After the end of the world
I read an article about new forms of grief arriving in therapy rooms — grief that is not
connected to an individual loss but a sense that the earth is doomed.
This note says that the grief is not new; reminds us, as Kathryn Yusoff does, that to name
this era ‘anthropocene’ and worry about the earth’s doom in a future tense is to fail to see
— to be silent about — the extinctions already undergone by Black and indigenous
people. Worlds ended over and again. not new. Colonialism, racial capitalism, climate
change and the death of a planet are connected catastrophe; our shared conditions, even
when not seen, or seen late by those not (yet) living in the rubble).
A decolonial therapeutic takes form through a lens pointing at how we are at, and already
after, the end of the world.
(Foluke Taylor, in Golding et al., under review)
The language of ‘grief’ is found in all sorts of conversations these days, including at the Open University, not least in relation to the climate and ecological emergency (the CEE). This is challenging, for people to engage with the existential threat of what’s happening, but grief and extinctions are more familiar to some people than others.
At its root the CEE is a human crisis but governments are failing in their responses, making the threat even greater and more menacing in terms of human mortality, losses and grief.
‘Simply mind-boggling’: world record temperature jump in Antarctic raises fears of catastrophe The Guardian
7th April 2024
“Of the 40 leading economies, all of which agreed in the 2015 Paris Climate Accord to take all necessary actions to stop global heating below 1.5˚, not one nation is on track to do what they promised.”
Fletcher et al. 2024
But some people are more able than others to evade these challenges, when the impacts of the crisis, and the human responsibility for its creation, are unequally distributed across the world.
Image: people escaping flooding, Pexels
So what is the soil available to nurture the human spirit in these times, to survive and perhaps thrive in facing the changes occurring at increasing speed? What are the limitations of the soil currently available and how can it be enriched? To be able to face the losses occasioned by endings, and the potential opportunities for rediscovering how to be in the world?
This question draws attention to how people respond to the existential threat of mortality. So, in recognising the personal emotional challenges raised by the planetary polycrisis, it’s important to reconsider the dominant language of ‘grief’, which is predominantly framed as a health issue, and understood primarily through white ‘Western’ experiences.
To think that the Western way of thinking about and explaining the world is the only one is ignorant. (Bernd Reiter, 2018)
Yet humans have sought to make sense of mortality in many diverse ways across time and space, so what are the roots of this particular ‘Western’ perspective?
In the affluent societies of contemporary minority worlds, palliative care became an important medical field from the 1960s, with the work of Cicely Saunders and the founding of the first ‘Western’ hospice. Over time the concerns extended to those left behind – ‘the bereaved’– living in the continuing aftermath of death, who came to be seen as also needing support in dealing with their ‘grief’.
And as ‘bereavement support’ has become more formalised ‘grief’ has become highly psychologised, understood as an individual inner psychic journey with ‘tasks’ of grief to be tackled. Services have become increasingly professionalised; framed in medicalised health terms, requiring formal assessments to measure and determine ‘risks’ of ‘unhealthy outcomes’, and providing ‘evidence based’ interventions to prevent them. Prolonged grief has been medically categorised as a disorder, while a recent survey in Germany found that the majority of people now consider ‘grief’ to be a mental health illness. Even when a more contextualised approach to ‘bereavement and grief’ is promoted through compassionate communities or community psychology, it is still situated as a ‘public health’ issue. ‘Grief literacy’ is considered necessary, requiring resources and training.
These approaches are undoubtedly found to be valuable by many people, with significant benefits. But they may also have their downside, and the limitations of the ideas, experiences, and ‘knowledge’ framing these interventions need to be recognised.
[I]n many cultures and particularly in mine [Morocco], there is a strong belief that death and illness are completely separate, illness in itself does not cause death, death is often explained as the station from which your journey to the hereafter commences. (Samira Ben Omar (2024)
Mortality is a key challenge of the human condition, and the deaths of significant people in our lives, and the aftermath of this key life experience, cannot by captured by the term ‘grief’ alone. Indeed, the word itself does not translate into other languages. To medicalise these existential experiences is to impose a particular understanding of the world and human ‘being-ness’, rooted in (white) coloniality/modernity. Developing from the European ‘Age of Reason and Enlightenment’, this worldview continues to be increasingly globally dominant. And it is these same historic, social and political processes that are the basis for the on-going exploitation of people and planet and the polycrisis of the CEE.
For the Open Societal Challenge of Existential Dis/Connections we seek to learn from all the diverse ways that people face death and suffering across the globe – and even find ways to thrive. To do this we need to connect across divides, and (inter)connect across key themes, that are currently disconnected, of: death, loss and change; the exploitation and oppression of all life on earth; and the climate and ecological emergency. These are matters of justice and care, and of sharing wisdom, that will potentially benefit us all.
We have a sacred obligation toward how we’re going to be, here at this moment.
(Stan Rushmore, Elder and Citizen of the Chiricahua Apache Nation in Living in the Time of Dying.)
Image: Banner on the Thames. Credit: photo by James Knapp and words by Ben Okri.
References:
Ben Omar, Samira (2024) Personal communication
Golding, Berenice et al, under review, ‘Decolonising death and its aftermath in UK contexts’, Mortality.