Grief often comes in waves and can intrude upon us at the strangest times. I’ve had this recurring dream over the years about someone who died being alive again. In one particularly memorable variation of this dream I dimension hopped to a universe where he’d lived by virtue of top-secret Obama-era experiments; I met with Obama and said “Thanks Obama,” in the dream.
I never have the heart to tell the guy he’s dead in these dreams.
In other dreams, my dead dog visits me. In these dreams, for the most part, I don’t realize he’s dead; my mind makes up some fantastical explanation about him being The Miracle Dog who survived his euthanasia (and somehow his cremation—that’s dream logic for you) or something. But lately, when I have these dreams, I do realize he’s dead. Maybe that’s my mind telling me I’ve processed the grief.
At the risk of being crass, one thing I’ve always wondered about grief is, why?
The point of emotions is arguably to regulate behavior. We feel angry with someone, we get recompense. We feel happy about something, we try to hold onto that thing as long as possible. For all the ordinary emotions we feel there is this element of operant conditioning.
Physical pain is perhaps a starker example of feeling regulating behavior. We feel pain when we put our hand on a hot stove and pull it away. People with congenital insensitivity to pain often die early for lack of ability to perceive what should be painful stimulus.
A gazelle being mauled by a lion feels pain and the pain is a very simple message: “I need to get away.”
But what about when the gazelle is beyond the point of no return, and no intervention can at that point save its life? What purpose does the pain serve then? One of nature’s rare small mercies is that the animal might be in shock by that point, but not always. If the feeling doesn’t generate any sort of actionable solution, then what’s the point?
You could write it off as nature’s characteristic cruelty that animals suffer even when there’s no conceivable point, but I think that’s slightly reductive. A plausible explanation is that our sensory apparatus are extremely blunt instruments because making them more precise would have an evolutionary cost (the energy cost of having to evaluate each individual situation and decide if the pain is useful) without a commensurate evolutionary benefit (evolution doesn’t care what happens to us, even eternal torture, once we’re beyond the event horizon of death).
So what about grief? Grief is no more actionable than the suffering of a dying gazelle. Nothing we do can bring the person back any more than anything the gazelle does can save its life. We can certainly conceive of a world where people don’t grieve1. So why?
Maybe it is like the gazelle example: grief emerges as a cocktail of more primitive emotional functions like sorrow, despair, rage, and nostalgia, and to judge each case individually and decide if those emotions are useful or not would be an evolutionary cost without an evolutionary benefit.
Or you could make a case that grief does serve a purpose in conditioning people to avoid future grief. It strikes me as an empirical question whether there is a correlation between grief and the ability to prevent grief by saving the lives of those closest to you, but death is so often out of our hands, even in the state of nature in which grief evolved, that I would hazard a guess the answer is “probably not, or the effect if it exists is probably negligible.” And if that’s the case then this story doesn’t strike me as very plausible, as the only other way to avoid grief is to avoid people, and I don’t think that’s the message our bodies and minds want to impart.
Maybe grief is ultimately selfish, a tacit societywide game-theoretic agreement that we will all remember the deceased and grieve for them so that when we die others will be obliged to do the same for us. Maybe we don’t want to be forgotten after we die.
And yet, lots of higher mammals grieve. Elephants even have funerary rites. It strikes me, then, that any explanation that relies on the machinery of human society and culture must surely be mistaken. Grieving is fundamental to our biology as mammals. Even kids raised by wolves grieve for the wolves.
It’s worth noting that we don’t grieve for everyone. Someone somewhere has just died as I was typing this, and if I may be perfectly blunt, I don’t care. Or at least, the extent to which I care is so negligible—compared to the extent to which I would care if it were someone I knew—that it might as well be zero. If you care, good for you. You’re a saint. But I know for a fact you don’t grieve for that person and don’t pull my leg by claiming otherwise. Society would be unable to function if we grieved for everyone. It would grind to a standstill as people walked around in a constant state of grief from all the death and carnage inherent to being alive.
So, it seems obvious, but maybe grief is somehow an inevitable emergent result of the bonds the deceased forged while alive. I don’t grieve for the person who just died, but their family does. Their friends do. Maybe grief exists because we can’t excise it from our emotional landscape without giving up things we want to have like friendship and family. That is to say, maybe I’m mistaken to think we can conceive of a world where people don’t grieve; maybe it’s a necessary truth that having close ties with friends and family implies grieving their loss.
So we’ve come at the problem a couple different ways and heard a plausible story that maybe, for some reason or another, grief is inevitable and it could not have been otherwise. But suppose that’s not true and we could get rid of grief. Would we want to? Some people would. But this, I think, marks the key difference between grieving and the dying gazelle. Doing away with the gazelle’s pain would clearly be a mercy. Stealing someone’s grief away robs them of something and leaves them bare. Stealing a grieving mother’s grief away, for example, would be no different than forcibly drugging her. I’m reminded of the scene from Braveheart, toward the end, where William Wallace spits out the painkiller concoction Princess Isabella gives him.
Drink this. It will dull your pain.
No. It will numb my wits, and I must have them all.
Some cultures choose to emphasize celebration over somberness in death rituals, but I presume this is performative and there is actual grief going on regardless.