The less said about today and its terrible significance the better. I am in fact avoiding Facebook & Twitter. So why am I writing about it at all?
Because as I watch some people’s reactions it drives home the thing I’ve been frustrated about for decades and to which I have presently a very unpleasant front row seat.
My friend Beth coined the term “grief vulture”. I’ve also heard “grief vampire” and “grief whore”. The basic meaning is the same–there are people who derive a visceral emotional satisfaction from the intense emotions of the grieving.
I first encountered these people when I began reading about the Nazi Holocaust. I was eight years old and didn’t understand that was what was happening. Since I was eight it was well before the cultural overhaul of the Internet so I only encountered a few of these.
That’s the great thing about the Internet and Netflix and YouTube. The technology of this era has effectively been the equivalent of handing a casual recreational drug user the keys to an evidence lockup. No longer do folks have to content themselves with newspaper stories and library books.
I think pretty much everyone has a strong grief reaction. I suspect that grief is like any other heightened state and releases endorphins and other neurological substances. I think these things are meant to see us through the times of our own exquisite pain. But now it is possible to get a buzz from dwelling on te grievous circumstances of others…a buzz that doesn’t have the drawback of a truly grisly personal price. Plainly speaking, you can get a dose of all the feel good brain juice without having to lose anyone or anything important to you.
One of the most appalling places for grief vultures has historically been church. Prayer requests and prayer circles draw these folk. And I’ve been watching as those brethren swoop in on my loved ones. All summer long I’ve gotten to watch my relations’ processing of my brother-in-law’s suicide become a feeding frenzy for grief vultures. Their profession of concern seems to be a mask behind which their true selves provoke the reactions they need. It’s just so horrifying.
I can’t go into detail here, but this weekend I became the object of a grief vulture who contacted me privately, repeatedly, to hear the details of my grandma’s stroke and impending death. It has been like being emotionally mugged.
So I’m hiding out today, even avoiding my desk altogether and typing this on the iPad.
Just Another Pretty Farce 
Oh, honey, hugs to you. (Soft hugs that don’t irritate the nerves or press on the joints, of course.)
I think you’re missing one key component of the grief vampire experience, which is that the vampires think that everything is properly All About Them All The Time, and someone else’s grief is an unfair hogging of the spotlight. Even when there isn’t a spotlight, of course, but especially when there is.
Ick. Sorry. And sorry about your grandma, too.
Ahhhh…yeah. I’m trying to be kind, recognizing that some people need the chest-beating and patriotic charge and grief drama. Maybe it feels real to them. Hell, maybe it is real to them. Who am I to judge?
But I do judge. I am infuriated by the general ability to take the tragic deaths of a couple thousand people and turn it into the WORST THING EVER. Seriously, get a freakin’ grip. In the oppression Olympics, this doesn’t even make it to the quarter-finals.
I also judge the political calculation and manipulations. This event is annually used to inflame the worst and meanest prejudices and justify policies and pass laws that make my skin crawl.
We are not instructed to hold a grudge, forever. We are instructed, in very clear terms, to forgive. So when I can’t be kind, at least I can be silent. It’s a start.
The 9/11 attacks happened to ALL OF US! The US AS A WHOLE and that is why there is all the “hubub” about it! We should NEVER forget what happened but we, AS A WHOLE, should mourn the the loss of all the people who died on that day! It is about a NATION COMING TOGETHER not GRIEF…ANYTHING!! YEAH, To whoever said get a grip? RIGHT BACK ATCHA!! SHEESH!!
I rest my case.
As do I.
Actually, I don’t rest my case. The 9/11 attacks DID happen to all of us. It changed the world we live in, and NOT for the better! We do not live in the same USA that I grew up in.
Terrorism DOES affect the U.S. as a WHOLE. I’m not trying to take away from the fact that the many people who lost loved ones still mourn year after year. I’m saying I mourn with them and for a country I don’t recognize anymore.
The whole reason for remembrance is to remind us of what happened and to be ever MORE vigilant in not letting this type of thing to ever happen again and to also remind us of how to COME TOGETHER AS A WHOLE and NOT JUST THINK OF OURSELVES!!! NOW I REST MY CASE!!! SHEESH!!!
