Capitalism Hates a Good Grief
Capitalism hates a good grief. And it loves a bad one. Capitalism fundamentally opposes the sitting, the stillness that grief requires.
A good grief lets you breathe and listen. A bad grief thrives on distraction and dishonesties. While there are many ways to foster good and bad griefs, there is no ‘good griever’ or ‘bad griever.’ The challenge in capitalist society is that we are not shown how to let grief be its own worthy pursuit — its own work.
Grief cannot be worked away. There is nothing you can consume to lessen its load. Nor is the load meant to be worked into anything, sold to the highest bidder, or delivered some other place for a good use. There is no five-star rating system for your grief. No one will sign for your grief on the dotted line. There is no one and no thing that can rush its employment within you.
Grief is one of the highest forms of labor. I learned this in the midst of my own. Grief inhabits you, transforms you, and is in fact you, all at once. It is powerful evidence that there are far greater things than what can be bought and sold and bought again. It is the evidence that love is the true economy, and all else that traded is, at best, ornamental.
The evidence is on my face. The evidence looks back at me in the mirror. Inside I see my father’s eyes, cheeks, and skin — emerging constellations on my body, written histories of days in the sun. I see my mother’s brows, nose, and bold dark mane — silvering, each strand curling with its own story to tell.
I am twenty-nine with streaks of white streaming from the top of my head, like a waterfall of wisdom, amidst what’s left of an untamed brunette. I am almost thirty with creases around my eyes that document my greatest woes and joys. As my lids grow heavy with time and trauma, the blueness of these eyes is ironic and welcome. I look in the mirror and see someone both young and older; I see both myself and them, at ages undefined. Even ages they never saw. I see the living and the dead. I am timeless.
My parents’ ashes sit on a narrow crimson bookshelf, draped in house vines that resurrect themselves through all seasons. Like sacred texts, the ashes get their own shelf. Each grain a page, a piece of a legend. Yet, I do not speak to them there on the shelf, where they have been enshrined. I speak to them in the presence of trees and chatty birds, in my sister’s near-obsidian eyes, in my aunts’ laughter and my uncles’ outstretched hands, in the rain and after, in the first morning light and evenings’ flickering candles, in long thoughtful walks, and in dreams. I speak to them as I move through the world. My life is an endless conversation with their memories. My body is the evidence of their existence.
I walk the earth. I am the evidence.
I did not always listen to my grief. I did not often tend to my grief when she needed to be away from the world, when she needed to be safe. Safe from the demands of social media, of comparison culture, of single use plastics, of greed, of forgetting, of filtering: surrounded by the plethora of images and sounds, of false gods and idols that suggested I could escape both their deaths (and my own ) through the free market.
Death plays a role in the for-profit framework, while grief is given none. Not a good grief, at least. Capitalism causes a great deal of suffering — the often unspoken expense of other people’s satisfaction. Death is a big player in the capitalist framework. Ideas, businesses, and people are always dying in the machine. Capitalism encourages such fierce competition that whole economies — people’s lives and loves — are obliterated so that other ventures can be born. In this, we are not shown how to grieve death. We are shown, time and time again, that death is profitable. As soon as one’s tragedy becomes fuel for another’s gain, we have lost the real work of grief. We have sold it.
The griever, looking out into the world, sees loss mirrored back as something that needs to be alchemized. Sadness must be alchemized into happiness, stillness into motion, and lack of productivity into a higher yield. This becomes the price, the toll, the debt of loss.
In our culture of enterprise there is little compromise for a grief. That is why capitalism will only tolerate a bad one. A bad grief encourages busyness (business) and forgetting. It asks that your breath commute, your sorrow be swallowed, and your honesty surface only in dreams. Capitalism does not want a lucid, raw grief. It does not want your wails on a grave; you must pay for that privilege. You must pay for a swift, beautified, official, out-of-pocket privilege. Capitalism does not want your prayers without tithes, nor pain without purchasing medicines. Thus, capitalism will only allow for the kind of grief that demands payment. Capitalism only allows for a grief that is a hungry ghost.
An immeasurable thing, like the love or wanting of a parent, a grief contains so many unanswerable questions. With the insatiable longing of nostalgia, or the persistent growling hunger of emptiness, the appetite of grief grows. The griever is tasked to nourish this metaphysical intestine, which cannot be fed by the material. They are together and at odds. Yet, it is the tangible — the consumed, priced “stuff” of the world — that they are instructed to feed their grief with. Living in the hungry dark hug of a misunderstood grief, love finds itself becoming lost. This is how the griever becomes both consumer and consumed.
Grief quite literally destroyed my gut.
I tried to feed the pangs of my parent’s absence with many things. Countless nights of takeout, hundreds of cigarettes, each of which I declared would be my last, three runaway flights (Bucharest, Madrid, Chicago) that I never boarded, and dozens of expensive second cups of coffee left unfinished, to name a few. The more I put in, the more there was to expel. Sometimes quite violently. I became sick. Sick trying to be recovered from the sadness and anger and confusion that capitalism warned me against. Sadness, anger and confusion were the three prison guards that would render me useless.
Then there were those hours of curation, both in person and digital. The hours spent — a sliver of infinity that cannot be asked back — trying to assure the world (and myself) that I was still alive, even though they are dead.
It’s far easier to curate yourself online. And with each social media post, I attempted to temporarily feed the stomach of my grief. I offered myself up to a thousand blue lit eyes hoping they would see a cadence in my tragedy. I sought to be satiated by the virtual consumption of moments, boxed and saturated for an audience of dilated pupils.
