Modes of grieving: my father, Matilde, and disenfranchisement

I just came across this nice discussion of “disenfranchised grief” and masculinity in the Feministing community.

Disenfranchised grief is grief over a loss that is not conventionally acknowledged or socially acceptable in your culture. Couples who experience infertility, terminate pregnancy due to some genetic disorder that the fetus had, or have a miscarriage often experience disenfranchised grief. Other examples include grief over the incarceration of a loved one, the death of a pet, the breakup of an unacknowledged relationship (i.e. gay couples who haven’t come out yet or have been rejected by their families) or the death of a partner in an unacknowledged relationship, the “loss” of one’s parent due to Alzheimer’s, the death of an ex-spouse or lover, the recurring grief of a birth mother who gave up a child for adoption, and the grief of an adopted child for the relationship they might have had with their birth parent(s). In many of these cases the people who surround the grieving individual may not understand the depth of the grief involved, or may think it’s something the individual should be able to get over already. In other cases, such as in the case of unacknowledged relationships, the individual may not be able to share their grief at all.

So as I’ve been thinking about this it occurs to me that men may often experience disenfranchised grief more often than women, because it’s more socially acceptable for women to express their grief, and because men are often expected not to have the same depth of feeling. I’ve known several men who really wanted children, and were deeply emotionally invested in having a family. When they (and their partner) encountered infertility or miscarriage, their grief was barely even acknowledged, while their partner received a lot of support. When men do express their grief over infertility or a miscarriage, or don’t “get over it” quickly enough, they’re viewed with a mixture of confusion and disapproval. So I think this is one example of the damage a patriarchal culture inflicts on men. What do you think of this? Are there other examples of disenfranchised grief I haven’t thought of? Are there cases where a woman’s grief is more disenfranchised than a man’s?

Check out the comments below the original post (made by Rachel in WY).

Without knowing the term, I’ve written several times about “disenfranchised grief.” I’ve written about my strong and enduring reaction to my high school girlfriend’s abortion. My most instant connection to that sense dates from June 2006, when I lost my father and our beloved first chinchilla, Matilde, only eleven days apart. I wrote about both deaths, but when I announced Matilde’s death, I shut off comments. I knew that news of my father’s death would elicit tremendous sympathy, but I feared that posting about my devastation at the passing of a 600 gram rodent (albeit one who had captured our hearts and given rise to our rescue charity) would also elicit ridicule. And at that point, if even one idiot had made fun of our grief over the death of Matilde, I would have been crushed. I got so many sincere notes from kind folks who read the post and were unable to comment that I opened up a later post. My own fear of being teased led me to be more mistrustful than might have been necessary.

I had an easier time crying for Matilde than I did for my father, who died eleven days later. It’s not that I loved Matilde more, or even equally. It’s that there was a clarity to my grief over my beloved chinchilla. Our relationship, for it was a relationship, lasted two and a half years. We cared for her and nurtured her and she gave us a colossal amount of love for a creature so small. But it was also an uncomplicated kind of love, compared to that between a father and his grown son. I had no anger left towards my father when he died; he and I had had time to “process our issues” long before he slipped away. But the enormity of what it meant to lose a father — with all that my Dad meant to me over the course of my life — was too big for me to comprehend in an immediate moment. Indeed, two and a half years later, I am still coming to terms with his passing. I needed no such period of reflection to understand what Matilde meant to me — our simple mutual devotion was intense and pure and, in the great scheme of things, brief. And for all these reasons, I wept more for Matilde than for my father in June 2006, the month they both died.

There’s another element in this as well. I’m the eldest of my father’s four children; I am close to my mother, stepmother, and other of my father’s relatives. When my father died, I was more immediately aware of my siblings’ grief than my own. He died at home, and I was with my sisters and my stepmother when the end came. My first thought after he died was “I must call my brother in England”; even though my brother was awaiting the call (my father had been terminal for some time), it was very hard to dial the numbers. And there were other calls to be made, and as my father’s firstborn son, I felt the law of what might be called “emotional primogeniture” (the rule that says that firstborns ought to take charge in times of great crisis) very strongly. And so I found that I was able to manage my grief, and even distract myself from my grief, by taking on a rather traditional masculine role of attempting to shelter everyone else. I was able to cry the day my Dad died, but I cried as much at witnessing my sisters’ far more expressive grief as for my own loss.

There was a lot of planning, too, of memorials and mortuaries and obituaries. The family threw itself into busy-ness, which helped enormously to ameliorate the most intense of the grief, and allowed us to process the pain in manageable doses. When Matilde died, all that had to be decided was which little box to bury her in, and with which of her chew toys. I dug her grave myself (with the help of my friend Bryan). And though friends were sympathetic, the only tears shed at her passing were my wife’s and mine. Without notifications and funerary arrangements to serve as distractions, the sadness came through pure and undiluted. Even now, I remember the shock of Matilde’s sudden death (she had a massive heart attack and collapsed in her cage) with a kind of horror — the long, slow, but grace-filled goodbye that my father took seems bittersweet and infinitely more complex by comparison. I’m still coming to terms with the death of my Daddy, and from what I hear from those who went through this years before, I will be for some time. There is peace, of course, and perspective — but no real permanent closure. And that’s fine; I would not want to close the door on my relationship with my father. He is with me now, I sense, and I see him every time I look in the mirror. The pain of his absence is not at all acute, but it is there, like background music just loud enough to be heard.

I’ve wandered off topic a bit. The point of the post was that there are losses which permit publicly acceptable displays of grief, and losses for which real grief is seen as inappropriate, out of proportion, or ridiculous. Telling people how much I miss my father invariably provoked sympathy; telling people how much I missed my chinchilla would not always elicit the same. And so in the summer of 2006, I spent a lot of time worrying that I was grieving too intensely for Matilde and insufficiently intensely for my Dad, as if I wasn’t meeting the correct and expected cultural and psychological markers that indicate the healthy response to death. I learned that summer how complicated grief is, and how much its expression is shaped by family and culture as well as one’s own unique temperament — and relationship with the departed. And I have pictures of my Dad around the house, and pictures of Matilde, and pictures of other relatives who have gone on to join the Great Majority, and I respond to each in different ways at different times. And I’m clearer than ever that I am not going to let myself get disenfranchised from any of my grieving, no matter the object of that grief.