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On October 18, Colin Powell – former U.S. Secretary of State and war criminal – died of complications related to coronavirus.
The next day, while I was busy writing an article for Al Jazeera called “Stop being polite – Colin Powell was a killer,” my mother’s grandmother Anne died of coronavirus in Florida.
And as with Powell, I didn’t feel the need for praise.
My grandmother, of course, had considerably less power than the statuettee who died during her time on earth. It did not help feed the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq, nor did it lead to the crushing of Panama’s poor neighborhood of El Chorillo in 1989, as local ambulance drivers began to say “little Hiroshima”.
However, he managed to inflict serious psychological and physical injuries on people living in his small world.
In my mother’s youth, for example, a perceived transgression by any of her or her four siblings could cause all five of them to walk in a circle, while Anne would skin them with a dog leash.
My mother’s first memory is that her nose was bleeding from Anne’s fist, while an incident around a pig’s box thrown to the ground caused her to shake her belt for several days which made it impossible for her to sit headless.
When her children were not to serve as the direct target of sadistic spirits and verbal abuse, they largely resolved on their own, and Anne often had relationships with minors. My mother moved out of my grandmother’s house at the age of 17 to go to college, biting her mother’s nose and holding her teeth, Anne marked the separation.
My last relationship with Anne was at the age of 11, and at that point she became too religious. This apparent attempt to cleanse her soul didn’t stop her from throwing her old aunt down the stairs and breaking her hip – an episode driven by her aunt’s reluctance to continue funding Anne’s habit of buying things from TV in a manic way.
Anne’s own closeness to God would not stop her from threatening her daughter, my mother’s sister, with a gun. As I mention in the book Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World, the Florida authorities confiscated the firearm, but quickly returned it to my grandmother, thereby defending the undeniable rights to militarized sociopathy of U.S. citizens.
When I received news of Anne’s coronavirus death in Tallahassee, I was in the magical stone-clad town of Gjirokastër, Albania – the last stop of my ongoing world tours that began when I set out in search of the United States almost two decades earlier. , I suppose, around places and people who felt more at home than my alienated homeland.
There was a society-driven hope, of course, that I would feel something in the wake of such a close relative, and I saw on Facebook that my mother’s family members were launching a memorial show needed to rehabilitate Anne to death.
And yet I felt nothing.
In The Nature of Grief: The Evolution and Psychology of Reactions to Loss, psychology professor John Archer quoted an 1843 letter from Charles Darwin to a grieving cousin, in which he affirmed: “Strong affections have always appeared to me, the noblest part of one. the nature of man and the absence of them is an irreparable failure. ‘
Darwin asked his cousin to comfort himself: “It’s your mourning … the necessary price for being born with such feelings.”
But should we feel that they are truly irreparable failures because we do not feel “strong affections” as human beings, first and foremost in people who have recently qualified as human beings in the recent past?
In the case of Colin Powell, it is roughly ridiculous to upset war politicians who have caused massive mourning around the world. In my grandmother’s case, however, I felt a much greater tendency not to upset her, but rather to provide a sick society — and a country that prefers to focus resources — to drop bombs and traumatize other human populations, for example. adequate mental health and other health services to its population.
Why not leave the enduring idea that the dead should be respected at all costs, even if they did nothing to respect the living when they were alive? An honest narrative of individual heritage — which necessarily involves an assessment of the social contexts in which it occurs — is not only more ethically consistent than hagiography, but can provide a better and stronger closure than calls for applause and beautiful emotions.
And while it’s arguably easier said than done, sometimes it can be enough to just say, “Go well”.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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