In the Bardo of Grief: Part Two

The Great Silence, abandonment, and Illich on the art of suffering.

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

–Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow

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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.

Miyu Kojima’s experiences cleaning the apartments of Japanese elderly who died “lonely deaths” led her to create illustrative dioramas—without miniature corpses—which her company could display at trade shows. Some 76,000 older Japanese died alone in 2024.

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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