Slick Packaging: Thoughts on a Grieving Nation

Like the rest of the nation, I was sad when I heard about what happened at Virginia Tech this week. The news seemed to drag down my spirit like a cement raincoat. How and why does something like this happen? Beyond the idea of original sin, I don't have an answer.

But, I have to tell you, I also felt a sense of outrage, not at the sick young man who took so many innocent lives, but at the rest of us and how we've allowed our national grief and mourning to travel familiar rutted paths. We've become too good at this. Up go the instant memorials and out come the stuffed animals and cut flowers. A thousand pieces of paper printed with prayers flutter in the wind. Candlelight vigils and ribbons in school colors. It seems to me that the way we grieve has become a package deal, a corporate response to and substitute for individual pain. We come together for the group hug, shake our heads, and say that if nothing else, "tragedy brought us together."

I think part of this outrage comes from hearing about the memorials on My Space and Face Book. Isn't it ironic that the media that draws us together depends on us sitting alone? Isn't it ironic that, isolated, we choose to grieve "together" in such a cold, impersonal manner? I'm not sure these memorials constitute grieving, anyway. The sentiments seem too packaged and predetermined. I doubt the family members of the victims read them. Whom do they comfort? I think it's ironic that the young man who took the lives at Virginia Tech on Monday was considered "a loner" and that he choose to leave his message to the world in the form of electronic media, including 27 videos he shot himself.

We've learned how to mourn as a nation, but the point of all mourning is relating. I think we do this best when we have real conversations with our friends, family and coworkers. Grief should be allowed to bloom in the dark, quiet places of our lives. I can understand why Virginia Tech wanted to kick the media off campus when Friday rolled around. They had had enough of having their sadness magnified, and necessarily distorted, so the rest of us could take part from a distance. The illusion created by the media that we are all personally involved in the grief that is going on in Blacksburg is just that, an illusion. We may hurt, but it's not our pain. Each of us needs to grieve in our own way, in our own place.

Conclusive evidence seems to suggest that the young man who committed this act of atrocity was mentally ill. A judge said so in 2005, and he was supposed to receive outpatient treatment. I wonder why the young man's family didn't know about his illness, his lonely pain and distress? The people we are closest to should recognize when we're in trouble and need help. I wonder if there wasn't a mother, a father or a sister who could have reached out to him? One commentator said this week that the events at Virginia Tech reminded him that he needed to tell his children every day that he loved them. Who could have done that for this young man? The faculty and students at school seemed to know more about what was going on with him than anyone else, and they were too afraid or uncertain to act.

We all want to know how this quiet boy with a speech defect became the bitter young man who only said what he had to say after he was gone. If we believe we're not as isolated as he was, we delude ourselves. Many of us have become a product or a consumer of the culture that specializes in isolation. Putting on the display of grieving as a nation doesn't mean we don't have to deal with every hurt on our own, personally and privately. Only when we hurt that way, do we come closer to the pain that heals.