Let us enfranchise our grief
Kisa Gotami was on a mission to save her child’s life. We have a mission of our own.
Kisa Gotami and the Mustard Seeds
In ancient India, in the time of the Buddha, there lived a woman named Kisa Gotami. Kisa Gotami’s young child had just died from illness. In her heartbroken state, she hoisted her child’s remains into her arms and went out into the village. She asked every passerby if they knew of a way to save her child. Surely, there was some healer or wise leader who could help her. She was told it was unlikely that anyone could help her, but if anyone could, it was the great sage himself—Shakyamuni Buddha—who happened to be preaching nearby. Perhaps he possessed the power to resurrect her beloved son.
Kisa Gotami found the Budda and laid her child’s body at his feet. She pleaded with the monk to bring him back to her. She promised she would do anything—sacrifice everything. Surely there was something the Fully Enlightened One could do to rescue her son from the cruelty of an early death. She prostrated before the teacher. Her pleas were wails.
The Buddha locked eyes with the young mother. He spoke to her slowly, calmly. “I know of a way to bring your child back to life,” he said.
Kisa Gotami’s eyes widened. She stepped back. “What do you need me to do, Bhagavant?” she asked, a newfound resolution growing in her voice.
“It is simple,” said the Buddha. He gestured to the town. “Return to your village. Go door to door and ask everyone if anyone in their household had ever died. Find a house that death has not touched, and ask for a handful of mustard seeds from their kitchen. I will use those seeds to resurrect your child and cure him of his illness.”
Kisa Gotami pledged that she would do as the teacher said. Leaving her child’s body in the care of the monastics, she raced back into town, determined to save the life of her son. She was positive she could accomplish what the Buddha had asked of her. All she needed was a handful of seeds. Surely there would be a household in her village—even just one—that death had yet to visit. Yes, Kisa Gotami thought. There must be one.
She diligently scoured the village, visiting every household. At each door, she introduced herself and her business. She told each villager that her child had died of sickness, and that the Buddha had promised her he could heal him if she could collect a small number of mustard seeds from a house where no one knew death. And as much as all the townsfolk felt for Kisa Gotami and wanted to help her, none could. Invariably, they all told her that at least one person in their household had experienced death. Invariably, Kisa Gotami was turned away. “Don’t worry,” they all told her, not wanting to break her heart any more than it had already been broken. “Surely there must be at least one family that can help you.”
But nobody could. No matter where she went, death had beaten her there. Eventually, she exhausted the entire village, and discovered that she had failed in her mission. She returned to the Buddha dejected and in disbelief. She found him meditating in the light of dusk, the corpse of her child laid peacefully before him.
There, at the sight of the Buddha and her son’s body, Kisa Gotami finally realized the purpose of the task she had been given. She thought back to all those people she had spent her day talking to; how they had all offered the kindest faces and the most comforting words, but not a single one could help her. She recalled how they had all lost someone dear to them. Some of them, like her, had suffered the terrible fate of outliving one’s children. She had seen the traces of pain in their expressions as they remembered the names and faces of ones who had died. She had witnessed the way their lives had continued after their bereavement—how they had gone on to build new homes, learn new trades, and welcome new lives into being.
Kisa Gotami realized that everywhere around her people were dying, and everywhere around her people were being born. That grief was survivable and life walked hand-in-hand with death. Or rather, she had known this all along, only having been blinded to it by her pain. At first, she felt the first stirrings of embarrassment over how she had lost sight of something so universal and so true, but soon understood that she had nothing to be ashamed of. She knew that others knew how it felt to be broken. She was confident that, one day, she would be mended as others had been mended.
She understood that a grieving heart was like a burning field. From its center, it would look as though fire and smoke were all that it had ever contained. But soon, the flames would extinguish, and what before was burning would be reduced to ash. And in due time, birds and animals would return to scatter seeds over the ruins, and rainfall would pound the ash and earth together, mixing new soil. And one day, at first slowly then all at once, flowers and shoots would wind their way out of the soil. Then the field would be a field again, as green as it had ever been, although a trained eye could tell that it had burned before.
