[Part One of this series can be found here; Part Two is here and Part Three here.]

I witnessed the workings of the pride economy—and its slow-motion collapse—when I made a temporary move east across northern Indiana to South Bend in 2020. My motive was to collaborate with a project related to resisting gentrification. The idea was to increase the number of homeowners who could be coached into becoming small developers—incremental development being the term for this approach.

Unfortunately, as I was unpacking in South Bend, Covid-19 also arrived--which hampered the community work I had hoped to do. But I spent two enjoyable years getting to know the city in the afterglow of former Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s ascent to Secretary of Transportation in the new Biden administration.

The pride economy described by Arlie Hochshild was plainly still operative in South Bend in the ever-present ghost of the Studebaker automobile company. This hometown enterprise dominated the civic spirit of South Bend for over a century, employing thousands of workers—over 16,000 at one point in 1956 in a city of only 100,000—with well-paid, unionized jobs.

The date many older citizens remember, however, is December 20, 1963, only a few weeks after the assassination of President John Kennedy. That’s the day the 111-year old South Bend Studebaker plant closed after a decade of gradual decline. Some 7,000 people lost their jobs.

One weekend, I visited the Studebaker National Museum, an marvelous collection of historic vehicles, including several concept cars which gave me twinges of teenage glee.

The museum’s parking lot was taken over that morning by Studebaker owners, several dozen local enthusiasts who parked their mint-condition Avantis, Hawks, and Starliners, in lemon yellow, lime green, or a special pink-white-gray combination and stood around talking about the glory days.

At one point I was invited to an event at the 1884 Studebaker mansion, now a swanky restaurant. And I often took walks past the Studebaker Electric Fountain in Leeper Park. Some millennial friends organized a story-telling event in the former Studebaker factory called “The Studebaker Talks.” Today there’s still the Studebaker School, the Studebaker Golf Course, Studebaker Plaza, and the Studebaker “living tree” sign—more than 8,000 pine trees planted in 1938 to spell out the company name in huge letters visible to an airplane overhead.

In 2012, the year of his first mayoral run, Mayor Pete gave a very good local TED talk invoking the spirit of innovation the world once associated with the city of South Bend. (Equally or more important, I discovered, was South Bend’s hidden resource in its sizable cohort of talented millennials—Pete’s people—who are devoted to their place.)

For every city like South Bend attempting—with some success—to overcome its post-industrial status, the state of Indiana has perhaps a dozen other places which are sliding into the status known as “ghost towns”, a label already applied to some 41 in all by one estimate. Their decline is not entirely from the last half century’s industrial restructuring and offshoring. Some began after the state’s natural gas boom of the 1880s began to play out in the 1910s.

Driving across Indiana north to south on the smaller state roads, you have the same experience today as a driver crossing, say, Texas, Kansas, Louisisana, or Oklahoma. You might call it a “Twilight Zone effect.”

You enter a little town whose skyline includes an historic courthouse with a pleasant-looking park nearby. Then, as you proceed down the town’s main street, you have the grim realization that the storefronts are all empty, with maybe a tattoo parlor and a bar remaining. Almost no one is around.

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My experience with sacrifice zones and places of abandonment is not limited to urban areas. For a few years I was a founding board member of the Northwest Indiana Food Council, a non-profit focused on small farms, healthy food systems, and an annual tour we called the Farm Hop.

The Farm Hop was a daylong bus ride around the Region, with stops to visit a mix of operations, including urban farms in the city of Gary, a peace garden, an aquaponics farm, and a 13-acre specialty farm growing 130 varieties of vegetables, herbs and flowers.

The Hop also offered a visit at a 1,160 acre place operated by one (!) person—a former Wall Street professional with farming roots. Whereas, as he told us, his family’s farm back in Wisconsin required numerous hands working on small tracts of land, he is able to handle his commercial corn and soybean crops with only one occasional hand. That’s partly because, as we witnessed, he owns several enormous pieces of farm equipment, including a huge digitally-outfitted tractor.

One question which our Farm Hop participants might well have asked is: what percentage of the food Hoosiers eat do they actually produce themselves? That number turns out to be less than 10%, in fact.

Years ago, the agricultural economy in Indiana and the U.S. generally was quite different. The USDA records for 1945 shows 176,000 farms operating in Indiana, with an average size of about 100 acres. Today the numbers are roughly 45,000 “family farms”, averaging almost 300 acres.

In 1940, U.S. farms numbered around 6 million, each averaging about 175 acres. Today, the long-term decline continues, with the current number being about 1.8 million farms, averaging 441 acres with the median size at 72 acres.

Those numbers disguise what agrarian philosopher and farmer Wendell Berry has described as another Great Migration—the 25 million rural people who left the farming economy between 1940 and 1967, i.e., in less than half a lifetime, as he notes.

For half a century and more, Berry has been our most perceptive public philosopher on many topics but especially in his lament for the destruction of what was once “an intact, authentic, functioning rural culture.”

To understand better why our rural areas have also become sacrifice zones, Berry suggests “Farmers and the land have been sacrificed to the need for cheap food, just as the miners and the land of Appalachian coalfields have been sacrificed to the need for cheap energy.”

He continues, powerfully: “As a result we live in and from an abandoned, unloved, toxic, eroded and degraded country that most of our people have forgotten or never knew.”

Our emergency, as he explains in his The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice, “is that the both the land and the people are unhealthy.” Which also means: they are unhealed.

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In old black and white photos from the 1940s and 1950s, the streetscapes of New York, Chicago, San Francisco inevitably look like noir film sets.

Looking more closely, there’s something else: the modest scale and the gritty, unfinished appearance of these places, a far cry from the glossy “perfume bottle” skylines of today.

As photos from these years also document, cities across the U.S. once contained many “urban villages”, lower-income but vibrant, functioning neighborhoods with the kind of social connectivity whose loss in terms of social cohesion we lament today.

This cultural density is where we got urban flowerings such as the Harlem Renaissance, Chicago’s Bronzeville society, San Francisco’s Fillmore neighborhood, and the New Orleans-like culture of Pittsburgh’s historic Hill District.

It was segregation which made the ghetto, as social psychiatrist Mindy Fullilove pointed out, which in turn made “the archipelago state and its local representative, the neighborhood.” These island-like communities had a shared common life which maintained the practice of older customs, especially the kinds of mutualism and cooperation needed to survive under enforced apartheid.

White citizens did not know much about these enclaves of color but assumed they were slums—meaning, unsafe, unhygienic, and detrimental to nearby real estate values. Some them still had outhouses. And, perhaps worst of all, they were located too near to downtown, thus giving out-of-town visitors a bad impression.

But in the years immediately following the Second World War, the pressure for housing and the hunger for civic “progress”—in the shape of a futuristic glass-and-steel skyline--was growing.

Thus the passing of the 1949 Urban Renewal Act was an effort to clear “slum” housing for private developers in order to extend the central business districts—Manhattan’s Lincoln Center being only one notable example. Similarly, as Fullilove documents, Roanoke built a new post office, civic center and a Ford dealership in the northeast corner of the city on land which had for decades been a strong and close-knit Black community.

Altogether, over the next several decades, some 2,500 urban renewal projects in 993 U.S. cities were undertaken, of which 1,600 were in Black neighborhoods.

