Grief Stigma & Disenfranchising Grief as a Tool of Capitalism

How systems of capitalism use lack of Standardized Bereavement Leave, the concept of "closure", and violence to undermine grief in US society and empower the empire.

This essay was originally written as a final for a class, December 2024.

At the very core of the nation of the United States is a disregard for certain lives and inextricably, certain griefs, which continues to be implicit (and explicit) to this day. There is a profound privilege attached to who gets to grieve and who doesn’t, as well as who gets to be grieved (there is also, as we will see, a profound privilege in not grieving– in forgetting for a moment the precarity of the corporeal body). This biopower manifests, on the most basic levels, in structures like bereavement leave, in concepts such as closure, and in the normalization of violence that works to minimize its (violence’s) impact on the labor force. The work to bring grief back into conversation, of destigmatizing its existence, and of codifying time off–to not just logistically care for the estate of the dead but to honor and remember them–is radical. It is work that is vital to remaining connected to our humanity, and building strong networks within and without us, and is work that must be done through collective action.

‘Closure’, the made-up phenomenon¹ that we can simply ‘find’ grief’s solution, has stunted our collective understanding of Grief and our ability to grieve. “We are taught to feel shame about grief that lingers,” no matter how traumatic. Sustained grief–crying, shouting, mourning, acknowledging–is not ‘polite grief’, which is understood as limited, personal, and unfolding in the home. The capitalistic canon of loss would have the employee believe that the funeral, the wake, the dead, the dying, the domestic partner or domestic partners, executions at the hands of police, incarceration, mental health episodes, repeated COVID infections, tending to wounds or a sense of common destiny, are unexceptional. Capitalism’s exploitation emphasizes that there is no clear evidence that these losses can be used in the laboring process and as such must be written out of the room. If “‘the usefulness of a thing’ can best be conceptualized as a ‘use value’”, then the employee on bereavement leave or grieving as needed is not available to stay in the market–to provide products, services, or ‘simple labor’-- which is particularly disturbing to the employer.

The lack of a nation-wide standardization of bereavement leave may be a clear point in which one acutely encounters the ways grief is undermined in the work environment. Bereavement leave is the allowance of employees or students to take (usually unpaid) time off to attend funerals or to attend to the logistics of death where swift recourse is necessary, such as socially and legally. As there is no standardization, in 45 of the 50 states of America it is up to the employer’s discretion to decide if there is any bereavement leave (or just funeral leave), who qualifies for it, and for how long. For example, “an employer may allow an exempt employee, manager, or supervisor to take five (5) days off to bereave but only three (3) days for non-exempt or hourly employees. [Or] allow full-time employees to take paid bereavement leave but only allow part-time employees to take unpaid leave,” they may decide that “three (3) days of bereavement leave” is appropriate “for the death of a child, but only one day for the death of a niece.” A short bereavement leave approved for the death of certain immediate loved ones (committed relationships and the nuclear family) while still less than ideal for everyone, favors the [colonizing], westernized nuclear family since many families, especially families of color with more emphasized relationships with extended family, have close associations with ‘non-nuclear’ family members that are just as important as those of their children but are not protected with the same bereavement considerations. This discretion is also liable to discriminate against non-monogamous people, as the definition of a ‘committed relationship’ by US Office of Personnel Management is one “in which the employee, and the domestic partner of the employee, are each other's sole domestic partner (and are not married to or domestic partners with anyone else).” Non-monogamous people may have multiple committed relationships that may be considered “extra-marital” by institutions or the monogamous majority which can translate to employers denying bereavement leave for the death of partners or choosing not to disclose the relationship of a loved one for the sake of employment or minimizing judgment, necessarily giving up time to grieve certain losses.

While there are up to 13 sick days available to employees, this also serves to compound the precarity of most workers. Even before the time of global pandemic–wherein the government has abandoned its citizens' health and wellness for, again, the sake of capitalism–this limited sick leave allows little time for personal life to ‘interfere’ with work, forcing laborers, especially the precariat, to disenfranchise their own minds, bodies, and spirits for the sake of work. The precariat–a class defined by instability and job insecurity, and as such especially sensitive to the minimal sick and bereavement time–cannot live if they do not work multiple jobs at the risk of homelessness, food insecurity, and so forth. Meaning no matter how traumatic their out-of-work life happens to be, the work requires bodies and bodies can be replaced. Grief stigmatizes itself, then, when the precariat cannot afford to confront it.

