Grief, Consolation, and Courage

what do we require to respond to another’s loss?

In one of my online classes, semesters back, a student who suffered a terrible and harrowing experience revealed this to the class in a discussion forum. Their own actions — and perhaps luck, chance, or grace — brought them through the event with minor injuries. What troubled that student even more was that not all of their friends had been so fortunate.

Reading the short selection for that week from Jean-Paul Sartre, and thinking over Sartre’s claims about our responsibility for who we make ourselves, got that student thinking, remembering, raising feelings still not entirely processed through back to the fore, leaving them, in their own words, “morally rattled.”

Fairly understandably, none of the other students commented on their classmate’s post in the discussion forum. It is often difficult to know how to respond to such intensely personal revelations, particularly at the beginning of a class, when perhaps one has but the briefest of acquaintance with one’s fellow learners. I tend to think that in these sorts of situations, younger people perhaps find themselves more at a loss, more resourceless than do their elders — though to be sure there are many very insightful, empathetic younger people and enough clueless older people to render that generalization…