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Eduard Punset once said: ‘Nobody can prove that I will die one day’ to show that, though some things in life seem certain, we cannot prove them until they actually happen. The average human tends to go through life without thinking that they, or their loved ones, are one day going to die. Until the inevitable happens, and grief is all we are left with.
Multiple losses in my family have sadly defined my early to mid-twenties. I am convinced that grieving changes you as a person; once you start grieving, you never stop.
In the beginning, I tried to believe in a hyper-structured form of the 5 stages of grief, first defined by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I was convinced that I just had to complete the 5 stages, and then this emotional distress would disappear forever. However, I found myself going through the motions in a disorganized manner, or through two stages simultaneously.
The months passed, and my feelings softened over time. Years later, I have found a comforting quote that summarizes my grieving experience quite phenomenally:
Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go. - Jamie Anderson
My personal grieving journey has remained intimate and family-centered, as well as filled with research on grief itself. Grief is usually seen as a deeply personal experience, but this got me thinking about how it takes place on a collective, global scale. If psychology recognizes conditions such as Prolonged Grief Disorder, might it also be possible to conceptualize new forms of grief shaped by mass media and public visibility?
With the emergence of celebrity culture and mass media in the 20th century, the deaths of public figures increasingly became collective cultural events. The mediatized deaths of figures such as Princess Diana, John F. Kennedy or Michael Jackson illustrate how public mourning can go beyond personal grief and become a shared social ritual. This raises the question of whether collective mourning for public figures generates what Émile Durkheim described as collective effervescence—a heightened sense of social unity and shared emotional energy experienced by those grieving together.
Beginning with the Vietnam War, mass tragedies and armed conflicts have increasingly become mediatized. Advances in broadcasting and, later, digital media have brought scenes of death, destruction, and mourning directly into people's homes daily. Events such as the 9/11 attacks, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ongoing violence in the Gaza Strip have unfolded before global audiences through continuous media coverage. As a result, viewers are repeatedly confronted with images of death. With people in the immediate aftermath of losing loved ones, their grief filmed and broadcast to billions around the world.
From grieving public figures collectively to finding oneself having lost a loved one in a globally broadcast tragedy, the grieving process has taken on countless new facets that have emerged with recent technological developments and societal contexts. Going through grief after the loss of a loved one is almost certainly the logical consequence, and one that seems to evolve with time. However, the basics remain: to grieve is to have loved, and in a world full of hate and where death is - almost certainly - inevitable, I hope we all continue grieving.
Paula
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