Anyone else thinking Kat paid Robert to come over and illustrate her post for her??
The sad truth is that a lot of things in our country have changed for the worse since the September 11 attacks. Of course, many of those changes are the direct result of everyone wanting to feel just as personally threatened as people in and around NYC and DC did on that day. All that loss of civil liberties (excused as necessary vigilance), all the money and lives (far more than died in the attacks that day) lost in misconceived and mismanaged wars (started with the false excuse that “those people” were responsible for the attacks), all the religious and ethnic hatreds stirred up (under the banner of “never again”) — all of that has been enabled by grief vampires.
I think you are onto something, if fact I’m pretty sure science backs it up. Those endorphin spikes feel good even if it’s something bad that spikes them.
I have mixed feelings about the 9/11 rememberances. The only year I have looked at pictures or watched any of the replays was on the tenth anniversary. It was difficult. All the memories flooded back. Lots of new tears shed.
I feel it would be disrespectful to those who died if I had so desensitized myself to it that the images left me feeling nothing at all, which I think is what can happen when a person tries to relive it over and over.
I do think 9/11 should become an official “something” though, hate to say “government holiday” and I don’t think people should get off work for it, but I think it was important enough in the nation’s history (understatement) to mark it officially on the calendar annually as a reminder of how fragile our freedoms can be.
I honestly declaim that I did not give Bob a dime.
Bob, I understand where you’re coming from, feeling patriotic and wounded. There are people–even people who have posted to this very comments section–who lost actual friends and family members.
While I agree that 9/11 was a jolt for pretty much everybody and that the attacks were nightmarish, sobering, and awful I can’t agree that they happened in the same way for all of us.
I was working at a gift marketing firm. I spent the morning watching the news on television and the afternoon putting together an order for 10,000 extra units of our most patriotic products to be shipped from China. (at my bosses’ orders. I still shudder thinking about it.)
Other people spent the day waiting to find out if their husbands were alive. Still others spent the day wandering from place to place, directed by police and wondering if they had been exposed to radiation, poison or chemical warfare agents.
I simply cannot agree that 9/11 had remotely the same effect on me as it did on those people.
I’m not forgetting the day or minimising the day. But I’m also not going to demand attention and comfort for a grief that largely missed me while it fell on someone else’s head.
You all are missing my point. I personally don’t seek attention or comfort for anything. Also, I know the events that happened on 9/11 didn’t happen IN THE SAME WAY, for EVERYBODY, I’m just saying that the attackers did what they did TO WEAKEN THE U.S. and by THAT it affected ALL OF US!! OUR WAY OF LIFE IS NOT THE SAME AS IT WAS! (i.e. total body searches, not being able to even bring a WATER BOTTLE on an airplane, new ways of invading our privacy ‘and dignity’ being implemented all the time etc.)
GET MY POINT NOW? SHEESH!!!
[…] the Takers to even notice, much less nurture friendships with them. If only I had known then that grief vultures exist—people made uncomfortable by suffering who react by descending on the person most […]
Hey. I needed this today. When my wife was suck with cancer, we let one of these into our lives, a friend whose appetite for our grief was endless. When he left us, he stopped with another cancer sufferer and sent us photos of her. “She’s lost her hair.” “Breathing machine.”
Oddly, these events had no documentation. I asked him not to contact me with these details. A few weeks later, it was his own terminal diagnosis. We circled back with his other cancer friend. She was cured, thriving.
He cursed me in a series of text messages. He wished me incontinence. Strangulation on my “poison tongue.”
My wife’s cancer returned. She invited him to her waking wake, where she would greet her friends, socially distanced, one last time. He insisted on a private audience. She did not reply.
After her death, he wrote to ask me why she cut him out of the wake. We had a phone call in which we couldn’t agree on the facts. “She lied,” he offered. Now almost two years later, he sends an mp4: The sounds of Megan’s chemo. “It’s all I have of her.” I’m crying, terrified. How could he? How to make it stop?
All a long way of saying, grief vultures can be terrible. I’m so sorry for what you’ve been through. The hurt is real. The type is real.