The result was the displacement of nearly one million people, 66% of whom were Black, along with the loss of their churches, businesses, and social spaces.

The multiple impacts of this enormous exercise in social engineering may not have been apparent to city officials, planners and developers, almost all of whom were in lockstep agreement about the “costs of progress.” Certainly Native American communities had historic knowledge of mass removals from decades ago.

As we now know, urban renewal had many indirect costs: destruction of local businesses and livelihoods, loss of social organizations, and psychological trauma—what Fullilove called the loss of the “life world.” The title of her 2004 book on this tragic history is Root Shock, a term she coined to describe the traumatic psychological effects experienced by whole neighborhoods of people who are suddenly uprooted.

Fullilove unpacked the term root shock by listing three ways urban renewal policies affected the general wellbeing of displaced community members.

First, root shock generates stress, trauma, and prolonged grief among those who whose social bonds and sense of stability are radically shaken. It destroys the working models of the world that had existed for generations inside people’s heads.

Second, it is an indirect cause of illness caused by sub-standard living conditions often found in the new places (i.e., public housing projects) to which people were relocated. In urbanist Jane Jacobs’ distinction (Fullilove was a student and mentee of Jacobs), one kind of area may operate as a perpetual slum—i.e., people are continually leaving it—while another could be called “unslumming—i.e., people are continually staying.

And third, it was a forced outlay of resources on resettlement instead of maintaining wellbeing in place.

Altogether, the process could be described as having three sets of costs for neighborhood residents: financial, social and political. Not all these impacts were immediately obvious.

For example, local jazz clubs were once a staple of cultural life in numerous U.S. cities. One answer to the perennial question of “what happened to jazz” is simply that its national web of little clubs was almost entirely bulldozed out of existence in the 1950s and 1960s. We could say the same for most of the small restaurants and shops that once gave a place a distinctive character.

The striking nature of Fullilove’s research for our purposes is that it focuses on community grief from dispossession, and a form of spatial injustice we have come to recognize very belatedly.

Fullilove’s teacher and friend, Jane Jacobs, was a deep critic of modern urban development, notably the kind practiced by New York’s Robert Moses in the 1960s. In these matters, Jacobs sometimes invoked the “sparrow principle”, as she called it. Not a sparrow should fall in executing planning schemes—i.e., no one in the neighborhood should be hurt, nothing done at anyone’s expense. No one experiencing a shock down to the roots. We might guess that such an idealistic standard has almost certainly never been applied—anywhere.

While Black communities suffered most from root shock, the phenomenon was never limited to any sincle racial group. To take a famous example, what was the psychic price paid in 1957 by white neighbors of Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field when, after 44 years in the same ballpark, Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley moved the team to Los Angeles? Beyond the demolition of the stadium to build apartments, what else changed for Brooklyn in terms of its civic spirit?

If the latter example of an abandoned sports stadium seems merely sentimental, consider the impact in recent decades of the Catholic Church’s closing hundreds of local parish churches, many of them sites of generations of family history—christenings, weddings, funerals—for large numbers of residents in the area.

Even for non-Catholics, it turns out, certain kinds of landmark spaces retain an aura of stability and authenticity which make them beloved essential pieces of the local fabric—like familiar friends. The calculus of progress simply cannot account for these things.

[To be continued.]

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[Part One of this series can be found here; Part Two is here.]

I have not read Hillbilly Elegy, the 2016 memoir of Vice President J.D. Vance, whose successful escape from Appalachia and his troubled family put him on track to political fame and even the White House. Some reviewers wanted to take the book as an insider’s explanation of Red America, especially the Heartland and its forgotten-man culture of Trumpism.

From the reviews of Vance’s book, it does not sound like an elegy, certainly not a nostalgic reflection on lost folkways like the joys of mountain dulcimer music. It will not put anyone in mind of Wendell Berry’s writing about community and membership in Port Royal Kentucky. The reviewers suggest it reads more like the effort of a rising politico trying to establish his policy chops.

A better title might have been Hillbilly Makes Good, given the air of self-congratulation which seeps through the story of Vance’s ascent to Yale Law School and a Silicon Valley venture capital fund before being discovered by the Man of Destiny.

As a better title—and a better analysis of his own roots—I would have suggested Hillbilly Grief. A culture of unacknowledged grief lies behind the three generations of the Vance family described in the book, born out of living through, like millions of others in post-industrial America, several decades of economic devastation, cultural demonization, opioid overdoses, and deaths of despair.

To bolster my claim as a participant and witness in this history, let me insert here an autobiographical note.

With a population today of 13,000, my hometown of Henderson Texas is only slightly larger than when I grew up there in the 1950s. In some respects, it resembles Vance’s Jackson Kentucky, the place he calls home. (It also resembles the fictional Anarene Texas, site of Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 filmThe Last Picture Show.)

Its location in East Texas, with Shreveport only an hour away, means the local culture in my hometown today was always more Southern than Texan. The poverty rate is 13% with an additional 33% of the population classified as ALICE (asset limited, income constrained, employed), which means almost half the town is not making it, economically speaking. That statistic has definitely changed since my childhood and not for the better.

Like Vance, I always knew growing up that I had to leave town. But it was once in better shape before the neoliberal economy of the 1980s began to take a toll on its main street and local families as well. So I’m familiar with Vance’s childhood world and its citizens. Whereas his early world was that of coal country, mine was oil country.

The arrival of the first gusher of the East Texas oil and gas field in 1930—some 140,000 acres across five counties with 30,000 historic and active oil wells—altered the psychology of an entire region. A red-dirt agricultural economy primarily based in cotton suddenly entered boom times and the mass delusion called “get rich quick.” Because that’s what oil could do for you while the going was good.

In my high school days, we played sports against the neighboring town of Kilgore, an epicenter of the oil field. At one time, its small downtown had more than 1,000 active wells, making it the densest oil development in the world.

As we rode the school bus to the Kilgore game, we would pass pumping rigs on what seemed like every other city block. Unless it’s a figment of my imagination, I think there was even one working drilling rig on the Kilgore High School football field. The players had to be careful not to run into the “rocking horse” in the end zone.

My father described the first years of the boom—his high school years in the 1930s—as truly a Wild West. His father was at work one afternoon in a downtown bank building when a gunshot rang out from an upstairs land office where some disgruntled party to an oil agreement decided to settle things on the spot. Because the local jail was relatively small and the number of lawbreakers so numerous, Dad explained, the local sheriff was reduced to tying arrested folk to trees until the police wagon could make the rounds of the county to pick them up.

Whatever reflections the people of East Texas might have had about the coming of oil, there was no thought that fossil fuels might be anything but a divine blessing. Nor was there anyone asking whether this freakish jolt of unearned prosperity and the mania it brought might in fact be a poisoned chalice. Karma waiting underground.

Over recent decades, the gradual depletion of the mammoth oil field—over 5.42 billion barrels have been produced from it—was not accompanied by any meaningful efforts to diversify the regional economy. Which is what allowed almost half the population of my hometown fall into the ALICE category.

While numerous small towns in East Texas have a dilapidated and depopulated look, the region is not the most egregious example of a sacrifice zone, if we extend that term to include the impact of economic devastation as well as that from industrial pollution.

A better candidate, one familiar to me from later personal history, is about an hour south of Chicago—the five counties of northwest Indiana known by locals simply as “the Region,” as bland a geographical nickname as you could find.

