[defined throughout: disenfranchised grief, factors of disenfranchised grief, prolonged grief disorder/complicated grief, typical grief, symbolic objects]
I found out my friend died the summer after my freshman year of college. We’d been best friends from 6th grade until about 10th grade when we drifted apart. I found out she died by scrolling on instagram and seeing a photo of something like a frozen yogurt lifted by a bodiless hand with a caption saying something like ‘I’ll miss this with you’. My friend had been tagged in it. I went to her account and there it was, RIP after RIP. I collapsed beside my bed, the hardwood coming up to meet my knees.
She and I had grown apart before her death so, by the time she died, I felt that it was no longer my place to grieve her, that I'd forfeited the right when I’d stopped crossing the threshold of her front porch. But, despite my best efforts, that didn’t stop my grief. I felt such overwhelming shame, feeling that by grieving her death I was co-opting it even though my grief and my love for her was and is very real. Even now, I realize I haven’t said her name yet, as if its invocation is reserved for people who were closer to her when it mattered, which is to say when I wasn’t.
Francie. Her name is Francie. Seven years later, and I still have to tell myself that the grief I feel is not egregious, that I’m allowed to mourn her (this is a manifestation, like those affirmation instagram posts. “Comment ‘I CLAIM’ to manifest!”). I wrote the poem, 6’x2’, a few years ago about the shame I felt about my grief for Francie (forgive the mixed metaphors, if you can).
6’x2’
My grief is a 6 foot long, 2 foot wide metal pole in my throat.
I can hardly swallow around it.
It fills me so completely and painfully.
My grief is too big.
When you grow apart from someone that dies,
How much grieving is too much grieving?
As hard as I try to regurgitate the steel post,
Remove it from me,
Take my foot off the gas and put a brick on the brake,
My esophagus seems to have grown around it.
And I feel like those who loved her more and knew her better
See this 6’x2’ pole sticking out of my throat
Like I’m curating and polishing it
For the world to see
As If I’m not trying just as hard to get it out of my fucking
Body and plant it in the ground where it belongs
To visit occasionally and respectfully and lovingly.
Instead I feel like a fraud with an overgrown toothpick
Choking me to death
24/7
Tears in my eyes, helpless to speak
Gasping for breath
Taste of blood on my tongue.
This relationship I have with my grief of Francie isn’t unique, it has a name and everything.
Disenfranchised grief is grief that is minimized either by oneself or others. It’s grief we know– implicitly or explicitly, for real or perceived reasons–that we cannot openly express or acknowledge and is therefore hidden away from the world and ourselves.
There are five factors, according to Kenneth Doka (who coined the term), that lead to disenfranchised grief.
A relationship that is not recognized by society (parasocial (celebrity or character), co-workers, ex-partners, queer lovers, mistresses)
The grief or loss is not socially acknowledged as meaningful (death of a pet, job loss, miscarriage or stillbirth)
Loss with stigma (suicide, assisted suicide, AIDS, drug overdose)
The griever being excluded as we incorrectly assume their inability to work with or understand their grief (people with developmental disabilities or dementia, young children)
When a person’s grief process is not socially normative (louder or quieter, longer or shorter, angrier or kinder than socially expected)
My experience, wherein I felt no longer close enough to warrant a loud verbal cry, is the dominant aspect of my disenfranchisement. Although my friend died by suicide, that has not informed my DG, which is also true of the suicide of my mother. Very rarely does death by suicide bring color to my cheeks or a ducked-headed shyness to my interactions.
“When social networks do not recognize that individuals have a right to grieve, the bereaved’s access to support systems that can help them resolve their grief is greatly diminished.” (Cook & Oltjenbruns, 1998)
Disenfranchised grief (DG) is stifling so much mourning. It is running rampant around us. When grief is disenfranchised, the intensity and duration of grief increases alongside the likelihood of Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD). PGD (also been known as Complicated Grief) is a type of chronic mourning that falls outside of the typical grief experience. PDG is characterized by grief that is debilitating, unrelenting, and lasts for at least a year after loss has occurred. Now, this timeline isn’t infallible–this doesn’t account for various cultural expressions of grief, or the impact of different modes of death like sudden losses to accidents, homicide, suicide, or genocide–but it provides us with a framework for relieving the distress of this ongoing grief. Furthermore, unequal access to grief resources and experience of factors influencing grief (cultural expectations, age/understanding of grief, access to money/time off to grieve/travel/get therapy, community, emotional stability, etc) informs one’s ability to grieve on a typical timeline.
To be clear, PGD only manifests in approximately 10% of grievers so not everyone who experiences DG will experience PGD. It is very possible to experience both a normative/typical grief period with disenfranchised grief. In typical grief, we experience acute grief in the wake of a loss (death or non-death losses like job loss, moving, divorce, incarceration, violence, etc.) that may be debilitating but is able to be integrated into our lives within a few months after the loss. The grief is, of course, still there and will be forever, but it is no longer inhibiting our ability to complete day to day tasks or exist in the world.
Another aspect that can lead to DG or PGD is lack of mourning rituals. If you weren’t invited to a funeral or mourning ritual or if there was no funeral to attend, you may find your grief feeling abbreviated or thwarted. Mourning rituals provide us with essential time and space to express our emotions, reflect on and remember our dead person, and embody our grief. The community aspect of many rituals allows us to feel seen and heard in our grief, the act of witnessing is a valuable one. But even with mourning rituals, you can still experience DG.
