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Grievability

I read about the term “grievability” this week in The New Yorker. It’s part of a larger piece, but this is the part that caught my attention. Mostly because it feels familiar: that idea that “some lives were considered to be more worthy of grieving publicly than others, depending on the status and recognizability of those persons and their relations.”

It’s discussed in both the collective sense and the individual sense. Some losses are more acknowledged than others; some types of losses are more acknowledged. It’s not just the famous who get publicly acknowledged while lesser known people are a footnote when part of the same event. It’s that some people aren’t really given the space to grieve at all when other people don’t acknowledge they lost something.

The loss was not recognized, and it was not marked, which means that it was treated as if it were no loss. Of course, that follows from the fact that the love they lived was also treated as if it were no love.

It’s thought-provoking, mostly because the term is the exact opposite: it’s an acknowledgement that all loss needs to be grieved.

3 comments

1 Noemi { 02.25.20 at 3:30 pm }

Both of those links take you to a New Yorker article. Just so you know.

2 Mali { 02.25.20 at 6:49 pm }

The childless and loss community writes a lot about disenfranchised grief, which is what she’s talking about. The idea that some grief is not permitted, or is judged. And as she points out, it denies us (or anyone) their grief, and denies the love that is at the heart of grief.

I found the article really interesting – I’m off to read a bit more.

3 Working mom of 2 { 02.25.20 at 7:36 pm }

I experienced something in between when my dad died. I wasn’t completely denied my grief, but I definitely experienced reactions like “oh, well then!” when people asked me how old he was and I said 86. Like, he was pretty old so not that big a loss. I was really mad about this for a while.

(c) 2006 Melissa S. Ford
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