Now Would Be a Great Time to Learn How to Grieve

We don’t really grieve here in the West, but we should.

I lost my maternal grandmother to an unsolved act of violence. To this day, the details are fuzzy, the subject sensitive. We share photos and post tributes every July in honor of our beloved matriarch, agreeing to never forget the gift she was to us all. Occasionally, when one of us is feeling down, the other will offer a funny story because she left tons of them. But ever since the death of my grandmother I’ve had to deal with people using her tragedy as a way to force their unsolicited advice and unfounded analogies onto my ears-drums. Saying things like “Your grandmother wouldn’t want you sad this long” and “If she were here right now, she would be telling you to get back to business cause she is just fine.”

In the wake of the tragic death of Kobe Bryant and his daughter, Gigi, people flooded timelines with their interpretation of Bryant’s last orders. Sports figures and analysts like Shaquille O’Neal and Stephen A. Smith jumped at the bit to tell everyone what Kobe would be saying could he say one last thing. All of their words sounding eerily similar, an order to get up, stop crying, and get back to work. Either our dearly deceased relatives shared a publicist or we had a bad habit of silencing the grieving by speaking on behalf of the deceased.