost both my parents within 6 days of each other. A few days later my overseas missionary team, which was highly dysfunctional to begin with, began a painful implosion, and I made a choice a few months later to stay home and get healthy rather than go back overseas and serve in my emotionally crippled state. In just a few short months I had lost my parents, my sense of "family", my job, my home, my career and my dreams. I was devastated. And my life was decimated.  I was told by three different counselors that I had enough losses tallied up to "send me to Mars and back," or at least to a loony-bin for a bit. One of them at least still seems to marvel that I was still walking and talking and functioning in the world at that point.

I think have a pretty good idea what grief is.

Over at Kat Coble’s blog-house there’s a discussion on public grief going on. Kat (both of the Kats in my life, actually) is always good at making me think. I guess this is why she won the Thinking Blogger Award. Doh. At any rate, Kat honestly asked, Does grief now need to be public in order to be real?

What a powerful, meaty question.

I have watched the public response to the Virginia Tech tragedy with a mix of curiosity and sadness. As someone who’s lost loved ones (I kinda dislike the triteness of that phrase, but it serves me well here), I know all to well the agony the next year holds for the families and friends of the dead. But truthfully I feel more pain and sorrow for my boss, who just unexpectedly lost his mom, than I do for the strangers in Virginia. Its not that I don’t feel for them or have compassion for their loss. Its just that I’m not connected to them. And therein lies my curiosity with the public grief currently sweeping the nation over this tragedy. What is it that causes us human beings to be swept up in other’s emotions?  And must grief now be public to truly be grief? If we don’t grieve publicly, does it mean we are unfeeling, disconnected and cold?

I struggled with the question of public grief a lot at the time of my parents’ deaths because in the beginning I felt only moments of agony (grief) followed by long stretches of blissful quiet nothingness. Because I didn’t cry at their memorial services I thought there must something really, really wrong with me — aren’t you supposed to cry at your parents funerals?? I began to be convinced I must be shamefully disconnected from my own self and emotions. Turns out I was, but without the shame. It’s called the “shock” stage of grief and it is a blessed, blessed thing to which I sometimes wish I could briefly revisit.

Anyway… I’ve since realized that I can no more predict how I will react in the face of painful, terrible loss than I can predict the weather in Tennessee. Nothing is normal so everything is normal.

The movie “The Queen” addresses this issue of public versus private grief in such a powerful way. It really made me re-think how I looked at the Royal Family during the public mourning of Diana’s death. And it reminded me of how most of my own grief has been quite blessedly private.

In just the last decade our country has had many reasons to mourn. Columbine, September 11th, the Iraq War, and now the Virginia Tech shootings, just to name a few. We’ve had a good deal of tragedy. Yet realistically, our parents and grandparents had much, much more. Vietnam, JFK’s assassination, Martin Luther King’s assassination, Korea, World War II, the Depression, World War I… And that’s just the national ones. There are countless other more personal, private tragedies for each one of them, made all the worse from ours by the lack of medical technologies and psychological understandings. Us Gen-Xers and Y-ers and the Boomers just haven’t had life all that tough in comparison.

Yet we seem to be the most melodramatic when it comes to public grief. Don’t we? I’m not saying our parents and grandparents didn’t publicly grieve. I’m saying we have a tendency to be so much more morbidly fascinated with and compelled to grieve publicly for people we do not know than they were. And I rather feel that most of what I see today in the way of public grieving is more of either an emotional mob mentality grief, or a misplaced focus of grief.

What I mean by the first is like what you see in preschool when one kid is really crying out of hurt or fear and the rest of the group follows suit.  It’s not that the other kids are faking it (if you’ve had to deal with this lovely phenomena, you know they’re not!), its just that the first child’s pain is so real and powerful that the rest become frightened to tears by the possibility that something that bad is coming for them too and the only way they know how to respond is to cry hysterically.

You see this with high school girls too. I remember some kid at my high school, not horrendously popular but known, died in a car crash (involving drunk driving) and the next day nearly every single girl on campus (and a surprisingly large amount of guys) all crying hysterically very publicly for the next couple of weeks. The school even called in a grief counselor to help get things back under control. Now, this was a school of several thousand students. My graduating class alone was around 1400, so even if this guy was Mr.-King-of-popularity – which he most definitely was NOT – that many girls could not have known him personally enough to be driven mad with grief by his death.

Sometimes the power of someone’s grief touches some wound, some fear or some pain at the core of who we are. We cannot identify that thing that was touched, we only know the touching caused searing pain or overwhelming fear and we respond with powerful emotions of our own, that others and often we ourselves mistake for grief.

