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In Someone Spectacular, now off-Broadway, six bereaved individuals are left to process their grief alone when their counselor mysteriously disappears. This absence forces the characters into raw, unmediated interactions, confronting their anxieties, fears and secrets without professional guidance. The play critiques both the reliance on structured therapy and the individualization of grief in American culture, underscoring the importance of shared human connection in mourning.
Grief is not a singular emotion but an ever-shifting landscape, encompassing sorrow, anger, confusion and even humor. The play’s funny side offers relief from grief’s intensity while underscoring the absurdity and unpredictability of loss. Without a therapist, the characters’ interactions grow chaotic, revealing the limits of therapy and the need for direct, unfiltered emotional confrontation.
The play serves as both a critique and defense of group therapy. It questions the idea that therapy can fully manage grief, suggesting that some aspects of mourning are best understood through direct experience. Yet it also shows the healing potential of collective support, even in the absence of a professional.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, Queen Elizabeth II remarked, “Grief is the price of love.” This phrase captures the deep connection between love and loss, where the intensity of our grief reflects the depth of our love. Loving deeply makes us vulnerable to profound sorrow, but it also underscores the value and significance of that love. Grief, though painful, honors the memory of our loved ones and is a natural part of life, reminding us that the joy of love is worth the inevitable sorrow that follows loss.
Grief is the deeply personal emotional and psychological response to loss, encompassing a range of emotional, cognitive, physical and behavioral responses. Grief often manifests in physical symptoms (such as fatigue, appetite changes or sleep disturbances) and cognitive experiences (such as confusion, disbelief or preoccupation with the deceased). These responses are the body’s and mind’s way of processing loss.
Grief allows individuals to process intense emotions like sadness, anger, guilt and despair, helping them confront the reality of loss and adjust to life without the deceased. Over time, grieving can lead to acceptance, where the bereaved integrate the loss into their life and move forward.
Mourning, the external and social expression of grief, is shaped by cultural, religious and societal practices. Rituals like funerals, wakes and memorial services provide structure, offering the bereaved a sense of connection and comfort. These practices reflect cultural and religious beliefs, helping individuals make sense of death, honor the deceased and begin healing. Mourning rituals serve as markers of transition, helping the bereaved come to terms with the new reality.
Mourning serves a dual purpose: It expresses our grief and provides a structured way to honor and remember the deceased. Through mourning, we pay tribute to their life and ensure their memory endures within the community.
Grief is a universal human experience, yet the ways in which it is expressed and processed vary widely across cultures and historical periods. Whether through stoic acceptance and resignation or open and uninhibited displays of emotion and whether through collective rituals or individual reflection, each culture’s approach to grief reflects its broader values and beliefs about life, death and the afterlife. These practices not only help individuals cope with loss but also reinforce cultural identities and social bonds.
Stoicism taught that emotions such as grief should be moderated and that one should accept death as a natural part of life. The Stoic ideal was to endure loss with dignity and composure, emphasizing the importance of maintaining inner peace.
In traditional Japanese culture, influenced by Buddhism and Confucianism, there is a strong emphasis on accepting the impermanence of life. The concept of mono no aware—the awareness of the impermanence of things—reflects a resigned acceptance of loss as an inevitable aspect of existence. Individuals are encouraged to internalize their sorrow and continue with their duties.
During the Victorian era, elaborate funerals and mourning rituals were an expected response to death. Mourning attire was a significant part of grieving. Widows, in particular, were expected to wear black mourning clothes for an extended period, sometimes up to two years, as a public display of their grief. This period of mourning was marked by strict social protocols, with different stages of mourning indicated by variations in dress and the gradual reintroduction of color.
In many South Asian cultures, white is the color of mourning, symbolizing purity and the cycle of life and death. In Hindu traditions, mourners often wear white clothing during funerals and other rituals associated with death. This is in stark contrast to Western traditions, where black is typically associated with mourning.
Mexico’s Día de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead) is among the best-known examples of the collective commemoration of loss. This holiday, celebrated on Nov. 1 and 2, is a time when families come together to honor and remember their deceased loved ones. The event is marked by the creation of ofrendas (altars) decorated with flowers, candles, photographs and the favorite foods of the deceased. The celebration symbolizes the continuing connection between the living and the dead.
In ancient Egypt, elaborate funerary practices, including mummification, tomb construction and rituals performed by priests, were designed to ensure the safe passage of the nobility into the afterlife. These practices involved the entire community and reflected the belief in an eternal life beyond death.
In many Buddhist cultures, grief is acknowledged through individual meditation and reflection on the impermanence of life. The focus is often on coming to terms with loss internally, through personal spiritual practices. While there are communal rituals, such as chanting and offerings, the journey through grief is considered a personal process of understanding and acceptance.
