A new riff on old grief

Over at Ms M-A's, there's some discussion of how people grieve and how people misunderstand the process. The conversation put me in the WABAC machine, back to the year I was writing my graduate thesis.

It was a micro-historic look at a small New Hampshire town in the first half of the 19th century, supported by computer analysis and with all the bells and whistles that went with this type of study, then newly fashionable. The work involved getting very deeply involved with the lives of a number of families indicated as representative by the data analysis.*

I learnt a good deal about the socio-economic life cycle of rural communities, but I discovered something else. Most laypeople and even most scholars look back at mortality in the era before the major discoveries in medicine with something like shock. They—we, for until this I did the same—insulate themselves with the assumption that the people who endured these mortality rates were used to it and that they didn't mind the way we would.

What comes out of the primary sources is first, that rural Americans at least weren't necessarily used to high premature mortality rates and that a great many of them minded very much. The diseases that could sweep away five of seven children in a week (like diphtheria) or could kill young adults in their prime (like tuberculosis) were diseases associated with poor sanitation and crowding, in short with 19th century civilisation. (I could go on with that, but you'd have another thesis on your hands if I did.)

The impact on those who survived was as variable as the individuals themselves. They responded with everything from gradually attaining acceptance, to abandonment, to what we would now call psychosis, to alcoholism or perhaps drug dependency, and suicide. Those who found their way to acceptance frequently had to confront repeated setbacks and failures. Agriculture is a merciless business, and it seems to lean heavily on those distracted by their grief.

It was sometimes hard to read this material and keep one's objectivity. Coming up close to these people and their emotions at more than a century's remove was probably a greater learning experience for me than the objectives I was supposed to be pursuing.

If we rightly try to give some space to our peers to allow them to work through grief in their own way and time, let's not forget the grief of countless past generations, or dismiss it, or rationalise it.

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*It's said that the average academic monograph has 1.4 readers. I must have hit some of the right keys because I found three citations when I Googled this item a few months ago. Not much of an audience for a year's work, eh?