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                                                     Soured dreamlands

The region of Northwest Indiana, as I discovered years ago, has a nickname: locals refer to it simply as “the Region”. No one has come up with anything more descriptive, less banal. If you live in the area, you’re a “region rat.”

The Region is an archipelago of a few middle-class towns not far from the shuttered steel mills, polluted industrial sites, and boarded-up storefronts of neighboring impoverished places like Gary, East Chicago, Hammond, and Michigan City. These are towns whose percentage of the population in poverty (officially defined as $16,000 annual income for a single person, $32,000 for a family of four) is around 30%. (The national rate currently is just over 11%.)

One of the Region’s happier islands is the leafy college town of Valparaiso, where I spent twenty years raising my daughters while trying to learn inhabitation, as the poet and ecologist Gary Snyder calls it. Snyder’s term refers to the process by which you come to deeply understand the place in which you live in all its dimensions—historical, environmental, geographic, and economic.

Around our little town, as I came to realize, lay a vast expanse of the Rustbelt or the “soured American dreamland”, as the urbanist James Howard Kunstler once put it acerbically after visiting the area two decades ago. Here’s a sample of his impressions:

“The storied steel mills of Gary are gone, and the numberless small shops and sheds that turned out useful widgets exist now, if at all, as ghostly brick and concrete shells along the stupendous grid of highways…Between the ghostly remnants of factories stood a score of small cities and neighborhoods where the immigrants settled five generations ago. A lot of it was foreclosed and shuttered. They were places of such stunning, relentless dreariness that you felt depressed just imagining how depressed the remaining denizens of these endless blocks of run-down shoebox houses must feel…Yet people were coming and going in their cars from the welfare ruins of East Chicago to the even more spectacular tatters of Gary, where the old front porches are disappearing into prairie grass and the 20th century retreats into the mists of mythology.”

My first impressions of the sacrifice zone known as Gary were drive-by glimpses from the interstate which passed just above the weedy backyards and along the empty-looking city center—a small Detroit, I kept thinking.

In 1993 it held the title of “’murder capital of the U.S.”, with an annual rate of 91 murders per 100,000. (The data for 2024 indicate the rate is down to about 70 murders per 100,000.)

Looking down from I-90, I felt the typical white person’s nervous shiver at the thought of the car breaking down somewhere along this stretch of road.

But in the early 2000s, I became involved in some community work in Gary, requiring me to attend meetings in City Hall. Turning off the expressway into the city steets of the downtown area—during the middle of the day, I should add—I had no particular sense of danger. Instead, what struck me was the terrible emptiness of the place.

In 1960, at the town’s heyday as a world center of steel production, the population was around 178,000 people. A litte more than forty years later, the city had only 80,000 residents left. Not even the city’s proximity to the southern beaches of Lake Michigan nor its status as the birthplace and childhood home of Michael Jackson have helped forestall the decline.

Sacrifice zones, with their associated disinvestment and unemployment, are known to bring in their wake deaths of despair, a term referring to lower life expectancy among middle-aged men due to a triple phenomenon of opoid addiction, suicide and alcohol abuse. Originally associated more with white Americans, these deaths have been increasing in Black and Native American populations since 2015, finally surpassing rates for white Americans in 2022.

A 2016 Federal Reserve Bank of Boston study compared the life expectancies of the poorest men in two cities: New York City and Gary Indiana. They found the lifespans of the Gary residents was five years less than that of the New York City group, suggesting that income disparities do not tell the whole story: geographical disparities are real and have a measurable impact. Your ZIP code definitely affects your fate.

These kinds of deaths went mostly unnoticed and unremarked until the 2020 publication of Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, by Anne Case and Angus Deaton.

A few years before the book appeared, it was an incident in our town involving a family member further that awakened me to my own community’s condition.

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                                       Collapse of the pride economy

About midnight one evening in 2017, I got a call from a police officer of our town. He informed me that our middle daughter, aged 18, and a girlfriend of hers had been picked up for possession of marijuana (still illegal in Indiana today!) and underage drinking. They were being held in the county jail until the parents could come by and pay a fine before taking them home.

I drove down, paid a few hundred dollars through the convenient bail kiosk, and then sat waiting in the lobby until my sheepish daughter appeared an hour or so later. It was all a bit comic, although I was worried about this misstep showing up in her college application efforts. In the weeks following, I located a local attorney who specialized in expunging this kind of court record who, in exchange for that service, expunged a few hundred more dollars from my bank account.

Somehow this small event gave me a window into my own community and its unseen life of despair.

The week following my daughter’s arrest, I was browsing through email and glanced at the local newspaper’s weekly newsletter. Among its regular sections was a photo gallery of people recently booked into the county jail, all of them wearing an orange jump suit. Staring back among the faces was one of my slightly dazed looking daughter.

After the shock of seeing her in this setting, I felt compelled to look closely at the faces of the other jail residents—fellow citizens of my town—as well as noting what they had done to get there.

It was a mix of ethnicities and ages, with about as many women as men. A young white guy with wild hair, smiling broadly. Next to him, an older Hispanic woman with a look of intense shame. His crime was creating a public nuisance (urination), hers was forging checks. I reviewed galleries from earlier weeks, just to get a further sense for these faces and their offenses. Rarely had anyone in this little Indiana town committed a serious crime. Quite a few were cases of DUI, along with several opioid dealers and domestic battery perpetrators. Almost none looked like “criminal types”: they looked like people struggling, in pain.

I imagined them staring back at me to say: See how I’m forced to live, the things I do out of fear or desperation. I can’t get a decent job, I don’t know anyone who is willing to help me get my life back on track. One false step and here I am, my pain on display in the gallery.

These are citizens of a state which at one time could be purplish: it once produced Evan Bayh, Birch Bayh, Richard Lugar, and Vance Hartke, to say nothing of Eugene V. Debs. It is now reliably red, voting for Donald Trump three elections in a row.

It is also one of the places where the effects of globalization landed in the form of offshoring, automation, and union decline. The losses inflicted on families—including their shame and loss of pride--over decades have been documented in numerous places, perhaps most notably by Arlie Russell Hochschild. Her Strangers in Their Own Land (2016) and Stolen Pride (2024), both based on extensive conversations with Red State citizens (in Louisiana and Kentucky), revealed the workings of an unseen “pride economy” alongside the material one, an amalgam of anger and mourning.

Well before the collapse of the pride economy—mostly felt by the white working class—there was another planned disaster: the urban renewal policies in the 1960s in communities of color.

Their legacy is called “root shock”, the ripping out of generations of community connection.

We’ll take up that story next time.

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Bringing grief and death out of the shadow is our spiritual responsibility, our sacred duty.

–Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow

In what feels like a long time ago--mid-April 2020--there reigned ever so briefly a Great Silence in the world. Do you remember?

As the Covid pandemic was beginning to pour across the planet like an invisible tidal wave, a quiet suddenly fell over everything. For a few days and weeks, the whole unstoppable whirring machine of modern civilization shuddered to a halt.

In a state of incredulity, I wrote the following as part of a Substack post:

The unimaginable has occurred. Not only in the form of a deadly virus sweeping the planet. But also as a Great Silence that has, for a time at least, settled over the cities.

