The Work of (Not) Mourning

One of the few things as certain as my death is yours. Part of what it means to live is to deal with the deaths of others—those we love, and those we don’t.

I made it through a good part of the first half of my life without losing too many people close to me. That luck has run out over the last few years (weirdly, I wanted to phrase that as “that long overdue debt has come due,” but why think of it as a “debt” and to whom or what would it be owed?). I loved some of those people deeply, others I didn’t know very well, and still some I’m not so sure I liked much at all.

The result is I’ve spent a good part of the last year trying to figure out how to mourn, who to mourn, and when to mourn. Indeed, while mourning might be universal work, we don’t get much guidance on how to do it. Our educational institutions won’t touch it, and most of us get very little broader cultural support in that area.

Once I had a professor from overseas who pointed out how weird it was that American society provided so little education on romance or sex. Those are such important parts of life, he reasoned, but we leave people to figure them all out on their own. A similar point could be made about mourning. Grieving is unavoidable and important for ethical as well as psychological reasons, but we have few reliable norms, practices, or inherited wisdom to help us face death in any of its manifestations.

In thinking about this, one book that came to mind was Derrida’s The Work of Mourning, which I’d first read years ago in grad school. The construction of the book itself is interesting—it’s an edited collection of diverse texts (e.g., eulogies, funeral orations, essays, and letters) that Derrida wrote after or about the deaths of his friends. Derrida was part of a fascinating generation of thinkers, and he outlived many of them. He wrote beautifully about his friends when they were gone.

It's a wonderful book, and it really shows Derrida wrestling with the ethics of how to mourn. In a conceptual strategy typical of Derrida’s thought, he notes how in mourning we are enmeshed in puzzling contradictions. These puzzles generally don’t have solutions; often the best we can do is to try to avoid getting knotted up in them. It’s as hard to mourn well as it is to live well.

For example, Derrida writes about the ethical responsibility we feel to honor a friend’s death by saying something about them. He’s right, of course, and that imperative can feel more like a compulsion. However, he also points out how hard it is to do that right. Is it possible to find the right words to express the depth of genuine loss? If words are bound to fall short, then is the solution not to speak? However, if that silence itself is intolerable or unethical, then do you content yourself with speaking inadequately? If so, then what types of inadequate speech will be adequate?

Lunch is on me if you have an answer up your sleeve. I could certainly use the help.

Derrida’s text focuses on mourning friends. Friendship is a very specific type of relationship. While he acknowledges some stormy moments, at least in The Work of Mourning, he limits himself to writing about people he ultimately liked and will miss.

In that sense, I’ve found myself wondering what puzzles might be true of other cases of mourning. Different relationships will be mourned in different ways. Mourning a parent is different from mourning a friend—or a respected adversary. Mourning a healthy relationship is different from mourning an unhealthy one.

I’m particularly curious about that last one—how to mourn a relationship that wasn’t joyful. Derrida talks a lot about “interiorization” in the act of mourning or the way you internalize the memory of a person. In a different way, I briefly noted this type of experience in a previous post. When you engage with someone, there’s a way you draw their voice and perspective into you as an enduring image. It’s a type of memory you breathe life into, like some strange Pinocchio of people you’ve known. Of course, you’re behind the whole thing, but it can certainly feel like the image acts of its own volition. Think of what it feels like when you suddenly just know what an old friend would think of something you’ve said or done.

Given that he’s talking about friends, Derrida of course discusses interiorization as a way of keeping the dead alive inside you. I like that idea. But interiorizing someone isn’t always what you want—there are plenty of voices in my head that I wish I’d never let in (though I guess you don’t always have much of a say in it). Interiorization is at the heart of mourning, and it gets an interesting twist in the case of mourning an unhealthy relationship: it seems to me that part of mourning a non-joyful relationship is to interiorize the person just enough to remember the failures of the relationship without letting them in too deeply. Their voice can be poisonous.

Just like in the examples Derrida gives of mourning a friend, mourning someone you don’t miss is important for the same ethical and psychological reasons. Whitewashing the relationship of its toxicity is dishonest, unfair to the world, and harmful to your own growth for many reasons—not the least of which is that you need to remember enough to avoid future experiences of abuse.

Is such a thing possible? How do you handle that contaminated emotional material without being contaminated? How do you pay proper respects to the death of one whose voice you should interiorize without really interiorizing? How do you mourn without mourning?