On the death of my maternal grandmother: an anti-obituary

On October 18, Colin Powell – former United States Secretary of State and war criminal – died of complications related to the coronavirus.

The next day, while I was busy writing an article for Al Jazeera titled “Stop being humble – Colin Powell was a killer”, my grandmother Anne died of coronavirus in Florida.

And like Powell, I felt no need for a eulogy.

My grandmother, of course, exercised much less power during her time on earth than the late statesman. It had not helped fuel the hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq, or presided over the pulverization of the poor Panamanian neighborhood of El Chorrilo in 1989 – to the extent that local ambulance drivers referred to the area as “Little Hiroshima”. started referencing.

However, she had managed to inflict significant psychological, as well as physical, injuries on the individuals living in her small world.

For example, during my mother’s youth, an alleged breach by her or any of her four siblings could result in all five being led into a circle as Anne chased them off a dog leash. Had given.

My mother’s earliest memory is of having a bloody nose courtesy of Anne’s fist, while an incident involving a piggy bank that was thrown on the floor whipped the belt making it impossible to sit without a pillow for several days. happened.

When her children no longer needed to serve as living targets for hurtful solicitation and verbal abuse, she was largely left to fend for herself, as Anne often pursued relationships with younger men. . My mother moved out of my grandmother’s house at the age of 17 to attend university—a parting Anne marked by biting my mother on the nose and holding her by her teeth.

My last contact with Anne was at the age of 11, at which time she had become highly religious. This apparent attempt at soul-cleansing did not prevent him from pushing his elderly aunt down a flight of stairs and breaking her hip—one episode said to be driven by the aunt’s reluctance to continue subsidizing Anne’s habit of buying items from television. inspired to keep

Nor will Anne’s proximity to a self-proclaimed god stop her from threatening her own daughter — my mother’s sister — with a gun. As I note in my book Deportation: Rejecting America and Finding the World, the firearm was confiscated by authorities in Florida, but my grandmother was quickly reinstated, making the militarization of American citizens unfeasible. rights were retained.

When I received news of Anne’s death-to-coronavirus in Tallahassee, I was in the magical stone-walled town of Gjirokastur, Albania—the latest stop in my relentless global disorientation that began nearly two decades ago when I searched for the United States. was abandoned. , I think, about places and people that felt more at home than my own isolated homeland.

Naturally, there was a certain socially motivated expectation, that I should feel something at the passing of such a close relative, and I noticed on Facebook that members of my mother’s family held the memorial spectacle necessary to rehabilitate Anne to death. had started.

And still I felt nothing.

In The Nature of Greef: The Evolution and Psychology of Reaction to Loss, psychology professor John Archer quotes an 1843 letter to a grieving cousin of Charles Darwin, in which he asserts, “Strong affection has always appeared to me. The greatest part of a man’s character and his absence is an irreparable failure.”

Darwin urged his cousin to console himself with the idea that “your grief is the necessary price to be born with such feelings.”

But should we feel like irreparable failures as humans for failing to feel “strong affection” for the recently departed, who hardly qualified as human in the first place?

In the case of Colin Powell, mourning the bellicose politicians who are causing massive grief around the world is more or less frankly ridiculous. In my grandmother’s case, meanwhile, I realized that I was more inclined to grieve, not them, but the ailing society that produces such individuals—and the country that wasted resources to bomb and otherwise kill other human populations. prefers to traumatize, say, providing adequate mental health and other health services to its population.

Why not discard the persistent belief that the dead should be respected at all costs – even if they did nothing to honor the living while they were alive? An honest reckoning with personal legacies – which necessarily includes an appraisal of the social context in which they occur – is not only more morally consistent than biography, it is actually a better and sound finale than calling out insidious and ornate sentiments. can provide.

And while that’s no doubt easy to do, sometimes it can be enough to say: “Good riddance”.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.