For anyone who has learned to hear ‘the cry of the earth,’ as ecological theologian Leonardo Boff calls it, the coronavirus tragedy arrives perversely with a gift: a glimpse of another way of life on earth, a kind of dream interval. We are all, for this moment, Thoreau self-isolating in his cabin, sharing the dream, with time for reflection.

It is not only that smog has lifted over Los Angeles, Tokyo, and everywhere else or that power usage is markedly down. In the Punjab region of India, one can see the mountain range of the Himalayas again in the distance. In our city parks, people are noticing the sound of birdcalls once again. Seismologists are noticing a significant drop in detectable noise in the earth’s crust, for both surface traffic and ocean traffic.

The story of dolphins appearing in the newly blue-green canals of Venice is apparently an urban myth but, as the Italians say, Se non é vero, é ben trovato (roughly, “If it’s not true, it sounds like it should be.”)

While humans are in a great pause, nature is taking a breath. Amidst great human suffering, with no discernible end in sight, we find ourselves not merely in isolation but altogether in something like an enforced silent retreat.

How can we interpret this unfathomable irruption of the natural into the busy human machine-world, I wondered aloud. And I offered two ways of understanding this moment.

One approach — especially for those who imagine themselves as practical-minded — was to take this interval as a glimpse of Eden, an image of a lost world in which somehow we are miraculously, momentarily dwelling. We know our joy will not last.

The other approach — especially for the despairing greens among us — was to understand that moment as a glimpse of Utopia, even if the political atmosphere in recent years has damaged our ability to imagine new worlds.

Undeniably, I argued, this crisis is also a dire warning about our lack of preparation and foresight in so many things. We are already hearing the cries urging us to go back to the Old Normal, the one that led up to these multiple catastrophes in the first place.

I concluded, “Our ability to withstand these powerful ideological forces may depend on the strength we’ve drawn during this moment of nature’s ‘reset.’ Let’s use this time of silence well.”

In justification of this advice, I might have added, had I known enough at the time: “After all, great grief is about to come over our country and beyond.”

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Covid time

Only a few weeks later, well before we’d had much time to reflect together on the great pause, the murder of George Floyd set off almost a year of what became the largest collective protest in U.S. history, with nearly 8,000 separate demonstrations, in addition to many others outside the country. It elevated a painfully needed national conversation about racial justice and likely influenced the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

By the end of 2020, while we were still in the pre-vaccine period, over 350,000 Americans died of Covid-19. Even with the new vaccine which, as many don’t remember, was designed in two days and distributed in two months, another 450,000 died in 2021, as we approached our total mortality count of 1.5 million, with many others disabled from the virus.

It seems more than strange that such shattering recent events are misremembered, which has meant they are still hotly disputed. Might many more have died—perhaps another 2-3 million? Do the notable missteps by various authorities invalidate everything positive in the record of this immense national tragedy? Was our response a triumph or an indictment?

We entered the crisis with an initial show of national unity and cooperation—that was the first phase. It was the Trump administration, improbably enough, which undertook an 18-month expansion of social welfare benefits in order to address the crisis before allowing them to expire.

The second phase of the pandemic has been called one of solipsism, when we retreated into our private worlds as though other people were simply no longer there or suddenly posed a threat to us in some way. For a time, we recognized our interdependence but soon grew angry and frustrated about it. Why can’t someone just fix this?, we demanded to know. Someone, somewhere must be to blame for this enormous disruption to all our lives.

The rise of conspiracy thinking and the loss of calm rationality are symptoms of our condition. Thus the Covid-19 outbreak was taken to be an undeclared state of emergency, beginning on March 11, 2020, when the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a pandemic.

In the shift from a sense of shared vulnerability to the release of culture war venting, we almost didn’t notice one other unsettling fact: the pandemic had no formal end, no victory celebration.

Moreover, at those moments when the Black Lives Matters movement exercised the political practice of mourning (“say their names!”), their rituals touched something deep for a nation enduring (and profoundly resenting) a mass death event in which family funerals were mostly disallowed.

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Lonely deaths

Although the pandemic has subsided, have we all come blinking out of our caves of self-isolation into the sunlight of community? It seems not.

In 2024, the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, issued an advisory report which described a new national malady--a condition of loneliness, debilitating on a par with tobacco, and affecting fully half the U.S. population. As a response to this loss of social connection, he urged us to recover the health benefits of being better connected to each other.

Social connection turns out to be a social determinant of health, as Johann Hari and others have also pointed out. Recent research on this topic claims to show that joining a club actually improves your longevity while being a loner certainly shortens it. (For an entertaining introduction to the topic of social capital, the Netflix documentary Join or Die—“a film about why you should join a club and why the fate of America depends on it”--is recommended.)

The Surgeon General’s loneliness report had an urgent tone but failed, perhaps unsurprisingly, to offer any recommendations toward genuine system change. The report mostly confined its recommendations to rearranging public spaces, reforming digital environments and expanding the public conversation on social connection.

This state of disconnection is not a new topic in American life, of course. The conditions of loneliness, isolation and solitude have been the sources of reflection by numerous thinkers, perhaps most notably Hannah Arendt.

Loneliness, she argued, was the defining condition of totalitarianism and the common ground of all terror. It is the inability to act altogether, a state of uprootedness when we suddenly find we have no place in the world, nothing to give the world. She linked it to a phenomenon described in her book The Human Condition, namely, our loss of a shared reality—a common sense of things--that allows us to know where we end and the world begins.

By contrast, isolation is the inability to act with others, which is the source of our political power. It renders people impotent. It may be the beginning of terror, Arendt argues, and is always its result.

Finally, solitude is a condition we often seek out for its gifts of calm reflection and tranquility.

I want to suggest that the ailment the Surgeon General was hoping to diagnose has one other dimension, a more desperate one. Instead of loneliness, he should have called our condition mutual abandonment—in multiple ways.

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The way we die is a mirror of the way we live

The word abandonment puts me in mind of the global phenomenon described in the Japanese term kodokushi, meaning “lonely deaths” or “dying alone.”

In 2017, the New York Times ran an article called “A Generation in Japan Faces a Lonely Death”, a portrait of Mrs. Cheiko Ito, a 91 year-old widow living alone outside of Tokyo as a resident in one of 171 nearly identical white buildings. These elderly tenants spend their remaining months and years cocooned inside their small apartments, often without families or visitors, unknown to the outside world until they expire.

These apartment complexes, some dating back to the beginning of the economic boom of the 1960s, were built originally for the families of Japan’s rising class of “salarymen” and their nuclear families, in a societal shift away from traditional extended family structures. As Japan has emerged in recent decades as the world’s most rapidly aging society, the country has been struggling phenomena like the depopulation of many small towns, now inhabited by a handful of elderly.

Similarly, certain high-rise neighborhoods have become places in which, according to the Times article, some 4,000 kodokushi-type deaths occur per week, a few of which inevitably go unnoticed for some period of time. The lonely circumstances of one elderly woman led her to make an annual gift of pears to a neighbor across the courtyard in exchange for simply observing whether or not the woman opened her blinds every morning. She told her neighbor that if the blinds did not open, someone should check on whether she might have died the previous night.

Mrs. Ito had lived in the same apartment for sixty years, commenting “I’ve been lonely for 25 years.”

