Public Grief

Anne Pressly passed away last night. P. and I were coming home from the country when we received a call. It was a shock to me how affecting it felt, made worse I think by reports of her recent improvement. This morning at St. Andrews church, where Anne attended on occasion and was a member of a bible study, Philip redirected the tenor of his sermon to focus on recent events. He appeared to speak extemporaneously, and it was moving and direct. He said he had spent most of the week at the hospital. He fought back his tears at one point but many in the congregation was less successful.

Afterwards P. said it surprised him that people who did not know Anne would allow themselves to become so emotionally involved in her death. Then there was the item from the paper earlier in the week where coverage of the attack and the outpouring of public support drew the criticism that other violent crime hadn't produced the same result. Is there something selfish in participating in grief for someone you do not know? Is public sympathy undeserved or illegitimized if it is not dispensed equally?

To think that it seems you would have to pretend that personal knowledge is the only true ground for grief and that every death has the exactly same claims to symbolic or emblematic significance. Sure public grief can be outsized and massive. And maybe we find disproportionately compelling the deaths of the young or the attractive or the successful. But we are a society, and our sense of ourselves is not just individual but also collective. And in judging our collective status we rely on the emblematic all the time. It is not just the man who committed the crime or the young woman who suffers and cannot survive but society too that is guilty and victim. The shock of the unlooked for event, the unnatural interference of violence and death, they seem to me good reasons for public grief.