The Alien and Mundane

I.

In Chicago, I had a friend whose mother died when she was young. By the time I knew her she had long since finished mourning, but she had not yet overcome the need to mourn. I never saw her more disturbed than on the day she realized, late into the evening, that it was the anniversary of her mother’s death. She had nearly forgotten. I never saw my friend cry for her mother but I saw her cry for her guilt.

These guilty mourners are everywhere. Go online to forums for the grieving, to the back pages of self-help guides to bereavement, or to the case studies of psychologists specializing in loss, and you will discover a great number of people in the wake of tragedy worried that they are heartless freaks. They worry because they believe they are getting over total disaster with too much ease. The world has changed forever, they insist, but they keep forgetting. Their husbands are dead, they report, or their children are paralyzed, but all they can think about is the laundry. Many report similar guilt over their responses to national catastrophe. The shooter is still active but they are worried about traffic. The monster is still President, but they wish the store was open on weekends.

“If it helps,” one woman writes on a message board, “My first response to 9/11 was thinking, ‘Oh this is really going to fuck up my date tonight.’” The towers were still burning on television.

On forums, everyone is asking the same question: Is there something wrong with me? The question is so common that if it is a sign of mental defect, then there are very few of us, it seems, who escaped ruin at the factory.

II.

“In what, now, does the work which mourning performs consist?” Sigmund Freud asks in Mourning and Melancholia. “I do not think there is anything far-fetched in presenting it in the following way. Reality-testing has shown that the loved object no longer exists, and it proceeds to demand that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachment to that object. This demand arouses understandable opposition—it is a matter of general observation that people never willingly abandon a libidinal position, not even, indeed, when a substitute is already beckoning to them. This opposition can be so intense that a turning away from reality takes place and a clinging to the object through the medium of hallucinatory wishful psychosis. Normally,” however, “respect for reality gains the day.”

Grief, for Freud, was a dilemma. When what we love is lost, all we have left of it is our sorrow. We “turn away from any activity that is...