In the same complex, one of Mrs. Ito’s neighbors, a 69 year-old man, came to a grisly end when he was discovered lying dead on his kitchen floor after three years and in an advanced state of decomposition. His rent and utilities went on being deducted from his bank account until finally it ran dry, finally alerting the building management of a problem.

As the chairman of the local housing complex remarked sadly to the Times reporter, “The way we die is a mirror of the way we live.”

Such cases of lonely deaths also occur in cities like New York and many others, of course. In Tokyo, the Times reported, a new industry sprang up specializing in cleaning homes where such human remains are found. (See photo above.)

Part of the power of the Times article—which received almost 400 reader comments, almost entirely full of praise—was its depiction of the way its main subject, Mrs. Ito, lived surrounded by ghosts of both the living and the dead. Her many scrapbooks and family photo albums now seemed to serve, as the reporter noted, as proof of a life lived, despite its obscurity from the world.

Mrs. Ito exemplified the Buddhist belief that spirits of the dead remain part of the lives of the living. Preparing herself for the inevitable, she had even given away the family tablets—the miniature headstones precious to Japanese families—from their Buddhist altar.

In the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, did we practice a kind of enforced kodokushi? “We allowed thousands of people to die alone,” the Yale sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis noted. “We buried people by Zoom.”

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Ivan Illich and the art of suffering

One of the figures who can help us understand this moment is the radical social theorist Ivan Illich. Becoming famous in the early 1970s as one of the first people talking about the harms of global development, Illich could also be called the father of the modern commons movement, as well as a major force in the deschooling/unschooling movement.

Another notable focus of his critique of modernity’s institutions was the healthcare establishment which he famously attacked in his Medical Nemesis (1974) for its commodifying and over-medicalizing of our human existence amidst the rise of biomedicine. The book is about professional power as well as the way the medical establishment exercises political power—in the name of care and with a carte blanche that usually only the military can claim. (In a war, no one counts the costs, almost no one dissents.)

Illich argued that institutions finally reach a watershed or tipping point after which they do more harm than good—as when medicine itself finally becomes iatrogenic (i.e, it makes us ill).

While generally favorable to large-scale innovations in public health that have given us good, safe water, clean air, sewage disposal, etc., Illich thought we were headed into iatrogenesis in terms of 1) the clinical impact (high rates of preventable errors), 2) the social impact (the art of medicine gives way to the science of medicine), and 3) the cultural impact (the traditional willingness to suffer and bear one’s own reality until finally dying one’s own death).

If Illich’s claims sound overstated, think of our extraordinary dependence today upon hospitals and our equally extraordinary lack of confidence in our individual ability to care for each other.

Today any sense of an art of suffering, as Illich called it, is overshadowed by the expectation that all suffering can and should be immediately relieved—which does not end suffering but renders it meaningless, an anomaly or a technical misfunction.

Death is no longer an intimate, personal act but instead a a meaningless defeat, a mere cessation of treatment.

Illich’s radicalism, here as in so many places, comes from his orthodoxy—i.e., his upholding of the traditional Christian view that suffering and death are inherent in the human condition. They are realities which can be mitigated but should never be lost. We cannot become gods who attempt to take charge of our own destiny.

Over the last century, having lost the art of suffering, we find biomedicine is creating new forms of suffering. Properly understood, then, the art of suffering is a way of taking things—whether as suffering or as enjoyment—through a respect for the givenness of existence.

“The teachings of the major religions reinforce resignation to misfortune and offer a rationale, a style, and a community setting in which suffering can become a dignified performance,” Illich writes. It is the crowding-out of such an understanding of suffering that most clearly outraged him.

David Cayley, Illich’s friend and surely his dream biographer, has written about Illich’s startling proposition that the most dangerous idol the church has faced in its history—one now worshipped also by secular society—is Life itself, i.e., bare human existence. It might be argued that in our therapeutic frenzy we have also made an idol of the closely related concept of Health, redefined into a pursuit out of all reason.

Illich’s student and friend, community activist John McKnight, took up this theme when he wrote about “the arrival of the bereavement counselor,” the professional with whom so many of us have become familiar in this time of almost routine school shootings. We have it on the best advice that, left alone, we are no longer capable of managing public expressions of mourning without calling in strangers to our lives.

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Along with the abandonment of other persons—both strangers and family members—we should consider the meaning of abandoned places. A drive across America today, especially on state roads off the expressways, can be an astonishing experience. Between the major cities, you pass through smaller cities and towns which may at first glance have a gingerbread quaintness until you realize the main street’s shops are mostly empty, with only a tattoo parlor, a bar or two, and a gas station remaining.

The next post in this series reflects on the “root shock” which these places suffered before being left to die.

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Bardo…1. noun: an intermediate, liminal state between death and rebirth;

2. In Tibetan Buddhism, the state between two lives on earth;

3. A metaphor for the shared but unacknowledged condition of American society in 2025—life in suspension, always on the way, with mutual grief never reconciled or consoled.

Introduction (first post in a series)

How to understand this moment in American life—are we not all trying to do this? But I don’t mean understand it in political or sociological terms. And not just this administration.

An exhausting number of explanations have been offered, some of them reasonable and some probably valid.

But they don’t go deep enough. That’s because this time in our history increasingly feels like a shared nightmare. Or like living in a simulation created by invisible technofeudalists.

But the latter explanation implies that our condition is something new, something enabled by latest wave of Death Star platforms.

Making technocracy the sole cause of this shared fever dream only demonstrates our cultural and historical amnesia. It leaves us helpless to understand how we actually arrived at this moment, somewhere in the middle of a mysterious transition to…somewhere else.

In the thought experiment which follows, I’m suggesting that our history of buried suffering has created a shared spiritual crisis of a particular kind.

We find ourselves between past and future, as the invaluable Hannah Arendt described matters more than a half century ago. She was speaking of our intellectual disorientation, given the loss of traditions as well as any shared sense of the world.

Or might we see American society as undergoing some kind of collective rite of passage? This term, taken from Arnold van Gennep’s 1909 book, was coined to describe an individual’s passage from one status to another (as in initiation ceremonies) and from one life situation to another (graduation, marriage), as well as the passage of time (birthdays, the New Year).

Can an entire culture undergo a rite of passage? Is some other kind of transition going on? Perhaps a deep societal process has been underway, one which we rarely allow to surface because we can scarcely bear to confront it.

I’m proposing here that our dreamlike state can better be understood as time in a bardo, using metaphorically the Buddhist concept of a transitional state between between death and rebirth.

I see American society suspended unknowingly inside a Bardo of Grief. Which is to say: as a society today, we’re perpetually, agonizingly stuck, spiritually and existentially.

Tibetan Buddhism recognizes three bardos experienced in life—the bardo of birth/life, the bardo of dreaming and the bardo of meditation—and three experienced during the process of dying—the bardo of the moment of death, the bardo of reality/luminosity, and the bardo of becoming/rebirth.

But suppose grief from a significant loss can also take us—indeed, our entire society—into a bardo realm.

For our investigations here, I want to sketch out the nature of the bardo of grief in order to suggest its resonance with our public and private lives today. So a few words about why I’m exploring this metaphorical approach.

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First, our American malady—which is more than a malaise--goes beyond economics or politics: again, and like many observers, I believe it is fundamentally spiritual in nature, as I suggested above.

