We Must Refuse a Forced Grieving

The powerful want us to move on. It is a political imperative we do not.

In early July, a few days after historic, global-warming- and budget-cut-induced flooding killed 135 people in Texas, Senator Ted Cruz opened a speech by saying, “Texas is grieving.” Other politicians shared his sentiments: Texas Governor Greg Abbott chastised reporters for asking who was to blame for the missing and dead, echoing one of the favorite rhetorical tricks of politicians anytime there is a tragedy: don’t politicize grief. It’s said ad nauseam after every mass shooting, or a manmade disaster, or anything else they do not feel like addressing (or are in full support of).

While the most obvious aim of this rhetoric is to skirt blame for the powerful’s roles in tragedies, I think there is a more insidious one too: by forcing the start of the grieving process, the powerful help us successfully relegate people to death—a kind of compulsory moving-on that we did not agree to; a forced dehumanization of those who are presumed dead, or those whose lives the powerful do not care for.

After all, on July 7, when Cruz gave that speech, he did not say he was grieving, but that his entire state was. And he said it before many of the missing’s bodies had even been found. How can one grieve those who are not even yet known dead? One can only do so if those people have already been killed in our heads.

In the last week or so, the entire political and media establishments have suddenly come to the “realization” that Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinians. Celebrities, pundits and politicians, who for years have remained quiet or shushed (or, for some, arrested) those of us who have stated the plainly obvious since October 7, 2023, are now all of a sudden recognizing that Gaza faces a starvation crisis purposefully created by Israel.

I have wondered since the beginning of this supposed sea-change in public sentiment: why now? Again, as with the Texas floods, the most obvious answer is that they are covering their asses, abdicating responsibility for the roles they played in enabling this genocide. But, again, I think the real answer is more insidious: they want it to be too late. They want us to move on.

By waiting until a tipping point of starvation was reached in Gaza, the powerful can now acknowledge the crisis as it is, because in doing so they can convince us that there was nothing to be done; that the hundreds of thousands of deaths are inevitable, or, indeed, that those deaths have already happened, even if they have not yet happened in material reality, but in the psyches of those in power, and, they hope, in our psyches too.

Why wait until the people of Palestine can no longer reliably be saved by aid to acknowledge what has long been obvious? Because to wait until now is to force and enforce closure on the issue—to force a grieving process upon a populace that is being murdered but that is not dead, and to force that grieving process on all of us; to tell us that the death is finally real, it has happened, the end.

The only thing we can do to stop this enforced mourning is to refuse to grieve, especially for those who have already been killed in the psyches of the powerful, but who have not, yet, been killed in the material plane. To accept what politicians are asking of us, to accept that now is the time to grieve, that now the deaths are finally real, would be to—to crib a phrase from Beatrice Adler-Bolton—“pull deaths from the future.” In other words: the powerful are asking us to allow them to tie up this genocide in a bow so that they not only get away without consequence, but so that we do not recognize that many things can still be done (both to stop the continuing genocide, and to stop future ones—by ensuring those responsible for it never touch a lever of power again). They are not acknowledging death for accountability, but for forced closure.

We must not have grief forced upon us.

In the works of Freud, grief is seen as an active process. In order to move on from a death or another form of loss (a breakup, for example), one must “kill” the person in being grieved in their heads. As the professor Tammy Clewell sums it up: “the other’s departure propels the mourner into a battle between life and death, between a desire to live that entails abandoning the other, and a desire to die that entails clinging to and following the other into death.”

Why do we feel so bad—even to the point of wanting to die—as we grieve a breakup or a death or some other kind of moving-on from someone? Because we wish to be close to the person who we must “kill” in our minds. To move on, we must internally relegate those we love to death. But this then leaves us a bit stuck: do we move on, and actually let them go, and attach to new things and people in the future, or do we follow them into a kind of psychic death so that we can remain attached?

This is where things like depression can form—“disorders” that follow grief are often ways we stay close to people in our minds and souls who’ve psychically died. We, in a way, kill ourselves (again, psychically, not literally), to remain attached to those we cannot be physically attached to anymore.

But after the loss of someone, Freud believed, we’d eventually be induced to move on from a death by our own ego. Our psyche’s will to survive would propel us forward to grieve the “lost object” by “offering the ego the inducement of continuing to live.” In other words, continued life eventually becomes more appealing than continuing to remain near psychic death. There are rewards in life that allow us to “kill” the person we are mourning and move on once and for all. New relationships, new sources of joy.

There remains a problem here though: every person is not their own self, but an amalgam of all those they care for and have cared for. To psychically kill the one you are mourning, you must, in some way, kill part of yourself.

