Giving Grief a Bad Name

One step forward, two steps back.

We speak of the Memorial service held for Senator Paul Wellstone in the Williams Arena at the University of Minnesota, on Tuesday evening, October 29, 2002, A crowd of 15,000 people assembled to pay their last respects, but in the end, the memorial itself lacked the respect that both the person and the event are due.

We understand that it started out in a manner that truly created accurate memories of the Senator and his wife and daughter who perished together on the same ill-fated flight with five others. But near the end, the service left the bounds of propriety and decency, and became an overt partisan political event.

What we heard and read in the reporting of that event put us in mind of the famous line, "I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out." What is more sad is that it now can be said of the tribute to Senator Paul Wellstone, "I went to a Memorial service and a campaign rally erupted."

As experts on grief and recovery, we are aware that the range of human emotions and behaviors, in reaction to the death of a loved one, can be very wide. Grieving people do not always behave politely, nor do they always conform to social morés, so we tend to give them some slack - and well we should.

But we are disinclined to think that the political fervor generated at that memorial, especially with the vituperative slings at the opposition party, accurately represented the life that Senator Wellstone led. Yes, he was vastly liberal and progressive; yes, he was passionate; yes, he was emotional. He was all of those things.

Above all he was a gentleman. He was a gentleman who was respectful of his colleagues on both sides of the aisle. In fact, from what we have been able to gather, it was indeed his respectfulness that engendered the same in return from those with whom he was in polar opposition on most issues.

Therein lies the rub. The misplaced rhetoric and misdirected ad hominem anti-passion for other people and philosophies had no place in that arena. It did not accurately represent the man who had lived and then died. And with it, it killed a part of all of us who want to help people deal with grief.

More than most, we understand that grief can produce an almost immeasurable amount of human emotion. We also realize that propelled by unlimited emotion, people often make radical errors in judgment. We will not judge those who provoked, nor those who responded, other than to suggest they may need to clean their own emotional slates, and leave the political slates out of this matter.

Grief is often spoken of in hushed, embarrassed tones, as if the words themselves might be contagious. But grief can be connective. It is the only universal experience with which we can all relate. It is sad when grief is used to divide people by philosophy and not join them at the heart.

An opportunity was missed to set aside all philosophies and just be people together to remember and respect someone who respected them.

That would probably have more accurately reflected the truth about Senator Wellstone.