AIBU to not "get" mass public mourning?

[BabyMummy29]

Thinking of the sad case of the little boy in Edinburgh at the moment, but on so many occasions nowadays people leave flowers, toys etc when they didn't even know the person concerned,

Wouldn't they be better spending the money on a donation to a charity.

I just don't get it at all. Fair enough if you knew the person involved. but not otherwise.

but you have NO IDEA, do you?

the thread has run its course for me I meant of course. thought that was obvious really sorry.

no I have no idea of your personal experiences unless you have shared them.

I have shared mine as not many people have actually had their personal lives splashed across sky news, been chased with their children by the media and had both international and national attention suddenly thrown at you while desperately trying to support your child and other parents and to cope with sudden death and life changing injuries to children who had simply been in a trip.

I am simply saying that for me and the parents I have discussed it with the laying of flowers and tributes, the support and help from the community helped enormously.

I suppose I could spin that to say that people helped to make themselves feel better and didn't really care but hey I choose not to.

anyway enough for me now. I will be laying remember acne flowers next month, it will be out of respect for the dead and a thank you for my dds life and for no other reason.

will make change now as over shared.

I think the discussion is difficult for many reasons, most obviously if these events resonate with you personally, but in particular because we are talking about different things - and different intentions.

I can quite understand someone involved in a community feling the urge to mark a loss and register their sadness and respect. I can't understand someone packing their children up to travel a distance and effectively create a connection that doesn't exist. Or who post online about 'I can't sleep, I've been crying all night'

I guess, for me, it is actually about people who acknowledge and mark the grief of others Versus people who try to appropriate the grief of others and somehow suck attention towards themselves.

I don't think anyone who finds public displays difficult actually has a problem with communities finding ways to support each other.i don't think anyone who finds public displays comforting actually has any time for those who want to get their picture at the spot where Holly and Jessica died.

I think the debate is about two different things tbh.

It's a cultural shift too.
My sisters funeral was organised (quite rightly) by her DD.
It was full of clapping and pop songs and stories of how lovely and jolly she was.
It comforted her DD and that's all that matters.
But for me it was a nightmare. There was nothing of my sister in that service. She wasn't lovely and jolly - she was a cantankerous mare. The sweetie cutie version of her was a travesty. She was ballsy, fierce, difficult and astonishingly brave.
The happy clappy process turned her into a hallmark card.

It's why the 'sleep with the angels' cliches annoy me. It makes every person who dies less than they are. They become a two dimensional tragic figure. It's ironicly dehumanising - this need to be seen to be so.

Good point, Pag: it can be very hard when family members have different views on dealing with loss. People who feel that grief should be a private thing, for instance, do not benefit, and can be deeply hurt, when others (who perhaps knew the deceased less well in the first place) make a big display of mourning. My mum, who is of the stiff-upper-lip type, was a bit distressed by having to deal with nieghbours coming round and wailing after my dad died.

Oh and FYI some of you - I didn't mention class. People can be thick, self-righteous and prone to dimwitted displays across the socio-economic/educational spectrum.

"That's interesting. To me, grief is personal, emotional, unpredictable and uncontrollable. Respect is dignified, kind and about others."

This is so true. Grief is the "property" of the people who knew and loved the person concerned. Respect is what the rest of us show as we do what we can to help the people who are grieving. It is crass in the extreme to hijack grief that is somebody else's. I have seen this happen in real life too- sometime it ends up with the bereaved person having to comfort other people when they should have been allowed space to grieve as they wanted to.

It'd is perfectly possible to show solidarity and respect in dignified, private ways.

Pag at my db's funeral I made sure there were several speakers that knew him from different times in his life. After his gf made a long speech about she saved him from a life of misery and turned his life around, and that he had low self-esteem issues his old mates came on and spoke of how happy he was and how great he was at what he did and what a brilliant laugh he was.

This is why funerals are best when they are neutral and managed by someone who has a sense of perspective.

Then we had people that wanted to put up memorials in various parts of the country that were convenient to them. One in a church, although he was never religious. I objected and was then vilified as a killjoy.

But yes, I agree with others, true grief can only be experienced by a person that actually has gaps missing in their lives and they rarely talk about it because it comes to them in the dark of night at any given time, they dont' need or want to seek it out and make a great display of it.

