WWhat we make of our lives can be understood, among other things, through our collective dealing with loss, dying and death. This is of course extra relevant in the week leading up to May 4. Luckily offered de Volkskrant This weekend we will teach etiquette about ‘mourning’ with a real mourning manual from Lena Bril. Philosopher Marli Huijer previously wrote an essay about ‘mourning well’ with a poignant note personal reflection.
Both Huijer and Bril offer beautiful contributions, because death should above all be ‘discussable’, to quote SIRE, but I became a bit uneasy while reading. These contributions take a somewhat limited perspective on grieving and mourning work.
Last year a very dear friend of mine passed away. When someone dies, you are left with some anthropologists lieux de mémoires mention, place memories. That could be a city, a house or a book. But also a specific route. So I always rode a certain cycling route to that friend. I only cycled to him that way. Until he died.
Recently I suddenly cycled on that same road without going to him. Everything about that road reminded me of him. But he was no longer there. It was true that it had that route no longer that function, but that meaning. Densification of meaning due to loss of function. So you can grieve when you take a bike ride, enter a room or go skating, as Marli Huijer outlines in her essay.
About the author
Mark van Ostaijen is an administrative sociologist at Erasmus University. Columnists have the freedom to express their opinions and do not have to adhere to journalistic rules for objectivity. Read our guidelines here.
That which is absent can feel painfully present. You could call it phantom limb pain. Pain with what is no longer there. Because when we talk about mourning in the Netherlands, it is often about the pain of loss, absence, emptiness. Namely the pain of something that is no longer there.
Phantom limb pain is the medical term for feelings of pain that people experience in an amputated body part. But if phantom pain is about the pain of the imagined present, then our vocabulary lacks a word for the pain of the imagined absent. Call it pre-mourning, anticipatory grief, but I call it phantom grief. Because if grief describes the pain of what is no longer there, then phantom grief describes the grief of what is still there.
For example, even in my life I was afraid of losing that friend prematurely. Even when I was alive, I sometimes grieved at the thought that one day he would be gone. I could sometimes be overcome by intense sadness. But even now I experience that with other loved ones. With my father, mother, brother, my partner and even sometimes at the sight of my dog. The thought that I will survive them is sometimes almost unbearable. Phantom grief.
The absence of phantom mourning in our vocabulary illustrates our somewhat flawed formal language. As if you can only grieve when something has disappeared. While we live in a time when we mainly share the fear that we will lose a lot. For example, the Social and Cultural Planning Office describes the mood in the country as gloomy because ‘almost half now expect a deterioration in our economic situation’.
Just as the American sociologist Robert Putnam has shown for the United States, we in the Netherlands no longer believe that future generations will necessarily be better off. As if we are already mourning our future. However questionable that perception may be, as soon as anticipated loss determines the collective condition, it always has serious effects in the here and now.
It seems like a bit of a leap, from individual to collective forms of grief, but it wouldn’t hurt to reflect a little more on the phenomenon of phantom grief. This can help us understand that grieving is not only about feelings of real loss, but also about anticipated loss. Both on an individual and collective level.
Ultimately, we all share the fear of losing something. This offers essential starting points and points of recognition for different groups of people. I’m afraid there is still a lot of grieving work to be done. Because in the end we are all amputated stragglers.