Wordlessly, without disturbing the Buddha, she raised her child back into her arms and carried him into the forest, where she buried him. Having laid her son to rest, Kisa Gotami returned to the Buddha, who had been waiting for her. The Buddha asked Kisa Gotami if she had completed her mission. She answered that she had.
The Buddha had never possessed the power to resurrect the dead. He was only a man. The only life that had been saved that day was her own, and the Buddha hadn’t been the one to save it. She was. By accepting, finally, that love was insufficient to prevent death, she gained back control over her life.
Seeing that the trial of the mustard seeds was over, the Buddha taught Kisa Gotami the following verse: “Better it is to live one day seeing Deathlessness / Than to live a hundred years without ever seeing Deathlessness.”
Kisa Gotami then pledged to follow the Buddha for the remainder of her days. She ordained as a bhikkhuni—a member of the monastic order of nuns—and served as a loyal follower of the Buddha, teaching many grieving people the same lesson she had learned. Eventually, she became an arahant—one who has achieved nirvana, or escape from the cycle of death and rebirth known as samsara.
That was my personal retelling of the story of Kisa Gotami and the Mustard Seeds, one of the most beloved and well-known parables of Buddhism. The tale of Kisa Gotami reminds us Buddhists to seek company and community in times of death, and to see grief as a process of relearning how to live when that knowledge is all but lost to us.
I like this story for several reasons. First, it’s easy to remember and to tell. There isn’t a single set of enumerated principles to memorize! This is rather impressive for Buddhism, the Religion of Repetitive Lists. Second, it’s universal. Of course it’s universal. We can all relate to Kisa Gotami’s amazement at how little the fact that we love someone changes the fact that they have died.
Third, I think it’s pretty funny to everyone who has ever canvassed for a political campaign, which is why I wanted to share it in Samsara Days. I figured many of you would get a kick out of it. The story does consist, in effect, of the Buddha instructing a woman to leave her child’s fresh corpse with him and go door-knocking as a solution to her grief. I imagine that’s the strangest reason a person has ever gone door-to-door, although who knows. People can really surprise you.
I do feel that my experiences canvassing are a little bit similar to the trials of Kisa Gotami. Like, one small, tiny bit. I was never under the same amount of duress as a mother grieving her child, but the stakes were reasonably high. When I’ve volunteered for a campaign, I’ve done it not just because I wanted that candidate or that ballot measure to win, but because I found victory to be politically necessary. We need reproductive justice, racial justice, environmental justice, and all those things. More than useful or expedient, they are positively vital to our vision for the people. It will be socialism or barbarism—I still believe that. Canvassing—all political activity, really—consists of convincing people to subscribe to your beliefs as to what is right and must be done, and to take action to that effect. Not quite resurrecting a dead baby, but still a daunting task—and a noble one. Canvassing is at once healing and excruciating, dignifying and humiliating; on top of that, it is entirely worthwhile.
And while the parable of Kisa Gotami instructs on grief, I believe its lessons are transferable to hopelessness, which is the plat du jour for us on the left. Hopelessness, you could argue, is the merger of grief and politics. If I could be so bold as to posit a redefinition of hopelessness as it applies to politics, I would offer this: The belief that one’s life, situation, or polity has become incapable of getting better; that it can only get worse or stay the same from now on. When we are convinced that the life we once envisioned is so far improbable that there is no longer any point in working to get us there—that is hopelessness. We come to grieve the world we used to dream of living in, and the people we must have been to be capable of dreaming up that world. Satisfaction is getting what we want; hope is not having what we want, but believing it’s out there waiting for us; hopelessness is accepting that betterment is lost and burying it in an empty grave.
The past three years have seen no shortage of hopelessness or grief. We’ve all got plenty to share. What we have had a shortage of, however—and Kisa Gotami might chastise us for this—is mourning.