What I mean by the second is that all too often we in America (or perhaps its all of western society) are, I think, convinced grief is about the people we lose whether we know them or not when nothing could be further from the truth. Grief is not about them, it is about us. It’s about what WE have lost. We grieve for ourselves and how our lives will never be the same because of what we have lost.

Nor is grief limited to people. It’s also about dreams, jobs, careers, homes, cities and towns, places, things, ideals… anything we have lost that deeply meant something to us. So many things in our lives die and deserve to be properly grieved! Yet I think people in America these days feel we cannot grieve over anything but people.

So our national grief over September 11th, became more about the people who died rather than what we truly lost as individuals and collectively as a nation. What tragedy! What a way to compound tragedy. What we who didn’t know anyone in the Towers lost as individuals was our sense of security, our sense of safety in our own homes, workplaces and towns, our sense of immortality, our innocence of the realities of war…. But because it’s socially unacceptable to grieve these seemingly selfish and trivial things when thousands have lost parents, siblings, spouses, children, lovers and dear friends, we take our grief and (mis)place it onto people we don’t know and claim we mourn their loss.

Aw, come on people! We need to grieve what WE lost. I wept bitterly over September 11th because I lost a great deal. No, I didn’t lose someone I loved, but dang, I lost the nation I thought I lived in! I lost the state of security and safety I thought existed around me. I lost my ability to trust foreigners – and I HATE that! You lost a great deal too. And even though the Virginia Tech shootings don’t have the national impact that September 11th did, there are still countless parents who suddenly lost any sense of safety for their children in college and students lost a sense of safety and stability in their college lives. Those are things worth grieving. And when we deny ourselves that time, and worse yet, deny we are truly grieving for those things by claiming our grief is for the dead, we rob ourselves of the chance to heal from that tragedy.

That is not to say that we don’t grieve with the families who lost people they loved in the Towers, or at the University this week. We feel for them; we feel sadness and empathy for the loss of the ones they love in their lives. BUT What we grieve personally is whatever we personally, intimately lost in that tragedy, and for most of us it isn’t people.

I think another thing we grieve but (mis)place onto anonymous people, is our loss/lack of deep connection with others. Stay with me here a moment…. What I saw in those girls back in high school was a desperate need to feel connected to something or someone in a deep way, perhaps even just to feel something real period. I don’t think we have that really anymore in our society. Oh, everybody wears their "feelings on their sleeves", yet very few really have truly deep relationships, ones where feelings can be expressed without fear.

There is something about detailed knowledge of someone that causes us to feel connected to them, and can deceive us into believing we are more connected to people than we really are. We are so informed about the lives of people we don’t even know that we have pictures and minute details of the last time they shaved their head and went a little nuts, and it makes us feel like we know them. But we don’t. So of course when we know just as much detail about the people around us, we think we must have a deep connection with them – because after all, if we have a connection to Britney and we don’t even know her, we must have a DEEP connection with those we know (for some odd reason in our society knowledge = relationship. How messed up is that?).  Too often the connections in our lives don’t satisfy us; more often than not they are superficial at best, and not deep as we suppose them to be.

The made-public death of a fellow-anything (student, co-worker, artist, etc), reminds our souls of that deep longing for real connection, real satisfying relationships, and grief over our own dissatisfaction bubbles to the surface. The current love-affair with public grieving gives us a free pass to cry and scream and get hysterical (to feel, in other words) as well as a safe way to grieve our own loss/lack of deep relationships without appearing self-centered in a moment of such tragedy for others.

Grief is so unpredictable. It sneaks up on you and bites you in the butt when you least expect it. It shows itself in public sometimes in ways that does not look at all like grief and other times reveals its true fire in private moments of agony. Sometimes it looks like sorrow, sometimes it looks like depression, sometimes it looking like a angry raging lunatic hell-bent on revenge, or at least a piece of somebody’s ass to chew off. And then, sometimes things that look like grief are not really grief at all. Fear especially loves to masquerade as grief, because it gets a lot more attention and acceptance that way.

I can’t say why all the people are crying over the shootings at Virginia Tech right now. But I have to wonder what it was in this incident that tapped into hidden losses and fears. For me it’s another reminder of all the losses in my life and my deep-rooted fear of losing someone or something else. Thankfully, my own pain and fears haven’t given me much grief over this whole tragedy (they’ve been deeply fixed on another, but that’s another post). But the huge public reaction – including my company opening up a meeting room for people to view the televised Memorial Service – does really intrigue me as I watch others struggle through the powerful emotions this incident brought forth.