American society, in contrast, tends to treat grief as an individual issue, to be managed privately, with minimal communal support.
While there is no single way Americans process grief, various cultural, economic, historical, religious and social factors shape a uniquely American approach to loss, reflecting the country’s broader values and dynamics.
Contemporary American society, with its emphasis on individualism, tends to emphasize the personal and unique nature of each person’s grief journey. This individualistic approach supports a wide range of grief expressions, from private reflection to public displays of sorrow, depending on what feels appropriate to the individual. In recent years, there has been a growing trend toward highly personalized funerals and memorial services, featuring elements like video tributes, custom music playlists or themed decorations.
With its rich cultural and religious diversity, the United States reflects this multiplicity in its mourning practices. While some communities, like African Americans, celebrate with joyful homegoing ceremonies, others, like Jewish families, observe sitting shiva, a weeklong period of mourning with family and friends. Christian funerals might focus on the hope of resurrection, while Buddhist rituals may assist the deceased’s spirit in transitioning smoothly to the next life. This diversity ensures that American mourning practices are a mosaic of different traditions and customs.
The well-developed funeral industry in the U.S. plays a significant role in managing grief and mourning, offering services that range from traditional burial to cremation and ecofriendly options like green burials. Funeral homes often serve as central institutions, providing logistical support for funerals and emotional support through grief counseling and memorial planning.
In recent years, social media has become an increasingly important space for mourning, allowing people to publicly express their grief, share memories and offer condolences, blurring the lines between public and private mourning. This shift has created new dynamics in how grief is processed, offering solace to some in online communities while presenting challenges for others who struggle with the public nature of their grief.
In his 1973 book The Denial of Death, the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker argued that the fear of death, whether conscious or unconscious, is a fundamental motivator of human behavior. This fear shapes culture, society, religion and individual psychology, leading people to develop mechanisms to deny or transcend mortality.
Becker contends that the awareness of our mortality creates deep existential anxiety, driving us to pursue activities like creating art, raising families, achieving success or adhering to religious beliefs—that provide meaning and help us symbolically transcend death. These pursuits offer ways to achieve a sense of immortality, either through belief in an afterlife or through cultural achievements.
Becker explores how societal structures and shared belief systems function as collective ways to deny death, offering individuals a sense of purpose and a way to cope with their mortality. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, particularly the work of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank, Becker explains how psychological defense mechanisms like repression, projection and denial help individuals avoid confronting mortality, though these defenses can lead to psychological disorders if they fail.
He emphasizes the tension between our biological nature, driven by survival instincts and our capacity for symbolic thought, which makes us aware of our inevitable death. This conflict creates a fundamental existential dilemma. Becker suggests that many societal issues—such as war, prejudice and the pursuit of power—stem from efforts to deny death.
Despite acknowledging that the fear of death is an inescapable part of the human condition, Becker advocates for a more conscious acceptance of mortality. He suggests that by recognizing our mortality, we can live more authentically and engage in meaningful activities that acknowledge, rather than deny, the reality of death.
American society does in fact exhibit a denial or avoidance of death, making it harder for individuals to fully engage with grieving and mourning. This collective discomfort with mortality manifests in cultural attitudes and practices that minimize, sanitize or distance death from everyday life.
In American culture, death is often seen as a failure of the medical system rather than a natural part of life, leading to aggressive medical interventions even when death is imminent. Many Americans die in hospitals or nursing homes, which distances the dying process from the home and community, making it a clinical event managed by professionals. Institutionalization means that many people have limited direct experience with death until it personally affects them.
Euphemisms like “passed away” or “gone to a better place” soften the reality of death, making it less immediate. Funerals often involve embalming and cosmetic procedures, presenting the deceased in a lifelike state, which can obscure the finality of death. This emphasis on youth, beauty and vitality in American culture, often sidelining the elderly, further contributes to a cultural avoidance of aging and death.
The highly commercialized funeral industry in the U.S. offers services that can make death feel like a managed consumer experience rather than a personal or spiritual one, with an emphasis on expensive caskets and elaborate ceremonies. Life insurance and estate planning also frame death in terms of financial and logistical management, downplaying its emotional significance.
In American culture, death is often kept out of sight, with few everyday depictions of it. This absence from public consciousness leads to its marginalization. Many Americans have little involvement in death rituals, such as caring for the deceased, which can make death seem distant and abstract.
Increasingly, “celebration of life” ceremonies are chosen over traditional funerals, focusing on the positive aspects of the deceased’s life and downplaying the sadness and finality of death. This reflects a cultural tendency to focus on life and positivity, even in the face of death.