In the cases of the murdered and neglected children their energies would be far better placed in questioning the services that are supposed to protect vulnerable children.

For some, but not all, of those who participate in public mourning like this, it's going to be because they have their own loss that they are dealing with and that this is an outlet for those emotions.

My mother died 2 days after Diana. My family, including my father, were shits and pretty much left me to deal with it alone. My then-husband was emotionally immature and I was the first in my group of friends to lose a parent, so people around me didn't really know what to do. So I went to Kensington Palace. It helped. And I sobbed my heart out when the hearse drove past on the North Circular. Yes, I probably looked deranged. Didn't give a fuck. I needed it for me and for my loss.

Horsetowater
Yes, that's how it should be. But my neice had no room for anyone else's grief.
It was especially hard on my mother (who was bloody brilliant) as there was no mention of my sister as a much loved daughter. My mother was sidelined. It was so hard. No one intended it. My neices grief was just a steamroller that had no room for the idea that others had lost too. Not even her brother, my nephew.
Understandable but so hard to watch.

I think the misgivings voiced by many posters is that it's now become common* for some people manufacture a connection to a tragedy in order to publicly present that the tragedy has caused them suffering.

Like others, I'm worried that it might become the default position that we must all react in a similar way.

• Of course, social media both makes this more apparent but also fans the flames.

Cardomomginger

Yes, I agree - it will sometimes be displaced grief. It gets you at odd times doesn't it.

At my sisters funeral I feel really disengaged because there was nothing of her in it iyswim. At the end they said something like 'let's all raise an imaginary glass and smile and remember happy xxx and her happy smile' and I just wailed because all I could think was 'fucking hell, is that it. 50 years, 10 spent dealing with cancer and we get George Michael and a portrait of some banal stereotypical mommy'
I think the congregation thought I was batshit

Bootycall it helped my family too, and there were also buckets put down next to the fish man for people to donate to the RNLI.

That rings a bell with me pagwatch.

I was talking to a woman at the wake for my friend. He was great, but could be a cantankerous wasp. That's what made him good company.

I told a story about how we'd met. He was a friend of my husband and took us to a play and dinner afterwards. He was needling me from the start and I hated him and was planning to go straight home.

It was a horribly pretentious and heavy-handed play - Harold Pinter's Mountain Language - and the first thing we both said at the end was how crappy it was. From that moment we got on brilliantly.

Her husband laughed and said that sounded like him. The woman denied that he was like that and then told me I was very disrespectful to say such a thing.

I fail to see how anyone who'd spent more than 10 minutes with him would confuse him with Mother Teresa. Plus he was my friend too and that was my memory and it was hurtful of her to trample on it.

Totally agree Pag

I find funerals a nightmare because I cry at the drop of a hat and that makes me feel awfully selfish - I had to step out of my oldest friends dads funeral because I was crying a lot - not for him, but for my lovely mate - it felt disrespectful - I am such an emotional wuss baby!

Grief is for the bereaved

Edinburgh is a small and compact city and really feels village like. The people of the drylaw, pilton and pennywell do not have their troubles to seek and yet pulled together as a true community and put this wee boy and his family ahead of everything else in a time where their help was needed. I suspect there was a feeling of "imagine if this was one of my family" I know I would want as many people helping to find my DC. These people invested time and emotion trying to assist the police and family in finding this wee boy. After the terrible news broke I cannot look at local people laying tributes and see "grief whores" but people doing something to show respect, acknowledgement and doing something to perhaps help them personally move on. A lot of people in this area don't have a pot to piss in and I for one won't condemn them for laying flowers. I have the utmost respect for a community that shows a spirit that could teach many a thing or two about respect and empathy

What I find disturbing about 'grief tourism' (and by this I DON'T mean people with a connection to the deceased remembering them, but weirdos making journeys from miles away in order to wallow in the atmosphere around a death or disaster) is this idea that if you aren't performing your distress loudly and ostentatiously it doesn't exist, and that the only way to demonstrate moral worth is to perform distress loudly and ostentatiously.