The language of “bereavement” can also be used to oppress the grief of the laborer. The Employment Law Handbook uses Dictionary.com’s definition of bereavement which, for “[their] purposes is defined as ‘a period of mourning after a loss, especially after the death of a loved one’ and ‘a state of intense grief, as after the loss of a loved one.’” They do go on to acknowledge that “each individual may take more or less time to bereave their loss” (emphasis my own). The dedication to the verbiage of bereave rather than grieve, and their focus on the definition of a period of mourning and the state of grief illustrates the state’s stigmatization of non-death losses, and their adhesion to the concept of grief as a passing ‘state’ that can and should be moved through (in a tidy three-day window).

“Political time is created and ordered by State authorities that declare itself as the norm. To define political time, the State must describe itself as timeless such that without the State there is no temporality: nothing exists before the State nor beyond it. In this construction of political time, the State centers itself as the defining, dominant, authority of time-space.”

The focus on death losses does not then leave room, technically, for leave when a loved one is lost in a non-death manner, such as due to incarceration, mental health episodes that lead to their disappearance or institutionalization, or homelessness that leads to a massive shift in needs (though wiggle room is written in with regards to health troubles (OPM)). Instead, the validity of these losses–real, earth-shattering, and grief-inducing as they are–is at the discretion of the employer; an employer who is incentivized by profit and exploitation of workers to write off these non-death losses as unexceptional. These losses being written out of the capitalistic canon of “loss” combined with the stigma related to some non-death losses (like incarceration, mental health, homelessness, physical health) and death losses (like those lives lost to substance use, suicide, of an extramarital or polyamorous partner, or of extended family killed overseas by genocidal powers) all contribute to the disenfranchisement the laborer often must internalize in order to maintain composure through the work day. “Disenfranchised grief” coined by Kenneth Doka, is a grief that the griever has been told, either implicitly or explicitly, intentionally or passively, should not be expressed or felt.

Due to the limited access to bereavement leave, there is an urge toward ‘closure’ to keep grief moving. Closure, “a frame used to explain how we should respond to loss”, is regarded as an individual’s solution to grief or loss – by doing or hearing the right thing (which is recognized as being something different for every griever), one can close the grieving chapter of their life and move on to the next. “Society,” Nancy Berns, author of Closure: The Rush to End Grief and What it Costs Us tells us, “provides feeling rules and people are expected to change their emotions to fit these rules. Feeling rules are informal guidelines that tell us how we should react to certain situations.” (Berns, 4) These ‘feeling rules’, also understood as social cues or expectations, are used to define what polite grief looks like, how long it lasts, and how much space it takes up (which is made abundantly clear by employers as as little as possible). Feelings rules also emphasize the ways that neurodivergent people, or people whose cultures are outside that of the Western or American, are oppressed by esoteric ‘feeling rules’ and social expectations, but further analysis is required at a later point to fully explore these depths. bell hooks speaks to the phenomenon of social expectations in grief too in her book All About Love: New Visions when she observes that “Sustained grief is particularly disturbing in a culture that offers a quick fix for any pain….We are taught to feel shame about grief that lingers. Like a stain on our clothes, it marks us as flowed, imperfect.”

Prolonged Grief Disorder, or Complex Grief, describes sustained acute grief that lasts more than a year; while this disorder does refer to a neurological difference in the nucleus accumbens, implicit cultural thanatophobia alongside the canonization of ‘closure’--the ‘quick fix’ for grief– has the potential to be misused by medical professionals who impugn non-western grief practices, traumatic grief, and even regular grief that does not follow ‘feeling rules’. This additional opportunity for pathologizing grief, pathologizing a failure to grasp closure, on a psychiatric level serves only to amplify further disenfranchisement of grief.

““Closure” is not some naturally occurring emotion that we can simply “find” with the right advice….Rather, closure is a made-up concept: a frame used to explain how we should respond to loss….often, when a concept like closure becomes so popular in our culture, people assume it must exist.” (Berns, 4)

Closure was first used in 1923 by Max Wertheimer, who used the term to describe creating a full understanding of a partially understood situation by using pattern recognition for inference. Closure is regarded as an individual’s solution to grief or loss–by doing or hearing the right thing (which is recognized as being something different for every griever), one can close the grieving chapter of their life and move on to the next. The place that closure grew to occupy in relationship with capitalism was and is calculated and intentional, used by funeral directors desperate to stay relevant in a time, post-1960, where trust in the funeral industry was waning. “[F]or the last two decades, funeral directors have emphasized the “need for closure” as a major purpose of funeral rituals….Funeral homes would have you believe that closure will result from the products and services they provide, but there is no clear evidence that this is true.” (3) “Closure eventually became a neat package to explain” the new services funeral directors had to introduce to stay in the market. (12) It is ironic that a society so focused on the concept of closure refuses to codify time to grieve into its laboring framework.