I smiled into the frame of the phone, choosing only the most flattering light. Each picture shouting into the face of the impossible: “I am still here.”
Grief contains shadows: the long, distorted shapes of absence. It is all too easy to mistake grief for only darkness, in juxtaposition with a world of “happiness”, light, health, and romance; the capitalist narrative. In the strange lunacy of mis-marketed hope, the one who grieves tries to climb out into light. The griever dissociates from their grief, for the promise of a happiness.
The light promised by capitalism is akin to the fluorescent lights in a shopping mall. It makes everything behind the glass look ideal, but it also makes grievers look at themselves in the glass with a fragile idealism, a longing, an insecurity.
Happiness is the thing they keep selling. This promise of arrival, of that dream life we slowly funnel all monetary, mental, and physical currency into since becoming cognizant of our allowances. Happiness, light, “good vibes only”, and a trough of other synonyms and kindred phrases. Then loss happens, and, like a vacuum, it seems as if there is no putting anything back into the place where someone loved once stood. We still try. All the ads tell us to try, and to buy, and to try again. We try, in vain, to feed a darkness, like a mouth that just announced itself in the heart. Frantic efforts to force-feed the dark with quick, visible change. Yet, there’s a secret that the one that loves, the griever, discovers. The secret is not to turn away: there is, actually, still a great deal of light in grief. And that’s love, feeding them still.
Grief is love work.
I did not know how much I loved my mother until she died. I did not know the size of my love for her. Just before the autumn came, only three months after my father passed away from a terminal illness, her unexpected death moved in me like the Big Bang. The person who created me, carried me, fed me, clothed me, had so abruptly left my physical universe. Her exit was a catalyst — an explosion — of pain and love and awakening. Her death filled up space and time, making me aware of the vastness of my heart — my capacity to love.
Just a few days before she died, she called me. I had told her I did not have time to talk. I was busy. I was grieving, too. I put things on hold. If I was rude, or cold, I honestly assumed that in a few days, over some sips of scalding hot coffee and bites overly cream cheesed bagel from the corner deli, I would get the chance to amend it with warmth. But that did not happen. So suddenly did she vanish from the other end of the dining table, the couch, the phone line, of myself. So suddenly did it hit me that the last words I uttered to my mother were, “I just can’t talk right now.”
We spent six years saying goodbye to my father, whose death was slow and visible. I had no warning to know that I also needed to say goodbye to my mother. Already inside of grief’s embrace from losing him, her death was both surreal and the most real thing I have ever experienced. It made both my father’s death and my love of her more real. It made the love for my sister, my partner, my remaining family — blood and chosen — more real. A summer of loss, the summer of my 28th year, commenced a season of painful growth. Whole galaxies of myself swirled in their absence. The breadth, tremendous and terrifying.
It is strange how quickly reality makes itself known, then how quickly the temptation arises to name it, frame it, escape it. I had so much love, and therefore so much to lose. Or so capitalism implied.
For some, coming of age means marriage or births or choosing a home. For others its a career change, a fearless journey, a reevaluation of your wants and dreams. For me, it was eulogizing both my parents.
“What a tragedy!”, “What a burden!”, “What an unfortunate set of cards!” the chorus around me proclaimed. They still sing, in less frequency now. Time passes and no one forgets, but they also do not fully remember. I do not always remember in the rush of modernity. I do not always remember. That is why I must stop, why I must write.
In the end, death answers to no clock.
Death sets a timer no one can stop. It is those that remain living that hear the ticking. And that is why the choruses of people say what they say, for fear that the living will go mad waiting to see their dead, or worse, that no amount of time will heal the absence.
Capitalism loves clocks, and all the many forms of measurement. That is why capitalism hates a good grief, for it is immeasurable. Like birth, a good grief is a burst of energy. Paradoxically born of absence, it is impossible to say when it ends.
Grief builds itself out from the origin point of loss. All the ripples that continue outward are its body, in and from and around and in dialogue with you. Grief is conceived from love and born from parting. Once someone that is loved departs, grief then enters.
And physical death does not hold a monopoly on grieving hearts. Grief can be a part of self gone missing (or never found), an exile from home(land), a dream forgotten. Grief is the evidence of the griever’s love, wielding an invisible string to someone or something that was once tugged on both ends.
Grief is witness.
The swells of a grief can feel as faint as a ripple from a skipped stone, even a tear. Or they can be as colossal as the tsunami conjured by the rumbling hot rage of the Earth. Trying to resist or distract from the motion will only create more swells. It is there that the distinction between a good and bad grief lies. The good grief cultivates stillness in the presence of (e)motion. The griever cannot change the course of these movements, other than that unprofitable stillness. Not paralyzed, but still — the utmost awareness that the waters of grief roll.
I witnessed my body in its resistance. I continue to witness my body in its resistance, and in that witness I must become still. I must be patient with this work.
One can only truly grieve what they have loved.
There is so much to fall in love with in this life. This one life to reconcile loving and losing, to reconcile light and dark, without forsaking one for the other. To sit so that we may be moved. To turn the lights off so that we may be illuminated by what is within. To understand the sacred currency of loving — the currency capitalism tries to distort and distract us from. To remember that your humanity can not be exchanged for an ideal.
So I close with a question rather than an absolute, one that is now engraved on my heart, inspired by the words of the late, great poet Mary Oliver. In this “one wild and precious life”, do we not owe ourselves and our loves a good grief?
This essay was written a year before COVID-19 entered our world. I am sharing it now as an offering to those experiencing personal and collective grief.