That is not to say we haven’t mourned. Those of us who have lost loved ones to COVID certainly have. Those of us who have suffered from COVID or any of the political and economic crises that have precipitated from the pandemic have mourned for lost health, lost loved ones, and lost faith in our society. Also worthy of mourning is the loss many have incurred of times in our lives we were promised we would love and look back upon fondly—adolescences clipped of their freedom, childhoods sterilized, college and high school educations cut short. Yes, in these years, we have certainly mourned.
But have we mourned enough? Have we mourned rightly? By that I mean: Does the amount we have mourned correspond to the amount we have grieved and to the extent that it should? I don’t think so. Let me explain.
I feel like, as a people, our capacity to mourn has been shot. Our mourning chip is fried. I know I’m not the only person who’s felt this way. I still remember that stunning New York Times cover from the summer of 2020. “U.S. DEATHS NEAR 100,000, AN INCALCULABLE LOSS,” and a front page plastered with names. I remember last May, when COVID deaths surpassed one million, and how it came and went with a whimper. And another year since, if you look outside in most places, except for the odd worker or grocery shopper still wearing a mask, it appears at first glance that life has returned to what it was in 2019. At the very least, the world insists upon a sense of normalcy, and most of us are happy to play along.
I don’t blame them. In large part, I’m one of them. I haven’t let my grief and my unease stop me from starting life in my twenties—even if I’m starting a couple years late. But still, I often find myself taken aback by how bizarre day-to-day life now feels—how hollow. Like a great big sinkhole opened up in all of our lives, and we’ve hardly acknowledged it except to tip-toe around its edge to get where we’re going.
Ed Yong wrote about this phenomenon in his piece, “The Final Pandemic Betrayal,” about the millions of people in America still mourning loved ones lost to COVID, and how estranged they feel by a society that appears eager to leave them behind. Their pain is compounded by the tormenting way that a COVID death plays out. They are forced to watch their loved ones suffer, or worse, to imagine what their suffering looks like in a hospital room they aren’t allowed to enter. They must endure the torturous experience of saying goodbye via grainy video call, their loved one potentially intubated and unable to speak. Mourners are battered with invasive questions about their loved one’s painful death as soon as the funeral is done or even before (if there even was a funeral). Were they vaccinated? Where were they going and how often? Did they have any pre-existing conditions? Mourners are accosted by the endless online misinformation campaigns that at best treat COVID like a joke and at worst brand it as some sort of conspiracy. Simultaneously and jarringly, they are swept along by the overwhelming cultural urge to move on at breakneck speed, with so many already referring to COVID in the past tense—as if reality were not publicly available.
As of March 24, according to the CDC, total U.S. deaths due to COVID-19 have reached 1,123,613. The current number of hospitalizations for COVID sits at 14,956. Yet, voices in media, in government, and in public speak of a “post-COVID world” as though it were already here.
Attempts at public mourning for COVID victims have been piecemeal, such as the candle-lighting ceremony held by President Biden when the U.S. breached 500,000 deaths in February 2021. What other attempts that have been made to memorialize lives lost to COVID have been localized and grassroots, such as art projects and social media pages run by small groups of volunteers. The nonprofit Marked by COVID is advocating for Congress to dedicate the first Monday in March as a national COVID Memorial Day, though their efforts are still in progress.
There is this fundamental disconnect between what we know about the world and how we interact with it which, I believe, spawned directly from the deficiencies in our mourning of COVID-19 victims. While individual families and communities have mourned, America largely has not. That America has not mourned—or, perhaps more accurately, has not afforded sufficient space for people to mourn—is because of the unique type of grief that COVID mourners are experiencing, as Yong describes. It goes by the name of “disenfranchised grief.”
Disenfranchised grief, named by Dr. Kenneth J. Doka, refers to grief that feels unwelcome or even shunned, such as when we grieve for a person or relationship that society disapproves of, or take too long to mourn a death that society thinks we should have gotten over by now. A classic example is grieving the death of an extramarital partner. All the regular ache of loss mashes together with our shame for having been invested in that person or relationship in the first place, and also with our knowledge that we will invite shame if we mourn too long or too publicly. This is, rather cruelly, precisely the situation that we have put each other in over the pandemic years.
