David Bowie and the Rise of the Grief Police - The Atlantic

"Grief, in the popular imagination, is a sadness to be experienced and carried and borne as silently and as stoically as possible. And yet mourning, too, has a public face: condolences, wakes, the sharing of memories and sympathies. That juxtaposition leaves many confused about how to celebrate the dead, how to comfort the living—how, in short, to grieve together. “Rituals used to help the community by giving everyone a sense of what to do or say,” Meghan O’Rourke puts it in her magisterial memoir The Long Goodbye. “Now, we’re at sea.”

One recent consequence of that collective drifting, especially as the confusion expands to digital platforms, is the rise of grief policing. The notion that there is but one way to grieve, and that deviation from that way is wrong. The tendency to tell mourners that, essentially, they’re mourning too much, or not enough. The desire to restore order to a practice that has become, culturally, chaotic."



David Bowie and the Rise of the Grief Police - The Atlantic