Grief as a Tool for Navigating Our Time

Grief and understanding loss as key tools for enacting agency and growth in the current tumultuous moment.

Grief is something that every single person will encounter in their lives. There is simply no avoiding it. In the past, it was much more commonplace. Women died in childbirth, babies died, children died, and most adults died in what we would today categorize as middle age, if they were lucky. There was disease, famine, climate shifts, natural disasters, not to mention endless conflict and the dissolution of nations, empires, and worlds that these triggered. Life was understood as something inherently frail and temporary. Belief systems and traditions reflected this, and their core values still shape our understanding of the world today. But for those of us fortunate enough to have lived in the affluent societies of the 20^th century and beyond, this frailty has become something foreign and terrifying. Every incursion that death or finality makes into our lives, in any form, seems to catch us completely off guard, and we reel at the thought that we and everything in our lives may not be immortal. Obviously, this is absurd, but it is nevertheless true that we live in permanent fear and anxiety of the idea that all of this is not forever. This angst currently underlies most everything in our world, as the geopolitical certitudes die, liberal democracy unravels, and the accelerating impacts of the climate crisis make themselves felt. Our world is dissolving, and we are ill-equipped to deal with what this could mean on every level.

It is in this moment that that which we are most afraid of presents itself to us as what could be our most valuable tool for navigating the chaos and loss to come, as well as giving us a chance at building something of value from the vestiges of what once was. Our inherent understanding and transformation through grief on an individual level is there for us to use. It is not a hindrance, but a vital compass. Beyond its personal dimension, grief can be harnessed as a collective tool for understanding loss, fostering resilience, and shaping meaningful responses to the challenges we face. By recognizing and embracing grief, we open ourselves to both the reality of what has been lost and the possibility of forging new ways of living in a rapidly changing world. Just as in a life disrupted by the death of a loved one, or the destruction of a community, grief on a larger scale enables the difficult cultural work of reflection and mourning. This has nothing to do with victimhood or passivity in the face of chaos, quite the contrary. It represents pure agency and the foundation for any sustainable and stable response that aims to ensure continuity amid the ruins and to envision new worlds and possibilities, as well as make them a reality.

Grief is inescapable in everybody’s lifetime. It is the constant reminder of our humanity and the inescapable importance that life, our loved ones, and the world that surrounds us carry for us. Death, loss, and the ensuing mourning necessary to continue in life force us to grow and, ideally, become more humble, insightful, and caring people. Those who fight against having to accept their altered realities shrink back in on themselves as the world carries on around them, missing the stages of growth and being left behind. You either evolve, or you dissolve. Grieving the death of a loved one allows you to fully understand their importance, appreciate aspects of their person you had never fully thought about before. You can revisit both the positive and negative, and without holding any grudges, accept who that person was in your life. You notice how much of yourself was shaped by knowing them. As time moves on, you become increasingly aware of their absence in the world and how it personally affects how you see reality. This presence through absence reinforces their importance. In the best possible scenario, you learn to relate with total honesty to their memory and your actions while they were alive. It brings with it both a deepening life, yearning, but also clear-sightedness about what was important, what went wrong, and what you would like to carry forward. In that way, it changes who you are in the future, how you act within relationships, and how you treat people, even strangers. You become a different person for having known and lost all the people in your life. You can accrue wisdom and humility through grief and learn to drop adolescent airs and expectations of people. This experience on an individual and personal level is also utterly universal through time and place; it binds people and civilizations across thousands of years. Meaning, we have a full quiver of approaches and manners of dealing with death, loss, and even extinction.

