Part 3 of ‘Grief & Healing Under the Capitalist Mode of Production’
Loss, at least after-the-fact, is not something to be conquered: dominated over and destroyed. When we lose someone or something which will not come back, our focus might be better served by looking at loss in relation to our lives and what carries on.
I am not brutishly saying to ignore or “get over” the loss to focus on the here and now—I am prompting us to look at loss in terms of the nature of the dreadful hole that now exists in our life and the world:
When we lose someone, we lose all the ways that they have been filling roles in our lives and in the world. We lose someone to talk to, to joke with, to care for and be cared for by.
When we lose someone, we lose the world they hold within them—their understanding of how the world works, what things they think are important to pay attention to and how to interpret those things, and ideas about what to do going forward. They not only influenced us directly by acting along and communicating their worldview—they also affected the world we share, influencing the natural world and social institutions which compose our lived environment.
When we lose someone, we lose a person in the world—a comrade who deserved to experience and develop themselves in a free world but was not given the chance to. We lose the experience of shared joy in fighting alongside each other to improve the world, and we lose the potential shared joy of experiencing structures of liberation alongside each other.
When we lose someone, we lose these very real, very tangible things, and it’s a horrible, horrible feeling.
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A certain salve perhaps exists here—there are material things that live on beyond someone’s immediate physical death. One of my friends introduced me to a conceptual framework of there being “three deaths”. The first death is the actual physical death. Then there’s the death of any living memory of the person. Finally, there’s the third death of their lasting effects on the world.
(With regards to this ‘third death’, there is a banal way that the mere existence of a person makes irreversible changes on the world around them. They displaced air molecules; they took up a seat on the train one day. Instead, I suggest we interpret this ‘third death’ in the sense of the changes they made to the world through their choices, which made meaningful material differences in other conscious beings’ lives.)
I think the “three deaths” is a nice observation: Even though we lose someone in their immediate death, we’re not losing everything about them. This can provide some comfort, but I wouldn’t be satisfied to leave it at that. We have still lost someone. We have still lost the very real, very tangible ways they would have related and interacted with us, others, and the world. And it’s still a pretty damn horrible feeling.
But at least we have some grasp of the loss that we’re facing. We don’t simply have a horrible feeling, we have some slightly more in-depth understanding of what is causing this terrible feeling.
When faced with the loss of a loved one, we must comport ourselves with the loss of many wonderful things, including the loss of the roles they played in our lives; the loss of their analysis of the world; the loss of the potential for future shared experiences of liberatory struggle and liberation; the loss of getting to celebrate the realization of their freedom and their genuine self-development.
We are hit with the heavy and undesirable task of entering into a world without them. But perhaps we can find an honest way forward, with the help of our lasting memories of them and their lasting, meaningful material effects on the world.