Whenever characters on TV shows discover a dead body, or when another character dies in front of them, the living character tends to fall to his or her knees, reach imploringly towards heaven, and howl, “No!!!”
This may be where many people acquire their notions of appropriate grief.
The Meryl Streep movie, A Cry In The Dark, was based on the true story of Lindy Chamberlain, an Australian woman whose baby disappeared from a campsite. Lindy was an extremely reserved and even a chilly person, and her lack of obvious, histrionic grief was used against her, and she went on trial for murdering her own child. It was eventually proven that a dingo, which is a kind of vicious Australian coyote, had in fact killed the child (this was the movie which turned “A dingo ate my baby!” into a punchline.)
Elizabeth Smart was the Mormon teenager who was kidnapped and molested by a religious psychopath and his wife. When Elizabeth escaped, after months in captivity, she seemed extraodrinarily capable, aware and well-adjusted, after such a horrific ordeal. At the time, Smart’s behavior, and her religious faith, caused a certain wariness in the public, because Smart was refusing to perform the role of a tearful victim, and while she eventually wrote a book and made the rounds of various media, she seemed unwilling to fully exploit her own suffering. She’s since become an activist, working to fight sex trafficking and abductions.
A few days ago, another psychotic gunman, in Texas, whose wife had left him, killed his in-laws, including both parents and four children. Another daughter, a teenager, survived because, while wounded, she pretended to be dead, and she was able to alert the police, who tracked down the killer. This teenager appeared on TV today, speaking at a memorial for her family. She was fresh-faced and articulate, and even smiled and laughed, and quoted a passage from Harry Potter. At first, this struck me as odd, until I thought: under such hideous circumstances, how should she behave? What would be the “correct” or “appropriate” response? What are grief and shock supposed to look like? That teenager had to not only endure the deaths of her family members, but now her affect would be judged by the rest of the world, including me.
At funerals and memorials, some folks cry buckets, while others don’t, and it’s dangerous to grade the depth of anyone else’s grief, on the basis of a public display.