It's like such people have an idea of what a person is that's all surface, all hammed up for the benefit of others, with no concept of an inner life as such. As though people are the sum of what they post on FB or Twitter, just a series of outbursts of noisy, transient badly-spelled sentiment.

The other thing I dislike about a lot of this sentimental posturing is that when people get very emotional about the death of a stranger's child, leave flowers or whatever, what they are actually articulating is rarely empathy ('My child died too, I know how it feels') but more commonly relief that it was someone else's child rather than their own. Like the dead child becomes a symbolic sacrifice and placing flowers means participating in a ritual that will help keep the participants' own children safe from a similar fate.

OTheHugeManatee before you get slated for your post I totally agree - I also think it applies to the vitriol shown to the McCanns (I would NEVER do that ergo my child is safe) and the whole 'stranger danger/peedow emeguncy' hysteria - If I don't do X,Y,Z my child will be safe

I agree. It's an atavistic thing- we probably all feel it to some extent. I remember being incredibly ashamed of myself when a child in my dd's year got leukaemia, and for a fleeting second I thought "well, statistically that means my dd won't." Which is wrong on so many levels, but, as I said, atavistic.

Manatee, you found a way to express what I've been thinking - it's as if all those flowers, cards and teddy bears are some kind of atavistic way of making a sacrifice to the 'gods' as a token to ensure nothing so awful can befall our own loved ones.

Funerals and strange events full of heightened emotions - I have a horrible tendency to feel like giggling when I am upset and feel under scrutiny. It has so far never actually happened, but I dread the possibility.

This thread has helped me in my own mind to get 'grief' and 'sympathy' sorted.

I think you're onto something there Pacific, it is very much like offering an appeasement to the gods, I also think there is guilt involved, all those times people didn't intervene when a child suffered.

Far better to donate money to a good cause which will actually make a difference.

Oh, it's definitely linked to superstition and appeasement. And that's at the root of why such people get so aggressive over their griefwanking - that's the other part of the ritual. Screaming and shitting your pants at anyone who isn't covering their FB page with some appalling misspelt drivel about heaven and a manky bit of photoshop of a candleand a face/ driving miles to add to the big fucking compost heap that's being created is also propitiation of imaginary creatures. Sacrifice and scapegoating is how it works. Of course, it doesn't. And sadly some of the people whose minds are this limited can cause serious distress to their own DC with their wailing and posturing: little kids are going to be frightened and confused if they are pressured to 'mourn' for someone they know nothing about.
There was a particularly grim bit of fuckwittery over the McCann case: someone had made a creepy film about the kid and it was shown in cinemas before the screening of some Disney/Pixar film ie to an audience including lots of children. Some of the parents at these screenings, understandably, complained that they didn't see the need for their own DC to be frightened they themselves would be snatched from their beds in the night, but these sensible parents were the ones vilified.

SGB you come across as extremely aggressive and judgmental yourself.

and you need to start defriending people who act in the way you describe in FB. no one i know acts like this.

the term 'grief wanking' is vile.

I take your point about dragging children to place flowers and teddies on a shrine to a dead child, that is distasteful, but personally I see the laying of flowers as a mark of respect and remembrance.

I live in Edinburgh and earlier today I walked over George IV bridge I saw a smallish group of ghouls assembled overlooking the back entrance to the Sheriff court (where they bring the prison vans in) hoping to catch a glimpse of the boy's mother as she was taken out the van (and doubtlessly hurl abuse at her).

Of the people assembled, it was mostly late middle aged women,in sensible outfits. I really don't understand the thought process of someone who makes a conscious decision to does this:

'Right, Monday, I need to get the shopping done early as I am going to hurl vitriolic abuse at prison van from one-ish, it might be chilly standing around with the rest of the baying mob, so I'll put my warmest coat on. I wonder if the goading will be over by six? Better tell Sue I might be late for Aqua-aerobics.'

My best guess is voyeurism - the chance to see a woman accused of killing her own child - dressed up as outrage. At least with the laying of flowers, teddies etc. that can be explained away as empathy or sympathy, but there is no justifiable reason for gawping outside the court.

Humans have always been ghouls, think of the well to do in the 18th century paying to view the inmates at Bedlam, or the tricoteuse in post revolutionary Paris watching and knitting as the heads of the nobility were sliced off.