But we need a different spiritual lens at this moment in order to see more deeply. I find that the American encounter with Vietnam and its culture of Buddhism, beginning well over a half-century ago, has profound significance today. We, the sick giant, are very much in need of the healing wisdom and spiritual resources of this small country.

Thus the teachings and witness of Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh (here’s a discussion of his work relevant to this post) will be important in this series.

Grief, as Mark Robert Frank writes, is a reaction to the precipitous, uncontrolled, and undesirable loss of self. That’s quite different from the controlled and desirable loss of self that takes place within the context of spiritual practice, or the uncontrolled but desirable loss of self in the context of falling in love.

In several forms of Buddhism, the bardo realm is the in-between, transitional, liminal state between death and rebirth. Whatever remains of the self goes out in search of its next rebirth. In this state, the deceased may experience a phase of intense grief, especially if they were not prepared for death—i.e., they have not learned to die, as philosophers once described the motive for their inquiries.

In the bardo realm, the deceased gradually realize they are dead and no longer among their loved ones. In scenes perhaps reminiscent of Dante’s great poem of other worlds, they may see and hear their loved ones and yet be invisible to them—a cause of great anguish. According to Buddhist teachings, the deceased experience a range of emotions related to separation, including sadness, loneliness, and a sense of alienation.

The traditional Buddhist texts describing these emotions also refer to visions of both peaceful and wrathful deities, depending on how we have used our lives (which is reflected in our karma) before death.

On the individual level, understanding the bardo of grief is beneficial in two main ways. First, it shows us mourners how to help the deceased navigate this transition and achieve a better rebirth. Second—and especially for our purposes—it helps the living cope with the loss of a loved one.

As many readers here will know, a central text for understanding this tradition is the Tibetan Book of the Dead or the Bardo Thodol in Tibetan.

These teachings include a number of ritual practices which mourners can undertake in order to lead the departed toward a fortunate rebirth. And to help them avoid getting caught up in mental delusions that would lead one to the hell realm or the condition of becoming a “hungry ghost”. The latter concept is a very suggestive one for citizens of a society dominated by consumerism.

The Hungry Ghost Festival is celebrated by Buddhists and Taoists in numerous Asian countries. On Ghost Day, the spirits of deceased ancestors come out from the hell realm in order to visit the living and be venerated or appeased. Some are spirits without descendants who thus have received no tributes from the living after death, leaving them in a desperately hungry, thirsty and restless state.

Ritualistic food offerings are prepared at tables with empty seats for the spirits. Relatives burn special “hell banknotes” (non-legal tender especially printed for this purpose) and other forms of joss or incense paper in the shape of houses or cars in order to please the ghosts and give them support in the other world.

The hungry ghosts being appeased are those spirits who are driven by intense emotional and physical needs in an animalistic way. They are often depicted in Buddhist art with big bellies and needle-thin necks to signify their suffering. One category of these nightmarish figures—the ghosts of losses—are always covetous, searching out human filth to eat at night. In life, they sought enjoyment in both clean and unclean things and were thus reborn in this condition.

Another category: the ghosts of flaming mouths, with bodies like a palmyra tree. Their condition shows the karmic results of stinginess.

If I am not stretching a metaphor absurdly far here, I can imagine our society as crowded with hungry ghosts, endlessly craving, always consuming. And like the newly dead in Tibetan Buddhism, some of us Americans suffer torments from karmically generated hallucinations of figures who appear to threaten us.

But no rebirth into a happier state is coming in our case. At least not until we confront our lack of public occasions for lament like the three “Great Chanting Ceremonies” undertaken for the war dead by Thich Nhat Hanh in 2007 in his native Vietnam. (I will describe these in a later post.)

In his impact on American spirituality, I think of Nhat Hanh as a terton, the Tibetan Buddhist term for a “a discover or revealer of (dharma) treasures.” The treasures are scriptures (called termas) that have been deliberately concealed and discovered at appropriate times by realized masters through their enlightened powers.

Some of these tantric scriptures are concealed in rocks, lakes, and temples: they are called Earth Termas. Others appear as mental awakenings and are called Mind Termas. We might consider Nhat Hanh’s teachings as falling into the latter category.

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But let’s begin with some grounding in terms of our situation in the U.S. What follows in this series are sketches drawn from life—or more specifically, our history over the last half-century--and my attempt to think out loud about them, drawing on more than one wisdom tradition.

The common thread throughout is my strong suspicion that almost all of us in American society today share a particular kind of unrecognized condition: the existence of “unprocessed” or buried grief.

Thus I’m not reflecting here on personal grief or its trauma discourse: instead I want to confront our unexamined legacy of communal grief.

Like a pool of contamination awaiting discovery beneath a plot of land, I think of our buried grief as a calamity which must be “remediated.” Remediation would mean, in the jargon, closure, especially the communal closure I want to examine here—the kind that comes from public rituals of lament.

In such rituals, it is the community that mourns, that imposes the mourning upon itself, as we have learned from philosopher Byung Chul Han in his Loss of Rituals. Which leads us to ask: where is our community today? Where and how might it offer and conduct a ritual of mourning?

The condition I’m exploring here is more than a lack of closure. And more than simply our American culture’s well-known avoidance of death and dying.

Hoping not to invoke the malign deities, let’s take up seven historical sources of destabilizing grief, most of which have enfolded over decades, all of them based in common experiences, all of them still quietly contaminating our shared life:

• The grief of the COVID-19 pandemic, with its 1.5 million dead in America (and over 7 million worldwide), when a profound human impulse—to mourn family members in public funeral ceremonies—was often put aside by something very like a state of emergency;

• The grief of the over 700,000 dead from the HIV/AIDS epidemic which started in 1981;

• The grief of the over 176,000 “deaths of despair” between 1999 and 2021 from addiction, suicide and alcohol, due partly to the decline in living standards and social status for a significant part of the American middle class;

• Partly foreshadowing the latter, the slow grief of losing our entire rural culture, some 4 million family farms in this country between 1940 and 2012, representing perhaps 25 million people leaving the land, thus removing from it and themselves, as Wendell Berry reminds us, their “love, care, skill and work”;

• What’s been called America’s racial karma—our 246 years of legalized chattel slavery, followed by a century or apartheid, as well as the destruction of our Native peoples and their cultures;

• The grief of those affected by the toll of America’s perpetual wars over the last two decades (over 7,000 deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan), as well as the annual average of 250 self-inflicted deaths by U.S. service members;

• Our shared grief over our burning planet and its wildfires, 500-year storms, dying oceans, lost species, heat waves, desertification, sea rise, displaced communities, climate refugees, and what may become a sixth mass extinction.

Our collective reaction to these losses resembles the often-noted silence and erasure around the flu epidemic of 1919 which killed over 50 million people worldwide. In the U.S., none of these shared catastrophes of the last half-century—all of them enormous in scope--have led us to mount occasions of public mourning on a national scale.

What then does it mean to live in a society which has allowed its social practices to degrade into merely instrumental and economic relations?

Simply that we now lack the grief communities and the rituals of lament which could bring us social healing in the form of forgiveness and reconciliation.

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                                                    Grief as a spiritual enzyme

One of the most insightful writers on these topics is Martin Prechtel whose work teaches that grief is not simply disappointment: it is as natural as singing or dreaming or eating.

Nor is grief simply sorrow—in fact it refuses to remain in sorrow. It is an obligation to the life we have each been awarded—an obligation to make more life. It should not be a mere preference. “Choosing not to have grief,” he writes, “burdens someone else and makes the world a sick place.”