Death, extinction, and grief have been our, and indeed life on Earth’s, constant companion since the very beginning, and, as such, it shapes every human understanding of the world, from our religions through to most aspects of our cultures. Even though it generally feels more distant today thanks to modern medicine, it is obviously as commonplace as ever – and increasingly so in the natural world as more and more species die out. It is everywhere. Anyone who has lost a loved one will know the feeling of suddenly realizing how many funeral homes or cemeteries there are. In our day-to-day, these things become invisible, especially in our youth-obsessed cultures. However, up until fairly recently, all humans had it deeply integrated into their communities. Many still do. And it is evident that the more we face it, the more we tend to value life itself. It conditions us to be kinder. It values certain spaces as neutral and calm. Death and grief not only shape who we are or have been individually, but also how our societies have developed. Indeed, our current, willful cultural ignorance of death comes precisely from the development of modern medicine and our vain hope that we can somehow ostracize death. But it is death, and specifically grief, that forges traditions, rituals, and collectively held values. It is through the pain and process of grieving that the preciousness of what has been lost is exalted. Ancient civilizations responded to the reality of loss or the temporary nature and frail relationship to life and sustenance by creating monolithic structures, sacred burial grounds, elaborate mourning rituals, and ceremonies meant to honor both the human departed as well as those of the animal kingdom. There has always been a deep understanding of the importance of life. The fear of losing what we love and being tied to the uncertain fate of what we need has led all our cultures to bring forward any number of products to comfort the living, as well as assuage, and thank the overwhelming power of nature.

Religions as we know them today emerged precisely to answer the mysteries surrounding mortality and to allay our fears of the feebleness of our being, offering narratives of the afterlife and communal frameworks for processing grief. These shared experiences fostered social bonds, reminding individuals of their interconnectedness and encouraging compassion in times of hardship. Communities organized themselves around the need to support those in mourning, establishing customs that promoted empathy, humility, and mutual care. Even our legal and ethical systems, in theory, emphasize the sanctity of life and the importance of remembrance. Minority groups forged networks of support and resistance in the aftermath of large-scale death and as a direct result of the mourning it triggered. Biologist, philosopher, feminist theorist, and one of the leading voices in discussions around the climate crisis, Donna Haraway, has referred to this as “worlding.” The process through which humans “become” through imagining new worlds and consequently forming them out of networks of dignified survival. From indigenous groups to the aftermath of the AIDS epidemic, communities have built structures to support one another and value the life that others won’t – structures that are still effective today. The continued cultural significance and valuation of resilience, continuity, and the enduring significance of human connection speak to our eternal confrontation with grief.

Just as mortality ties us together as humans, life and death intertwine us with the nature that surrounds and sustains every aspect of our being. Communities and regions have always been closely linked to their local environments and those environments’ histories. They form our diets, daily rhythms, interpersonal relationships, our clothing, and our culture. Even after the onset of agriculture, sometimes even more so, the prehistoric pasts of the lands we cultivate have dictated what we can do with the soil and who we will become through it. Every aspect that we deem unique to our regions, cultures, and nations is dependent on the nature that allowed them to develop and thrive as they did. While we have always assumed these to be eternal, an everlasting backdrop to the feats of a disconnected human race, it has regularly been demonstrated that our civilizations can be discontinued with relatively small tweaks to the environmental conditions in which they are embedded. We now face a phenomenon where this is happening on a global scale. The climate crisis is putting countless regions under increasing strain, and with it, all those identities that seemed timeless begin to melt away, ideas of who we were, what our traditions are, and what defines us as people and gives us meaning, crumble.

We are currently refusing to face the questions that many humans throughout time have had to face and make hard decisions. Soon enough, we, or our children, will have no choice but to take them on. We will need to find ways to hold on to the old meanings of who we are in the face of permanent change and future otherness. We will need to find ways to remember the homes we once had and the lives they shaped. Many traces of ancient civilizations are exactly that. Attempts to interact with the powers of nature to either calm them or plead with them to bring back what once was. The Nazca Lines in southern Peru, for example, were most likely created as a means to communicate the need for rain to sustain the people’s way of life in a landscape being shaped and changed by a dramatic shift in climate. Visible to this day, they speak to the traces we humans leave behind, both in nature and down through time, as we try to make our peace with the shifting world that (no longer) sustains us. Repeatedly, our societies are hit with changes in nature – “short” ice ages of a couple of hundred years, massive volcanic eruptions with global implications – that push us to the brink, trigger famine and disease, and forever alter how we live our lives. All these changes and adaptations, new traditions and cultures, are the effect of grief and mourning in the face of widespread death and deprivation and the worlding they forcibly enact. Grief allows us to value that which no longer exists or is in the process of disappearing. It lets us feel loss, but also love and value, and anchor the importance of that which is gone within ourselves. These tools are at our disposal and will be increasingly necessary in the decades and centuries ahead.