Clewell writes:

We are now in a position to understand how Freudian mourning involves less a lament for the passing of a unique other, and more a process geared toward restoring a certain economy of the subject. During the memory work of mourning, as Freud assumed at this early stage in his theorization of grief, the survivor seeks a magical recovery of the lost object for self-serving reasons. More specifically, by resuscitating the other in memory, the mourner attempts to reclaim a part of the self that has been projected onto the other, a part of the self necessary to the construction of the subject’s self-image as a complete and autonomous being. Losing a loved one therefore threatens to shatter the mourner’s imaginary psychic integrity, imaginary since this self-image depends on a relation external to the self. This threat explains why the mourner clings to the lost object, since acknowledging the loss would force the grieving subject to recognize the full extent of what has been lost, namely, an irrecoverable attribute of the self necessary to the mourner’s sense of coherent identity.

This, I believe, is why we have been counseled by those in power since Israel’s assault on Gaza to not empathize with Palestinians, or even counseled to not believe that they are dying. And it is the same reason that we are told by the media and politicians that those killed by state power the world over are not worthy of our sympathy (e.g. “Michael Brown was ‘no angel’”).

Because if we begin to identify with the oppressed, we begin to absorb parts of their psyches into our own—what happens to them thus affects us, even if we are thousands of miles away. And once that happens, it is very hard to disentangle. To do so—to allow their oppression or death—would require a mourning not only of them, but ourselves too; it would require, to repeat Clewell, “the grieving subject to recognize the full extent of what has been lost, namely, an irrecoverable attribute of the self necessary to the mourner's sense of coherent identity.”

I think this is an under-discussed part of why so many of us in the U.S. and other "privileged" countries feel so bad these days—it is not that our lives have gotten worse (though that too) but that the horrors we’ve been asked to accept against other people make us feel as if we, too, are dying, because, in a very real, psychic sense, we are (or, more accurately, are being indirectly psychically killed by those in power).

But it is too late. We have already identified with the oppressed. Their psyches have partially become our own. And so now, the same tactics that politicians and the press hoped would work at the beginning of Israel’s assault—denial, disavowal—are not working. So what are they to do? If the psyches of those being killed by U.S. empire are partially alive within those living within U.S. empire, the powerful’s only option is to attempt to push us through a forced grieving process, so that we can once again separate our psyches from the oppressed, and move on, and return to business as usual, allowing for a continuance of violence in the future.

In normal, positive forms of mourning (like, getting over the death of a loved one who died of old age) the process involves finding a kind of replacement for that which is being grieved. This could be another person (you break up with a loved one, you eventually kill them in your mind, you then find another loved one), or could come about in the form of art or writing. This, Clewell writes (citing the work of Peter Sacks) is often the point of elegy—to take one’s grief and transform it into something that feels beautiful and lasting, a thing that carries on into the future, even as the one grieved recedes into the past.

The problem, though, is that this kind of process can be politicized.

The historian Jay Winter writes of how war memorials in Europe served not to necessarily honor the dead, but to provide “a way of remembering which enabled the bereaved to live with their losses, and perhaps to leave them behind.” The memorials were a kind of forced-mourning—asking society not to learn lessons to never enact mass killings again, but to relegate those mass killings to the past so that they could, essentially, be forgotten, and thus be repeated in the future.

This, I think, is what is happening now with Gaza: because it is too late to ask us to not identify with those under assault, politicians are instead asking us to begin to dis-identify with them. Those complicit in the genocide are not suddenly taking responsibility for the crisis they have caused, they are instead using language (an elegy, if you will) as a kind of temporary war memorial—honoring the dead (both those who have actually, already died, and those that the powerful have already killed psychically so that they may be allowed to continue to die in reality), so that we can relegate them to history, move on, and repeat the same process over again.

Keir Starmer’s statement in which he says he will acknowledge Palestine as a state in the future if Israel does not agree to a ceasefire now can thus be seen, as Felix Biederman put it, as a kind of “preemptive land acknowledgement.” In other words, it is not a policy proposal, but a form of memorial to the already-relegated-to-death, asking us to grieve not only now, but in the future, once everyone who the powerful want dead are already so, so that we can move on guilt-free, not learning a lesson from the present or past.

There are many things we must do now in order to prevent the continuance of this genocide and the creation of future genocides. But the first step, I believe, is a refusal to be forced to grieve.

Interestingly, Freud seemed to acknowledge in his later works that this was the best way to honor someone: not to only grieve them and move on and reattach your energy and interest to someone or something new, but to acknowledge that parts of them will never, ever leave you, and accept this. Not only accept it, but, in some ways, become them, or allow them to become you.

Clewell writes that Freud's later works posit that “working through no longer entails abandoning the object and reinvesting the free libido in a new one; it no longer entails accepting consolation in the form of an external substitute for the loss….Rather, working through depends on taking the lost other into the structure of one’s own identity, a form of preserving the lost object in and as the self.”

“Although we know that after such a loss the acute state of mourning will subside, we also know we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute,” Freud wrote late in his life. “No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else. And actually, this is how it should be. It is the only way of perpetuating that love which we do not want to relinquish.”

This is how it should be. There is nothing to mourn that is not already us. If we wish to live, then they must continue to live too.