The Role of Grief: Can reconnecting with the sanctity of our individual and collective grief drive us forward on our path for social justice?

This blog post is a summary of our latest free online module The Role of Grief available on our website.

In today’s world, we are confronting massive amounts of violence, injustice, and suffering. Perhaps the magnitude and global prevalence of such injustices is not new, but the growth of technology has, in a way, given all of us a front row seat to the suffering of others and the violence perpetrated in our contexts and beyond. This has had drastic consequences on our mental health. 

Our minds, bodies, and spirits were not designed to hold the weight of the world. So many of us are struggling to cope with existing in our day-to-day lives of work, grocery shopping, feeding the cat, and catching up with friends while also watching extreme acts of violence through our digital devices. Many of us are also waking up to the fact that much of the violence and suffering we are witnessing or experiencing firsthand is by design. More and more people are talking about the nature of structural violence, exploitative and extractive capitalism, and harmful hierarchies of power that create the world we exist in. 

How can we disrupt these systems of violence and injustice? What role does grief play in this process of disruption and abolition? How can it help pave the way for a new way of being? 

“Our grief—our feelings, as words or actions, images or practices—can open up cracks in the wall of the system. It can also pry open spaces of contestation and reconstruction, intervulnerability and strength, empathy and solidarity. It can discomfort the stories told from above that would have us believe we aren’t human or deserving of life-affirming lives—or for that matter, life-affirming deaths.” - Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief 

What is Grief?

Grief is the response we experience to an actual or perceived loss of someone or something important to us. Everyone’s grief response will be different, as the way we experience loss and how it impacts us will be influenced by our personal beliefs and circumstances, our body chemistry, our culture, the language(s) that we speak, the environment around us, and the nature of our loss.  It is a very personal yet universal human experience. 

We may experience grief over a tangible loss of a person, place, or object, but we may also experience grief over more obscure things, too. 

We might experience grief when we go through a change in our worldview and realize that our previous belief systems were harming us or other people. We might grieve the loss of an idea or a movement that connected us to ourselves or to other people. We might grieve the loss of a feeling that a particular person, place, or object provided for us. We might feel a deep and heavy grief over the state of the world, or grief on behalf of other people, or grief over the life we thought we’d have as individuals and a collective.. All forms of grief are real and are valid, and all forms of grief that you experience deserve your attention and your grace. 

Structural violence relies heavily on the normalization of oppression and policing in order to uphold it. Policing occurs in many ways, some of them obvious like restricting movement or openly discriminating against racialized communities by incarcerating (imprisoning) them at higher rates, but it also occurs in more subtle forms. Historically, colonial powers have worked incredibly hard to impose power over indigenous and racialized groups of people by separating them from individual and collective identity. A huge part of that process was discouraging or even outlawing rituals. People have created rituals to honor the change of seasons, rites of passage, and phases of life such as birth and death. Severing humans from these ancient rituals has contributed to the spiritual disorientation many of us experience today. It also left our ancestors with no way to process the grief they experienced from everyday life and from colonialism. Reclaiming our own grief, the grief that those before us were forced to silently endure, and the grief of other beings around us is one of the ways we can disrupt colonial paradigms. 

Grief and mourning are among the most authentic expressions of humanity that many of us ever experience. It is powerful and disruptive, raw and unpredictable. Capitalism wants us to “grieve” in a stepwise, linear process with a definite beginning and - most importantly - a definite end, in order to return to our roles as productive members of society. As mentioned in the previous section, most workplaces do not offer adequate bereavement leave. Most societies are intolerant of prolonged sadness and grief and may reject and exclude people who are struggling to cope with a profound loss. We have been conditioned to believe that this expression of our humanity is somehow inappropriate or unnatural. 

Reclaiming our grief is a way to not only heal ourselves in a deep and profound way, but it is also an outright rejection of systems that separate us from our humanity. Taking the time and space that we need to grieve and not putting on a performance of “normalcy” is one small way we can keep making those cracks in the walls of the system that will liberate us and lead us back to who we are.

What can we learn from grief?

We can learn that there is strength in connection: Many species rely on social groups and relationships to survive. A study in 2006 measured the levels of stress hormones in baboons following a loss. They found that baboons that strengthened their social bonds after their grief event by spending more time grooming other baboons (an activity that strengthens social connections in baboon communities) had a more rapid decrease in stress hormone levels than those that did not partake in communal grooming. Grief processes and ritual can help connect us and hold together our human communities and promote positive outcomes in our physical and mental health, especially following a grief event. 

Our grief is a legacy of healing justice: To grieve is to honor the grief and resilience of all of those who came before us. It is to honor the injustices we have witnessed past and present and to the ones that lie ahead. Think back to the narratives grieving mothers shared in response to their children being murdered by racial and structural violence. Think back to the mutual aid networks AIDS activists established as their friends, partners, and communities died around them. Through their grief, people still clung to the hope that a better world could emerge and that their actions on the day could minimize the chances of someone experiencing the same grief tomorrow. When we confront and metabolize our grief - individually and collectively - we are healing entire lineages. 

Grief is disruption, grief is resistance: When we take the time and space that we need to grieve, and when we grieve unapologetically, we are disrupting the attempts of the system to oppress us. While it may seem like a minor gesture, embracing the sanctity of grief and honoring our needs is a radical protest against attempts to sever us from our journey towards liberation. 

Grief is human: As capitalism and toxic individuality try to convince us that we do not need other people, grief can help remind us of, and encourage us to embrace, our inherent interconnectedness and interdependence. Through grief, we can connect with ourselves and with others across space and time.

Grief brings us to a sacred liminal space where we can stand on the threshold of everything that was, that is, and that will be - only if we let it. 

If you enjoyed this post, we encourage you to dive more in depth by taking the free online module on The Role of Grief!