Offering: April 2025

An agreement to be transformed

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During a press conference in October of 2020, Illinois Department of Public Health Director Dr. Ngozi Ezike cried while addressing the audience about climbing COVID cases and deaths in their state. Later in the address, Ezike—who would resign a year and a half later, just after the statewide indoor mask mandate was lifted—appealed to viewers asking, “let’s please think beyond ourselves.”

I recently watched and rewatched videos of Ezike’s tearful address and later resignation, and thought about the experience of disenfranchised grief. Kenneth Doka, who is the author of Disenfranchised Grief, defines it as “the grief that persons experience when they incur a loss that is not or cannot be openly acknowledged, publicly mourned, or socially supported.”

Citing Doka, philosopher Kathleen Higgins describes common experiences of disenfranchised grief as including “unrecognized relationships, unrecognized losses, and unrecognized mourners¹.” Grief may be disenfranchised if the person grieving is in a relationship with the deceased that is not seen as legitimate, or when a death is viewed as somehow morally complex. I think it could also include grief over loss of faith, loss of habitat, loss of language or culture, and loss of species.

Disenfranchised grief underscores the social dimension of mourning. Grief may be considered obligatory in some cases while in others may be viewed as inappropriate, or even criminalized. As Higgins notes, “not everyone is entitled to grieve,” and while grief can be seen as a moral obligation for some, “others may not have the right.” How we experience grief is contingent, at least to some degree, on whether or not our losses are recognized by others as grievable.

I began reading and writing about grief in the summer of 2023 during a difficult interpersonal loss, and became increasingly committed to the project after October 7th of that year. I read Judith Butler’s essay “Violence, mourning, politics” for the first time then, and have been revisiting it lately. In it, Butler poses the questions, “Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And finally what makes for a grievable life?”

At that time I felt intuitively that there was something vital about what I was going through, something that was worth staying with despite how impossible and unyielding it sometimes felt. I sought footholds in language, as usual, that might illuminate the worthwhileness of an ongoing grief process. So I was deeply moved by Butler’s assertion that there is, after all, something to be gained from “remaining exposed” to the “unbearability” of grief.

But the thing to be gained was not necessarily toward the project of personal or spiritual growth, as is sometimes the promise in grief care settings or self-help books or literature. Instead, it was a thing that might instill a greater sense of what all this is, and more specifically who we really are. For Butler, we are social beings with bodies, forged by relational ties, both vulnerable and powerful because we are collectively responsible “for the physical lives of one another.”

The realization of this vulnerability may pose a benefit for our way-finding capacities; it is “one of the most important resources from which we must take our bearings and find our way.” The vulnerability we experience through our shared risk of and exposure to significant losses may be a ground from which we become capable of making vows “to protect others from the kinds of violence we have suffered.”

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As we know, vulnerability is differently distributed across bodies. The we/our pronoun is tenuous in part because these bodies of ours get nourished and maintained differently through means that are applied depending on where one is in the world and where one is socially within a given location.

Some bodies will be held up and protected, while others will not. As Butler notes, enforcing protection over those lives which are deemed more worthy than others “will be sufficient to mobilize the forces of war,” while “other lives will not find such fast and furious support and will not even qualify as grievable.”

NPR reported this week that Israel’s latest war plans would consider “options for soldiers to control the distribution of food limited to a minimum caloric amount necessary for survival” in Gaza. Israeli airstrikes in Gaza last week killed more than 400 people, including 183 children according to the health ministry in Gaza.

Twenty-three-year-old journalist Hossam Shabat was among those who were killed. In an outpouring of collective grief over Shabat’s murder on social media, writer Hanif Abdurraquib wrote, “Hundreds of children in Gaza killed in a 2 day stretch, and the world didn’t stop, didn’t offer any memorials. No buildings changed colors in their honor. The world is capable of this kind of memorializing, depending on the children.”

I’ve read a lot about grief these last years and “Violence, mourning, politics” is one of the most essential pieces of grief writing I’ve encountered thus far. It argues for the possibilities that become available to us when we grieve. Among them, a sense of community that shows our ties to us, revealing how vulnerable we are as a result of the reality that we are, as Butler writes, “socially constituted bodies…attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure.”

Butler doesn’t use the term disenfranchised grief in the essay, but they do describe a “hierarchy of grief” which is enforced in part by public mourning practices like the obituary. Through obituaries, lives are narrativized, often tied up with bows, and deemed worthy of grieving. But the lives that qualify for inclusion in this genre are typically those which are “married, or on the way to be, heterosexual, happy, monogamous.”

Butler notes, “we seldom, if ever, hear the names of the thousands of Palestinians who have died by the Israeli military with United States support, or any number of Afghan people, children and adults.” And it’s worth mentioning that Precarious Life—the book in which the essay was published—came out more than twenty years ago.

There is an agreement that Butler suggests is central to mourning, “to undergo a transformation…the full result of which one cannot know in advance.” And while there is a degree of decision to be made there, the nature of it also undoes choice in some sense. One cannot really set out to grieve in a particular way, to project oneself forward as one might toward a goal, to “achieve” proper mourning in a protocoled fashion.

Instead, Butler writes that in mourning, “Something is larger than one’s own deliberate plan, one’s own project, one’s own knowing and choosing.” And asks, “where does it come from? What sense does it make? What claims us in such moments, such that we are not the masters of ourselves? To what are we tied? And by what are we seized?”

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To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.

My calendar is open for one-on-one Tarot sessions in April, for more information about what sessions entail click here. To register, click here.

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1. I’m citing Higgins’ chapter “Love and Death,” from the edited volume On Emotions: Philosophical Essays.