O'ROURKE ESSAY IS ARTFUL PRIMER ON THE NATURE OF BEREAVEMENT

I don't know where, with barely half an hour's reading, a person might be able to delve more deeply into the nature of grief's complexities and challenges than in Meghan O'Rourke's 2010 New Yorker essay "Good Grief: Is There a Better Way to Be Bereaved?"

Using the ideas and life (and death) of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross as a reference point, O'Rourke tells the story of "the privatization of grief," testifying insightfully to the cost of grief's displacement from the public sphere. In one of many trenchant examples, she recounts a TV scene in which a bereaved person steels herself against her grief at a time when mourning would be "a luxury":

This model represents an American fantasy of muscling through pain by throwing ourselves into work; it is akin to the dream that if only we show ourselves to be creatures of will (staying in shape, eating organic) we will stave off illness forever. The avoidance of death, Kubler-Ross was right to note, is at the heart of this ethic.

O'Rourke's engaging narrative takes us from Freud's misguided role in mourning's demise as a powerful public rite --

Only two years after Emile Durkheim wrote about mourning as an essential social process, Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia" defined it as something fundamentally private and individual. In a stroke, the work of mourning had become internalized.

-- through a sampling of observations from some of the most astute thinkers who chronicled the West losing track of bereavement and of the bereaved. Again, to give just one example, O'Rourke acknowledges the value of George Bonanno's ideas about resilience among the bereaved in general, then comments on his own experience in particular:

He thrived after his own father died, but, as he relates in his book's [The Other Side of Sadness] autobiographical passages, he became preoccupied, many years later, with performing an Eastern mourning ritual for him. The apostle of resilience is still in the grip of loss: it's hard to avoid a sense of discordance.

I do hope this overly brief review of "Good Grief" presents it as the artful primer on bereavement that I believe it is. And, if you've got less than half an hour to spare, please go straight to the end of the essay, where O'Rourke has left us with a gem from Emily Dickinson ("the supreme poet of grief"), which captures the essence of the thing in a mere handful of words: "It feels so old a pain." Indeed.