There is also a cultural push in the U.S. to move on quickly after a loss, which can suppress emotions and lead to an incomplete mourning process. The pursuit of technological solutions to extend life, like cryonics and digital immortality, reflects a belief in overcoming death, contributing to the narrative that death can be defeated or postponed indefinitely. Strong religious beliefs in the afterlife also serve to minimize the fear of death, providing comfort but potentially shifting focus away from the reality of death as the end of earthly existence.
American society’s tendency to psychologize grief—understanding it in terms of stages, relying on grief counselors and viewing mourning as something to get over—is rooted in cultural, historical and social factors, which reflect broader values such as individualism, a preference for scientific and therapeutic approaches and discomfort with death’s inevitability.
Psychology has become a dominant lens in American culture, leading to widespread adoption of frameworks like Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief. Originally intended to describe the process of dying, these stages have been applied to grieving, offering a structured, prescriptive way to manage grief that aligns with the American preference for order and predictability.
Grief is often medicalized in the U.S., treated as a psychological issue to be diagnosed and managed through therapy or medication. This reflects a broader cultural tendency to seek scientific solutions to life’s challenges, reducing complex emotions to conditions treatable by professionals.
American individualism extends to how people handle grief, placing the responsibility for coping on the individual. This approach can make grieving a private, internal process rather than a communal experience. The emphasis on self-reliance means grief is often seen as a personal journey to be navigated alone, with an eventual return to normalcy as the goal.
The cultural discomfort with death often leads to viewing grief in psychological terms, making it seem more manageable and less threatening. This perspective can sidestep deeper existential questions, with a strong push for individuals to achieve closure quickly, equating it with “getting over” grief.
Grief counseling has risen as a profession in response to the erosion of traditional communal support networks. Counselors provide structured support, reinforcing the idea that grief can be managed with the right tools. However, this can lead to pressure to resolve grief quickly, aligning with broader societal expectations of productivity and efficiency.
The pathologization of grief, with terms like “complicated grief” or “prolonged grief disorder,” reflects the tendency to categorize mourning within a medical framework. The widespread acceptance of the stages of grief model has normalized these stages as the standard experience, creating expectations that grief should follow a linear progression.
While psychologizing and professionalizing grief can offer support, they also contribute to viewing grief as something to be overcome quickly and privately, potentially overlooking the ongoing, communal and deeply personal aspects of mourning.
American grieving and mourning practices are shaped by a cultural discomfort with mortality, a preference for quick resolution of sorrow and the expectation that individuals handle grief privately, often with professional counseling rather than community support.
In a fast-track, quick-fix society that values speed, efficiency and individualism, Americans are encouraged to process grief quickly and quietly, with death pushed to the margins and mourning treated as a personal responsibility rather than a communal act.
By sanitizing the dying process and promoting rapid mourning, American culture places the burden of grief on the individual, leading to a mechanical processing of sorrow that often leaves deeper emotions unaddressed, forcing many to cope with loss in isolation.
Grief cannot be fast-tracked, nor can it be processed alone. We are gravely mistaken if we believe that sorrow and pain can be quickly healed or worked through privately in isolation. There are no quick fixes for profound losses.
Playwright Doménica Feraud wrote Someone Spectacular in the wake of her mother’s death. I think we’d do well to embrace her play’s takeaways.
Processing profound loss and grief is a deeply complex and emotional journey that cannot be fully navigated alone or solely through the help of a psychologist or therapist. While professional support is valuable, the experience of loss touches on aspects of our humanity that are inherently social and communal.
Grief is often an overwhelming and isolating experience. While therapists can offer guidance and support, they are not a replacement for the communal bonds that naturally help us process loss. The solitary nature of one-on-one therapy can sometimes reinforce feelings of isolation, making it harder for individuals to connect with the broader human experience of grief.
Grief is not just a personal journey; it is a universal experience that connects us to others. Processing grief in isolation can deprive individuals of the shared understanding and empathy that comes from communal mourning. In collective settings, such as support groups or community rituals, people find comfort in knowing they are not alone in their sorrow, which can help normalize and validate their feelings.
Grieving within a community allows individuals to give and receive support, creating a network of care that can ease the burden of loss. When people share their stories of grief with others who have experienced similar losses, it can foster a sense of solidarity and mutual understanding that can be deeply healing.
Throughout history, cultures have developed rituals and ceremonies to help people cope with death and loss. These rituals—whether religious or secular—serve as powerful tools for processing grief. They provide structure, meaning and a sense of continuity, helping individuals move through their sorrow with the support of others.