I attended mourning rituals for Francie. I went to the funeral, the memorial, and post-funeral reception, and there were moments that teetered both on the side of disenfranchised and franchised grief within these experiences. After her memorial, I found myself hanging around the mutual friends we had in high school. I felt stupid standing there but I couldn’t stomach the thought of walking out. I felt absent of an allowance to grieve, but was desperate to be proved wrong. Here, someone gave condolences to a mutual friend who acknowledged & redirected them, saying, “Alekz was really close with her, too.” My heart swelled. I don’t know if she was just saying that to be nice or she truly saw that I had been close with Francie and needed to know someone remembered that. We lived 2 blocks away from each other, we had sleepovers almost every week at least once, hung out almost everyday after school, took vacations together. Which is why it hurt even more for our mutual best friend, who I’d also lost in this great schism, to say “thanks for coming,” in a tone that implied there was some world in which I wouldn’t have, as if I really was so distant from Francie that her death wouldn’t have moved me. The room suddenly felt far too small to hold all of us.
My mom, ever the dreamer, had bought a wine rack at some point and subscribed to some wine delivery service for a short period of time (just long enough to fill the wine rack cheaply); something about the idea of being the kind of person who has a wine rack appealed to her even though she almost never drank wine. After Francie died, in early June, I spent that summer drinking bottles of wine and crying alone in my room. I would tiptoe upstairs gripping the wine like a club and drink it until I was flushed, hiding the empty bottles in my closet. People experiencing disenfranchised grief are more prone to self-soothing in arguably destructive ways. My mom found the empty bottles before the summer was done and looked at me with a furrowed brow, holding one up in a wordless question. “I’m sad,” was all I could say. And I was, and she knew I was, so we said nothing more about it. She probably hugged me about it but I don’t remember. I didn’t want her to witness my grief or perceive my mourning, and she tried to oblige me, giving me space.
I gave myself a tattoo on my hip some time that summer (probably while tipsy) that said DEFY, hand-poked it into my right hip. It was a riff off a favorite line from a favorite book. “Life, especially human life, is an act of defiance.” (The Humans, by Matt Haig) This was an entreaty to myself to live, and by living, to defy. The letter F, too, was poked beneath my fingernail on my left pointer finger.
Symbolic objects can be used in grief rituals and memorial tattoos are an emerging type of linking/transitional object one you can engage in to acknowledge and remember your person and nurture your grief. That is, an object used to provide a focal point “to continue the link with the lost loved one” “through which the bereaved claims ownership of the circumstances and agency to conform the passivity of loss.” (Sas & Coman, 2016)
And that’s what a disenfranchised grief really needs–to be nurtured and seen. That is what can be done for yourself or those you love that are burdened by DG–acknowledge the loss. Give them the space to acknowledge it. Let them tell you about their person, the relationship they had; yes, even if they’re going to tell you about a co-worker who chronically stole their yogurt, or their ex-in-law. Tell yourself, tell them, whomever, that the loss was profound and real. Seriously, say it aloud at least this once. Write it on an little sticky note.
My loss is real. This loss matters. My grief matters.
To: F (ii)
I can’t go a day without you flickering through my mind.
I tattooed your initial just above my fingernail.
I hung the sweater you gave me for my birthday just above my bookshelf.
The program from the service sits just above my desktop;
The side with your face toward the wall, I’m sorry to say.
I don’t want to forget but
I just can’t see you yet.
So your words face me; out of ash you rise.
The sky is the same color that your eyes are. Were.
I smelled a cigarette yesterday that smelled like the first ones we smoked.
Do you remember finding half a pack on a bench and smuggling them home?
Double Happiness, they were called.
When night came we stole outside and sat behind your shed, giddy with rebellion.
We agreed that it tasted like grass clippings. We smoked them anyway.
We wanted to carve a star into our hips and press them together to mark ourselves as blood sisters.
We never got around to it.
Maybe that’s why we grew apart. No stars on our hips to bring us together as a constellation.
I miss you so much that my knees creak,
my whole body aches straight down to the marrow,
your absence a one hundred pound weight on my shoulders.
The pressure’s changed, your absence now a
damp day and I swear these days I can hear your
laugh, bells, outside my window.
I remember your house feeling thick with ghosts.
Your family doesn’t live there anymore.
There are too many ghosts now.
It feels too alive with those that aren’t.
3 months and 16 days. And it’ll only be longer tomorrow. You’re not coming back.
An excerpt from this poem was pressed into the sidewalk in Minnesota, a permanent memorial to an unnamed friend.
Here is Francie’s sidewalk block.
Love,
Alekz
Resources:
All art and poetry included my own.
Cook, A.S & Oltjenbruns, K. A. (1998) Dying and grieving: Life space and family perspectives. Earl McPeek.
Doka, K. (1989) Disenfranchised grief: Recognizing hidden sorrow. Lexington Books.
Haig, M. (2013) The Humans. Simon and Schuster.
Kwong, E. & O’Connor M. (8 November, 2021) What happens in the brain when we grieve. Short Wave, NPR. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1052498852
Sas, C. & Coman, A. (2016) Designing personal grief rituals: An analysis of symbolic objects and actions. Death Studies.