Regret, Resilience, and the Nature of Grief

Abstract

Vain creatures that we are, most of us hope to be grieved after our deaths. To learn that our loved ones will not grieve for us or that their anguish will subside quickly might imply something unsettling about ourselves: that we really do not matter as much to others as we ordinarily suppose.Empirical studies of grief indicate that these egoistic hopes often go unrealized, however. Far from being permanent, the pains of grief, while often initially intense, tend to dissipate in a few months, rather than years. In the immediate aftermath of a spouse or loved one's death, grief is nearly always detrimental to subjective well-being. Yet most individuals return to their antecedent level of well-being surprisingly quickly. Our apparent ability to move on, or move beyond grief, seems to indicate that our "emotional immune system" deals with the pain of loss with far more resilience than we might expect.1In a well-regarded article, Dan Moller has argued that these empirical findings do not show that we fail to care (or care very little) about our loved ones while they are alive. However, such findings give us reason to regret our apparent resilience in the face of grief, according to Moller.2 Because our emotions enable us to "perceive value," our apparent ability to adapt to the loss of our loved ones suggests that we eventually end up blind to the value of our loved ones and our relationships with them, he argues. We should thus regret this resilience on epistemic grounds, inasmuch as it precludes emotional engagement with our lost loved ones and "so deprives us of insight into our own condition."3

The Covid-19 Pandemic and the Bounds of Grief

“…Furthermore, even in the case of grief following a death, it may be an oversimplification to say that what is lost is the person who has died , and thus to insist that grief in the case of bereavement is about the death (the concrete object) or about irrevocable personal loss (the formal object). Michael Cholbi takes ‘the relationship with the deceased as it was’ to be grief's concrete object (2019: 497). Bereavement, he thinks, involves a kind of ‘loss’ but one that may be better described as a forced change to one's relationship with the deceased.…”

Grief, disorientation, and futurity

“…I nonetheless suspect that disorientation is likely to always occur in at least those profound cases that I am concerned with here. 5 The recent work of Cholbi (2017Cholbi ( , 2019 provides a useful starting point. Cholbi's primary concern is with the complex process of grief as a whole, rather than the self-regarding component of disorientation that is (often) involved in, and one specific emotional component of, grief.…”

On grief's sweet sorrow

“…11 Michael Cholbi (2019) interprets Augustine as delighting in his "tearful search" (2019, 490) for his friend, alluding to a passage in which Augustine describes his eyes as seeking his friend everywhere (4.4.9) and takes this supports his view of grief as motivating one to attend to the normative significance of loss rather than providing one with a "pat representation" or "decisive perception" of its significance (2019,490). However, Augustine delights in sweet sorrow, not in his search for his friend.…”

“…for example, noted the tendency of some who appear to denigrate themselves to use terms of criticism that apply, in fact, to others (a disposition he associated with "melancholia," a pathological form of mourning). As with self-pity, the presence of an aversion toward others can be less than obvious.27 Solomon (2004) defends this view against Janet McCracken's (2005) (unqualified) claim that it is the whole of a person's life that is brought into focus in grief.28 SeeMoller (2007Moller ( , 2017 andCholbi (2019) for a defense of the view that our "typical grief responses" are insufficient in light of the loss to which grief is a response. See Preston-Roedder and Preston-Roedder (2018) and Vitrano (2013) for arguments against this claim.…”