The strength of the emotions they awaken in us leads us to build precisely those new networks, resistances, and ties that will see us through into the future. We imagine what could be possible, find those who share our pain and understanding of the need for continuity and community bonds, then build new worlds on those foundations. This was the bedrock of almost all civilizations of the past and will be necessary for our shared future. Whether it is the threat to our democracies or looming mass extinction, we need to be aware of what is at stake, what we will lose, to be able to survive in a future that is sure to be marked by both authoritarian rule and climate chaos, as well as civil uncertainty. Understanding the things that bind us is what fortifies our networks to weather the storms. These are based on the understanding of loss and pain, what they mean for us, and the appreciation of what we have and can still save and nourish.

For decades, we have been acutely aware of the unfolding extinction of species, whereas humans centuries before us were either unaware of their direct impact on nature or, given their level of knowledge, cared relatively little about it. Today, it is difficult to turn a blind eye to this protracted, slow death, just as it is impossible to ignore how species extinction leaves a trail of devastation that causes the networks of living beings and ways of life – including human ones – to crumble and disappear. Mourning plays an essential role in the appreciation and orientation needed to live in this damaged world, not least because it is vital for cultivating a capacity to respond. Haraway refers to the ecological philosopher and multispecies ethnographer Thom van Dooren and his work with bird species threatened with extinction to draw attention to the fact that neither the capacity nor the practice of mourning is an exclusively human behavior, and that extinction is not a sudden event but a long-drawn-out process, full of hard work and struggles. In this sense, the act of imagining and building new worlds doesn’t just involve the process of becoming something new together with other humans and non-human species, but also a long process of understanding and mourning-with and mourning-for our non-human companions on the planet. We know that we are dependent on all levels of life to sustain us, from the microbial upwards. Losing too many layers of life will doom us. In the same way that learning to live with human death can make our lives richer and more full of appreciation and love, learning to live with the reality of our effect on our nature or our inaction in the face of the rise of authoritarianism, can spur us to a deeper understanding of the values of these things and the creation of a more cherished and valued world.

If we dare to stay with the problems, if we dare to engage with the real relationships surrounding us, it quickly becomes clear that we must also come to terms with a great deal of loss and death. Grieving is about dwelling on this loss and acknowledging what it means when something is gone and how the world changes as a result. Through the grief of loss, through mourning what once was, we can hopefully develop an awareness of our own interdependencies, as well as an understanding of how we ourselves will need to change and renew our relationships. In this way, grief becomes the foundation for continuity amid disruption. Mourning and the reflection that comes with it enable us to face and acknowledge the profound shifts in our societies, environments, and identities. Rather than allowing loss to paralyze us, grief invites us to engage with the wounds of our time, cultivating the wisdom and compassion needed to preserve what matters most. This process of collective mourning is not passive; it is active cultural work that anchors us in the ruins of what once was, while simultaneously opening the door to renewal and transformation. By honoring grief, we are able to hold onto the core values and memories that define our humanity, ensuring that they persist even as the world changes around us. Moreover, grief empowers us to imagine new worlds. The act of mourning, far from being a retreat into sorrow, is a generative force that propels us toward envisioning alternative futures. Through grieving, we confront the realities of extinction, displacement, and societal upheaval, and in doing so, we develop the courage and capacity to respond creatively. Reflection rooted in grief enables us to recognize our interdependencies and responsibilities, inspiring us to build communities that are resilient, compassionate, and adaptive. In this way, grief is not only a key to continuity but also a gateway to possibility that allows us to dream, design, and enact new ways of being in a world that demands both remembrance and reinvention.