Grief can be intense and unpredictable, bringing with it a range of emotions that can be difficult to manage alone. In a collective setting, individuals can express their grief more freely, knowing that others will understand and support them. This shared expression of emotion can be cathartic, helping to release pent-up feelings and fostering a sense of connection and belonging.
When we grieve together, we not only honor the memory of the person we’ve lost, but we also reaffirm the importance of our connections to others. The act of coming together in grief reinforces the bonds that sustain us through life’s challenges, reminding us that we are part of a larger community that endures beyond our individual losses.
In the contemporary United States, there’s a tendency to view grief through a medical or psychological lens, treating it as a condition to be managed or cured. However, grief is a natural, human response to loss that is best understood as a collective experience. By engaging in communal mourning, we acknowledge that grief is not something to be fixed but rather a process that unfolds in the presence of others who share our sorrow.
True healing from grief often requires more than just individual introspection; it involves reconnecting with others and finding meaning through shared experiences. Collective grieving allows us to integrate our loss into the fabric of our lives, making it a part of our shared history and identity.
Grieving collectively helps build resilience by fostering a sense of community and shared purpose. When we see others who have gone through similar experiences and emerged stronger, it gives us hope and the strength to carry on. This communal resilience is vital for moving forward after a profound loss.
While individual therapy and psychological support are important components of grieving, they are not sufficient on their own. Grief is an experience that is deeply rooted in our connections to others and our place within a community. By mourning collectively, we tap into a powerful source of healing that comes from shared understanding, mutual support and the reaffirmation of life’s most meaningful connections. Collective grieving honors not just the individual who has been lost, but also the ongoing bonds that unite us all in the face of life’s inevitable losses.
Grieving is complex because our deepest relationships are rarely simple. Human connections involve a mixture of love, dependence, conflict and unresolved emotions. When we lose someone close, we not only mourn their absence but also grapple with the intricate feelings that characterized our relationship. This complexity often brings ambivalence and regret to the surface, complicating the grieving process.
In even the closest relationships, love is accompanied by less positive emotions like frustration, disappointment, jealousy or anger, alongside care and compassion. These mixed feelings don’t vanish with death; instead, they can intensify as we reflect on unresolved tensions. Grieving someone with whom we had a complex relationship can lead to conflicted feelings, guilt or regret for unresolved issues, making it harder to achieve closure.
Most relationships involve unfinished business—things left unsaid and apologies not made. When someone dies, the opportunity to address these issues is lost, often leaving the bereaved with lingering regret and what-ifs that add to the complexity of grief. We may also mourn missed opportunities—time not spent, love not expressed or rifts not mended—adding to the pain of loss.
The finality of death often sharpens our awareness of the imperfections in our relationships, leading to a deeper sense of loss as we realize the relationship will never evolve or improve. Personal history, including past traumas and conflicts, plays a significant role in shaping our grief. Unresolved issues from the past, especially in family relationships, can resurface during mourning.
Grieving often involves coming to terms with the imperfections of the deceased and forgiving them for any pain they caused. The inability to forgive can prolong grief and hinder peace. Equally important is the need for self-forgiveness, as those grieving often blame themselves for things left undone. Working through these feelings is crucial for healing, but it is not easy, especially when regret is strong.
Navigating grief means dealing with both the loss of a loved one and the tangled emotions that defined the relationship. Understanding and accepting this complexity is essential for processing grief and finding a path to healing. While challenging, working through these layers of emotion can lead to a deeper understanding of ourselves and the relationships that have shaped our lives.
The way Americans grieve and mourn is deeply influenced by a cultural discomfort with mortality, a tendency to avoid the deeper emotional work that comes with loss, an emphasis on quick resolution of sorrow and the expectation that individuals should handle their grief privately, often with the help of professional counseling rather than community support.
In a society that values speed, efficiency and individualism, Americans are encouraged to process grief quickly and quietly, with death often pushed to the margins of consciousness and mourning treated as a personal responsibility rather than a communal act.
One of the humanities’ historical functions was to teach people how to live a good life. An equally important, though often underappreciated, purpose of the humanities was to prepare people for death—both their own and the deaths of others. The awareness of death, paradoxically, can enhance the quality of life.
By engaging with the profound insights offered by literature, philosophy, history and the arts, we are better equipped to understand, accept and cope with the realities of mortality. The humanities teach us that living a good life involves acknowledging the reality of death, not as something to be feared or ignored, but as a natural part of existence. This awareness can lead to a life lived with greater intention, purpose and appreciation for the present moment. By contemplating our own mortality, we are prompted to think about our legacy: about what we have contributed to the world and how we wish to be remembered.