And this: “Only nations capable of the true art of grief, grieving their mistakes and the deeply felt losses they endured, can say they are not pools of economic stagnation dressed up in the spoils of ungrieved wars disguised as good business.”

Another of the most powerful insights in Prechtel’s writing is his connection of grief with praise. Grief is “the best friend of Praise because Praise is a grandiose griever. Without grief and praise, life is only hate and mediocrity.”

In essence, if we do not grieve what we miss, we are not praising what we love—“we are ourselves in some way dead.”

Echoing philosopher Byung Chul Han, Prechtel argues that living communities are necessary for people to grieve in a real way. “Grief, even for an individual’s loss, is a thing for which a lot of people are necessary.”

Tragically we have gradually lost the culture in which we could grieve together as a society. Worse, we defer the grief of a previous generation onto the next generation, creating a dangerous and inhuman condition. All the people and places lost, Prechtel suggests, “are buried in a shallow mental mass grave of temporary amnesia in the collective mind.”

What we lack is the process by which grief, defined as a “spiritual enzyme”, metabolizes our losses. If we do not allow this to occur in some communal fashion, the grief almost always goes to a form of accusatory violence and the destruction of our common life. Thus the adoption of revenge works as a way of freezing grief and, in Prechtel’s phrase, “making a shrine to someone’s losses.”

Reading Prechtel, a terrible realization gradually comes over us: that we are all living on top of a buried continent of unprocessed communal grief.

No matter how well we may be dissolving our personal sufferings with the enzymes of grief, we have chosen collectively—and over generations—to live inside a history of great losses, human and natural.

Grieving, he explains, is not a form of depression—which is a condition that comes from not being able to grieve, in which we convert our losses, our “frozen sorrow”, into violence. But what if grief is not sorrow and refuses to remain in sorrow?

Might Prechtel be correct that we possess an ancient way to revive an entire culture, if we truly and freely grieve? Might the practice of grief—itself a sacred art—be the foundation of all our work toward peace and reconciliation?

I welcome your comments and I’ll be posting another piece in this series soon.

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What follows here are a few sketches from life, an extension of some thoughts offered earlier this year in a post called

The common thread here is my suspicion that many of us share an unrecognized condition: the existence of “unprocessed” or buried grief amidst a neoliberal culture whose competitive energies push against being interrupted for “unproductive” occasions of public lament.

Like contamination beneath a plot of land, I think of buried grief as awaiting discovery after which it obstructs anything new until it can be “remediated.” Remediation would mean, in the jargon, closure, especially the kind of communal closure that comes from rituals.

In rituals of mourning and lament, it is the community that mourns, that imposes the mourning upon itself, as we have learned from philosopher Byung Chul Han.

The condition I’m exploring here is more than a lack of closure. It is partly our culture’s well-known avoidance of death and dying. But there’s even more.

Here are four historical moments of destabilizing grief, most of which have enfolded over decades, all of them based in common experiences, all of them still quietly contaminating our shared life:

• The grief of those affected by the toll of America’s perpetual wars over the last two decades (over 7,000 deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan), as well as the annual average of 250 self-inflicted deaths by service members.

• The grief of the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when a profound human impulse—to mourn family members in public funeral ceremonies—was put aside by something very like a state of emergency;

• The grief of the well-documented decline in living standards (and social status) for a large part of the American middle class, beginning in the 1980s;

• The grief of losing some 4 million family farms in this country between 1940 and 2012, representing perhaps 25 million people leaving the land and thus removing from it and themselves, as Wendell Berry reminds us, their “love, care, skill and work.”

Somehow, none of these shared catastrophes—all of them enormous in scope--have led us to instigate occasions of public mourning on a national scale.

What this means in a society which has allowed its social practices to diminish into instrumental and economic relations is that we lack grief communities which could bring forgiveness and reconciliation.

An experience years ago left me thinking about how older cultures—in this case Catholic culture—once offered powerful religious practices for community grief.

Chicago, 1985

Tenebrae is a Latin word for “shadows” or “darkness.”

I first attended a Tenebrae service while living in Chicago. I had discovered a century-old Catholic church, St. John Cantius, in the historic Polish neighborhood which runs along Milwaukee Avenue. A friend knew of my curiosity about the old rites of the Church and suggested I attend this particular service which is observed at the conclusion of Lent, just before the Easter Triduum of Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday. He did not mention how spiritually arresting it would be.

Entering the dimly lit sanctuary, I took a booklet of readings drawn from the penitential Psalms and the Book of Lamentations. As I slipped into a worn wooden pew, I noticed the altar was stripped bare with only a candle stand (called a “hearse”) of fourteen brown and one white candle, all lit.

The men of the church’s Gregorian choir were seated around the altar. As the service began, an antiphon chant from a single voice rose up, the opening words of Psalm 69, “The zeal for Thy house has consumed me, and the reproaches of them that reproach Thee, fell upon me.”

Tenebrae is an ancient monastic office of lamentation which commemorates the darkest moment in the Easter cycle, the night of the betrayal of Jesus and the crucifixion. Quite unlike anything I had ever experienced before in a church, I felt the service taking us, the congregation, deep into the mystery of grief, abandonment, and agony.

The coming darkness is made palpable by the gradual extinguishing of a candle after each of the readings until only the single white candle remains.

Then a moment of “weird Catholicism”, as some people refer to these ancient rites, happened. After a few seconds of quiet in the near-darkness, the congregation began stamping its feet on the floor, recreating with the noise (a strepitus in Church Latin) the earthquake which Scriptures record at the point of Christ’s death. The eerie clatter lasted for less than a minute.

Finally, the last candle–symbolizing the light of Christ–is placed out of sight behind the altar, suggesting the apparent victory of evil for the moment. The church is now in almost total darkness, in tenebris. In this mood, unrelieved by any joyful music or parting words of hope—Easter joy is still yet to come--the congregation files out in what felt like a truly rare kind of contemplative silence.

I realized I had just experienced a liturgy, a “public service connected to the divine”, which was very foreign to our untragic sense of life and its learned helplessness in the face of grief.

Especially when celebrated in a beautiful old basilica and with a Gregorian choir, I imagined Tenebrae drawing upon indigenous European roots, almost lost by now, in order to celebrate an annual observance at which the Catholic community offers up their shared grief within the mystery of our mortality and losses.

Tenebrae services are still offered by many churches—Catholic and Protestant--today. At home I sometimes try to recall this moment by listening to a choral setting of Tenebrae, either Palestrina’s Maundy Thursday Tenebrae and Thomas Tallis’ Lamentations of Jeremiah, both of which I’ve found to reach great depths of solitude.

Let me turn now to my first category of grief, that felt by those touched by our perpetual wars. I begin by reflecting on an experience I had in the former U.S.S.R.

Piskaryovskoye Cemetery, Leningrad, 1978

In the summer of 1978, I was restless to leave grad school for a new adventure—say, learning Russian. So I signed up for a two-month camping and driving tour of the U.S.S.R.

I had read a bit about Russia’s horrendous experience of the Second World War. My first closeup glimpse of its lingering aftermath occurred early on when we reached Leningrad, as it was still called in those days. At one moment, I wandered away from the tour group on a whim. Strolling down a side street only a block or two away from the famous boulevard Nevsky Prospekt, I spotted an old apartment building, still standing but ripped in half and exposed to the street like a giant gaping wound.