It must also be considered that it is a privilege to forget the precarity of our bodies and our proximity to death, to grieve or mourn only after a great loss, or to be altogether unacquainted with great loss. Claudia Rankine emphasizes in her essay ‘The Condition of Black Life is one of Mourning’ that institutional racism’s function has always been to weave precarity into the very fabric of Black lives and to keep that fabric from unravelling. Writing about a friend Rankine says, “Years after [her son’s] birth, whenever [he] steps out of their home, her status as the mother of a living human being remains as precarious as ever …. For her, mourning lived in real time inside her and her son’s reality.” The empire is indebted to the subjugation of grief that is inherent to the necroviolence on which it was built. The conversation about grief cannot unfold without acknowledging the nuances and the additional baggage it carries for racialized and minoritized people on Occupied Turtle Island (the so-called ‘U.S.’), but this topic requires further discussion in a future essay. Gore Capitalism, coined by Sayak Valencia in her essay of the same title, is “a direct consequence of the transformation of First World capitalism through globalization.” (63-4). This practice not just normalizes violence and death for the gains of capitalism, but hyper-violence through ‘gore practices’, or ‘thanato-strategies’–“the systematic and repeated use of the most explicit forms of violence to produce capital.” And if gore practices make plain the violence needed to produce capital, they also serve to desensitize the labor force to violence, loss, death, and to make them more efficient workers in the face of such things. To weave this fabric of precarity, violence is the shuttle.

“When almost nothing remains, what remains is to defend memory, what remains is to not become desensitized to the normalization of violence, of this damned violence that sometimes seems so far away and other times slaps us in the face. What remains is to turn our backs on the individualism imposed by the market’s logic, on this ridiculous ‘everyone for themselves.’ What remains is solidarity.” (Campbell translating Robledo)

To re-imagine the handling and reception of grief would be to radically re-conceptualize modes of production and the roles of laborers with a more holistic cultural understanding of the citizen as a person who also works, rather than the citizen as a worker who the employer is obligated to give moments to live. In this moment among the precariats where “there is no class-consciousness, group solidarity, or sense of common destiny, only clusters of very different personal stories and trajectories….at once brutally unequal and hyper-individualist”, we must begin wriggle against the callous inequity of bereavement leave and calculations of grievability. “Loss, when acknowledged among accomplices in the struggle for a more just world, can assist in both tending to wounds and building together to prevent further wounding.”

The culturally sanctioned disenfranchisement from one’s state of emotion, one’s earth-shattering grief, and one’s self – pluri-dimensional and social – is much more than simply esoteric ‘feeling rules’ or social expectations. The internalization and disenfranchisement of our individual and collective grief has been carefully conditioned over generations by oppressors–the empire, colonial powers, white supremacy, the government, those in positions of power above us– as a subtle means to maintain power and must be carefully deconstructed. To embody the grief that grows undeniable and loud as the bark of a dog is to subvert the powers that stratify grief and grieving by class, race, and labor power, thereby undercutting capitalism’s warp. Grief comes as easily to mankind as breathing, laughing, or crying, as easily as loving, which is the root of grieving ( to love is to miss that which leaves).

Grief does not follow human ideals of what it should be. Grief is like a dog – it does not have a human sense of scale. It does not know if it is small, and it does not know if you are big. It knows that it is, and as something that is, it lets itself be as big as any other dog. The chihuahua has a bark as sharp as the doberman, and will assert just as much space. Grief loves strangers and family alike, snuffling and licking and befriending all. I love you even though I’ve only known you for a minute. I love you and I’ve known you all my life.

Love, Alekz

Bibliography:

Admin, “What Is Bereavement Leave (Grievance Leave)? | Everything That You Need to Know,” ELH / HR4Sight, January 1, 2024, https://www.employmentlawhandbook.com/employment-and-labor-laws/topics/leave-laws/bereavement-leave/.

Benji Hart, “Feeling Is Not Weakness,” in Rebellious Mourning (AK Press, 2017), 21.

bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions, 2000.

Campbell translating Robledo, “In Self Defense, In Defense of Memory,” in Rebellious Mourning, 2017.

Claudia Rankine, “The Condition of Black Life is one of Mourning,” in Rebellious Mourning (AK Press, 2017).

David Harvey, A Companion to Capital, 2010

“Federal Employee Leave for Funerals and Bereavement,” U.S. Office of Personnel Management, n.d., https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/leave-administration/fact-sheets/leave-for-funerals-and-bereavement/.

Lipovetsky via Sayak Valencia, Gore Capitalism, 2018

Meryem-Bahia Arfaoui, Time and the Colonial State, from The Funambulist Magazine; 36, 2021.

Nancy Berns, Closure: The Rush to End Grief and What it Costs Us, 2011, 4.

Sayak Valencia, Gore Capitalism, 2018

Scott Campbell, “In Self Defense, In Defense of Memory,” in Rebellious Mourning, 2017.