For those of us who are politically active on the left, there is another aspect to our disenfranchisement. In addition to death and disability due to COVID, we are mourning (what appears at the moment to be) the loss of the political potential of the pandemic. The early success of the second Bernie campaign reinvigorated many of us who had all but consigned electoral politics and purportedly left-friendly Democrats to the ash heap, only for history to pull what can only be described as a “fuck you” of epic proportions on us all. The one-two punch of Bernie’s defeat and the onset of the pandemic had us up against the ropes. But then, we began to notice that COVID was unraveling America at the seams, exposing its rotten core for all to see. Policing, healthcare, housing, racial capitalism itself—the current state of these institutions was revealed as fundamentally and undeniably incompatible with human life. The contradictions and deficiencies that our movement had labored for over a century to expose were suddenly plastered all over the headlines. We could hardly believe our eyes.
Ultimate tragedy bore an immense opportunity. We grasped for it unflinchingly, with every ounce of power that remained to us. We failed to take hold. Our chance slipped away. The George Floyd rebellion was violently put down and failed to establish lasting political change save for an act of Congress that, horrifically, wouldn’t have even saved its namesake’s life. Mutual aid workers did what they could to stop the bleeding in America, but the need was too great for what even the most talented organizers could address with the resources on hand. The center and the right won their war against meaningful criminal justice reform; police funding, rather than decreasing, uniformly increased or stayed the same. Conservatives scored savage victories against reproductive freedom and the rights of transgender people in red states. The groundswell of energy that flowed into left-wing organizations, collectives, and autonomous movements in the summer of 2020 slowly dissipated. Radical groups have been left understaffed, demoralized, and licking our wounds. Everywhere, the question seems to be: What do we do now?
I don’t have the answer to that. I’ve got plenty of ideas, but so does everyone else. First, I should heed my own advice and not call things over until they’re over. The pandemic isn’t finished, but neither are we. The contradictions that were exposed three years ago are still here. America remains belly-up. If we keep fighting, keep teaching, keep serving the people, and keep taking care of each other, then someone somewhere is bound to make a breakthrough.
There is one idea that I’d like to put forward as something we can start implementing now. I offer that we begin to learn the same lesson Kisa Gotami learned in her village millennia ago, when the Buddha sent her on her quest for the mustard seeds. That fateful day, Kisa Gotami learned something about grief, which is that although it makes us feel alone, this is a lie. In truth, grief reminds us that we are never alone. And though it hurts us, it also renews our membership in a community as large and as old as the human species. And everywhere around us, life leaves behind evidence that loss is survivable and strengthening. We need only summon the will to look up from our pain briefly enough to see it.
So let us begin by mourning the way we were always meant to mourn—together. If everything worthwhile is done with other people, as Mariame Kaba likes to say, why should mourning be any different? If the grief we are experiencing is disenfranchised, then we shall rectify that. Let us enfranchise our grief. Let us name, sanctify, and collectivize it. We will give our suffering physical form so that we may more easily hold it in common. We will use solidarity as a tool to soften and contextualize our sorrow. Though we lie here broken-hearted today, tomorrow we will rock the world with our joy. Gargi Bhattacharyya asked us to consider “that to be heartbroken is the true class consciousness of racial capitalism.” She wrote:
In its best everyday forms, the drudgery of political work becomes a falling in love and we are, once again, entranced by each other. Sometimes we reach a little further, enraptured by the jouissance of losing ourselves. Who we were – which identity or which faction, which analysis or which mis/gendering, which skin, which god, which acronym – fades away in the face of who we could be together. And then together doesn’t even make sense anymore, because in the world we are dreaming and making, there is no me and you, there is only us. Just us forever. And it feels like nothing on earth. Nothing on earth yet.
The labor movement has a favorite phrase. It’s three simple words, and it goes like this: Don’t mourn, organize! I love it as much as any other pinko, and the story behind it too. However, may I suggest a modification to suit our current circumstances? Don’t worry. We can always go back to the classic formula. But for the time being, until we all start feeling like ourselves again, why don’t we try this one out: Mourners, organize!
Image credit:
Theredgiant, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons. (Modified)