I guessed its ruined condition dated back to the German bombing campaigns during the siege of Leningrad, the infamous “900 days” between 1941 and 1944. Thirty-four years later, it was clear the Soviet regime had still not been able to repair all the destruction caused by what our government tour guides referred to simply as “the Fascist invader,” a kind of catchall explanation for the dilapidation and ruin still found in many places.

Certainly the apocalypse of the largest invasion force in the history of warfare, along an 1,800-mile front, still haunted every Russian of age in those years, especially the older Leningraders who survived.

For the three-year duration of the city’s siege, starvation was the main killer, with the worst period that of January through March 1942, when around 100,000 died each month until the streets became littered with bodies. For their part, the living dealt with thirty-below temperatures without heat or light. Leningraders reportedly ate their pets and even the bark off the trees under the relentless force of the German campaign to destroy this symbolic city, the birthplace of the Russian Revolution in 1917. Over 100,000 bombs were dropped on the city, and the final toll from starvation was over 641,000. Altogether, estimates are that one million died in the greater Leningrad region.

After the blockade ended, the sheer quantity of corpses overwhelmed the Russian soldiers assigned the task of digging the graves: they eventually resorted to dynamiting open the frozen earth in order to complete the task.

The Piskarevskoye cemetery contains about 420,000 civilians and 50,000 soldiers buried in 186 mass graves. We walked alongside these long bunkers at the end of which the only inscription was a year: “1941”, “1942”, “1943”.

I have a photo of the wide plaza in front of the Mother Motherland statue where I remember we could hear over the loudspeakers the dirge-like strains of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony (the “Leningrad”), a musical piece championed by Stalin himself.

On June 8, 1996, Russian president Boris Yeltsin established June 22 as the annual Day of Remembrance and Sorrow to commemorate Operation Barbarossa, the Axis invasion of the U.S.S.R. Russians also observe Victory Day on May 9 in honor of the Russian victory over Nazi Germany. (The Russian term for the Second World War is “the Great Patriotic War.”)

It is difficult to comprehend the Russian war losses: 27 million dead, of which two-thirds were civilian. An older Russian we befriended during the 1978 trip related that even almost four decades after the end of the war, most newspapers still had a special section for those seeking information about lost family members from those years.

Privately, Russian funeral traditions include a three-day period of grieving in the family home, along with the practice of covering every mirror with black cloth and stopping all the clocks. Open caskets are more common than is our practice and visitors often place items inside, such as personal effects and money.

Mourners form a circle around the casket, taking turns to place flowers inside and sometimes to lean down and kiss the departed.

Moreover, grieving does not end with the funeral. Memorial days for the deceased are held periodically in later years and are occasions for collective mourning.

Arlington National Cemetery, 2024

I began this visit by making a long stroll past thousands of white grave markers as I went up the hill to Arlington House. This former home of Robert E. Lee sits at one end of Arlington National Cemetery whose 624 acres make it almost ten times the size of Piskaryovskoye. From the front porch, the view back toward the city of Washington D.C. is majestic, one which Lee must have enjoyed until his refusal of the Northern Command in 1861 inevitably meant he and his family had to abandon the house and its slave quarters.

The land was confiscated from the Lee family and became a national cemetery on May 13, 1864. After the Civil War, the southern part of the property was initially used as a “freedman’s village” with rental houses for several thousand freed slaves who farmed the estate and received training. Segregated burial areas were used until President Truman changed the practice in 1948.

Over 400,000 U.S. servicepeople are buried at Arlington, representing conflicts from the Civil War through Afghanistan. Today the cemetery holds two dozen or more funerals daily, an average of almost 7,000 annually.

Its 70 sections represent different conflicts in U.S. history but it is Section 60—service members who died in Iraq and Afghanistan, starting in 2001—which has revealed something about uncontrollable, unmanageable grief.

In a time when war is mostly invisible by design, Section 60 has been a place where you might know we’ve had a war going on. This section is only 14 acres of the 624-acre cemetery, with just over 900 graves. As author Robert M. Poole pointed out in his book Section 60: Where War Comes Home, it is one of the few places in America where it’s considered normal to talk to the dead.

Speaking to National Geographic magazine in 2014, the author remarked, “There’s the community of the dead under the ground, and the community of the living aboveground. And people have no hesitation about carrying on conversations with dead brothers, husbands, fathers, or mothers buried there. It’s like they’re still alive. Why people do this I don’t know.”

What also struck Poole in his research was the rawness of emotion in this part of the cemetery, similar to the atmosphere around the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in its first years after being installed in 1993.

He noted that Section 60 was a place where family members would camp out, laying out a blanket and sleeping on the grave of their lost brother, husband or son.

People were also bringing a strange array of items to place on the grave markers: report cards, sonograms of unborn children, love letters, empty rifle cartridges, baseball caps. Comrades who were present at a friend’s death observe the custom of leaving on the headstone a quarter coin or a penny in the case of someone with whom they went to boot camp.

The emotional rawness is perhaps also related to the number of deaths caused by what Poole calls “the signature weapons of our most recent conflicts”—i.e., suicide bombs and improvised explosive devices (IEDs), the latter causing more than 2,500 deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. This fact may be related to something I noticed when I recently walked through this section: the numerous graves of Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, Green Berets, para-rescue airmen and helicopter pilots.

As Poole notes, the term IED comes from the conflict in Northern Ireland. These fearsome devices so damage and disfigure victims that medical examiners frequently recommend the families do not view the body, thus inevitably blocking out an important part of the healing process.

For a number of years, as Poole recounts, grieving families ignored the cemetery’s no-alcohol rule in order to drink at the gravesite, sometimes pouring out part of a beer on the ground as though re-enacting a funeral practice out of Homer’s Iliad.

It’s important to note that Arlington National Cemetery is not part of the National Park Service but rather has been operated by the Department of the Army since its inception. Thus it’s not surprising that some of the more plaintive mourning practices observed in Section 60 drew the Department to begin exerting tighter controls over grieving visitors. Weekly “sweeps” of the section are now routine, with strict rules as to what kinds of items and interactions are allowable. It is now the prerogative of the Army’s Center of Military History to determine the disposition of the miscellaneous items, whether to “preserve, throw away, leave in place.”

Just as with the elaborate and precise choreography of the guard in front of Arlington’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the military always wants—perhaps desperately—to signal its firm control over all aspects of the horrific events which its actions have unleashed. Too much public expression of raw emotion, however needed by those caught up in grief, can challenge that control or even contribute to undermining its reasons for existing.

On my recent visit, Section 60 was typically quiet except for the loudspeaker at a distant Marine Marathon event I could hear across the cemetery in the distance. As I walked through the long aisles of grave markers, I spotted roughly a dozen floral arrangements. Approaching the main road back to the entrance, I took a look back and saw a young woman seated motionless on the ground before a grave marker, bent over in what looked like a praying position.

If we must have community in order for our rituals of lament to be efficacious, then we are forced to confront the terrible dilemma which I quoted author Bill Kauffmann on in my earlier post: “You can have empire—or you can have your hometown. You can’t have both.”

In future posts here, I will take up the other three historical moments of “frozen” grief.

See you next time—peace.

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