When my mother was diagnosed with cancer, I began grieving. “Grief” is a word that medical and psychological researchers use to describe shock, anger, depression, and other emotions in response to death. Psychologists would call this anticipatory grief: the sadness experienced before someone dies. I cried intermittently over the next few months, shocked at the idea that one day she would not be there. Ten years later, she died and I felt angry that she had to endure a very drawn-out dying process. It also hurt deeply that there was an unspoken expectation for me to move on. Once, I went to a grief group on campus, where a few strangers awkwardly sat to talk about grief, but I did not like it.
Around that time, I received a grant to do research on happiness in China. The most popular class ever at Yale teaches that people often don’t know what will make them happy, so research on previously unknown sources of happiness is always welcome. One thing that drew my attention was how people visited cemeteries every year after a death in the family, not only once for the funeral. This was not a part of my upbringing, and I wondered: is visiting graves good for people? Researchers have found that gratitude is a source of happiness; perhaps visiting a cemetery is conducive to expressing gratitude to others. The world’s longest-running study of happiness has found that deep, supportive connections are the most important factor in happiness. Could feeling connected to someone who has died be beneficial?
Over a decade, my research has shown that, in China, the parent-child relationship is constructed to have both a premortem and postmortem phase. The premortem phase of the tie encompasses the child being in the womb, youth, and middle age, during which at some point, the parent gets older and the adult child begins to take care of the parent. Then, the death of the parent transitions the relationship to its postmortem phase, where the adult child goes to visit, brings family, until one day he or she is in the ground and the one being visited. Mourning is therefore done in a context where the bereaved are not expected to “move on,” but instead, people maintain their ties to their deceased parents by visiting periodically. They understand it as an expression of filial piety. A national survey found that 79 percent of the adult population went to visit a grave at least once during the past year, with most people gathering with family to bring food and paper gifts to the grave for a brief visit on Tomb Sweeping Day every April.
Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish writer on Christian ethics, argued at age 34 that the best clarity of thought occurs at the grave. Consistent with an early church tradition of observing the death date of the family member annually, Kierkegaard articulated some reasons to visit graves in an essay published on September 29, 1847. A certain lucidity occurs at the site of the dead; it resembles standing in front of a mirror. The one who is dead does not change, which really detracts from one’s own excuses: “You will not be able to say to one who is dead that it was he who has grown older and that this explains your changed relationship to him.” We learn things from the dead, Kierkegaard concludes, things that are not possible to learn from any living person, “not even the most highly gifted.”
Given the long tradition in some Christian communities of visiting graves, Kierkegaard’s readers may not have needed to hear his arguments for going. The link between being well and keeping relationships with loved ones who have died is also commonsensical in China. The philosopher Xunzi (310–238 BCE) wrote about managing emotions toward deceased parents in order to have a respectful ongoing relationship. In one cemetery, I saw a 20-foot-tall character of fu, “blessed happiness,” etched and painted in gold on the side of the hill.
Fu is a property of individuals in relationship, and is on the side of the mountain because it alludes to an old concept of happiness depicted in a written character combining symbols for the mouth, family, and farmland to convey a family working together for ample food. Blessed happiness refers to a concept of a family as an unbroken chain that connects those who lived in the past, the living, and those who have not yet been born.
When people refer to a “good death,” they sometimes mean a death free from distress or suffering, according to one’s wishes, focusing on an individual’s corporeal well-being and choice. But my research shows that there is also the possibility of a socially good death. When death is a transition to another phase in ongoing relationships, family members remain relevant after they die. Instead of ending abruptly, the relationships progress to another stage where the adults care for deceased parents and learn to nurture a new relationship postmortem.
The first time I tried visiting my mother’s grave in Los Angeles, I had to push aside my reluctance about being unscientific about whom to speak to, since she is nonliving. I was uncomfortable treating a dead person as a social entity. But I had brought a plastic takeout container of a type of stew she liked, and I set it on her gravestone. Emulating what I saw in China, I tried talking to her half audibly and half in my head. It was not a very mystical experience. But, when I was talking to her, I saw myself in the way I imagined she saw me: lucidly, in Kierkegaard’s words. It was not fun, exactly, but it felt good in the way that eating whole grains feels good. Now, every time I am in town, I go to my mother’s grave. Geography has stretched out the process but doesn’t make it impossible: I went and did research in China, but my mother is buried in LA and I live with my spouse and children near Washington, DC.
I learned that bringing children to the cemetery isn’t so bad: I offer boba tea afterwards as an incentive, and the visits are quick. (Ours have been ten to twenty minutes.) Young people are adaptable. While there, we chat about my mother—their grandmother—and my spouse chimes in. When it is sunny, standing there on the green grass is pleasant. (My daughter has come to appreciate these visits as much as me—her reflection from a recent visit can be found below.)
I have come to think that visiting graves is generally a good thing. There is a clarity of thought, as Kierkegaard wrote, especially about the important relationships in one’s life. In China, it’s fitting in the family timeline for adults to return periodically and thank their parents for giving them life. I like that timeline. I have an ongoing tie to my mother, more than two decades after she died, but grief, being a word about the response of an individual to a loss, does not describe our relationship [link to Jane, Korina, and Lystra’s blog]. Perhaps grief could be used to refer to sorrow occurring after a death, without assuming that it describes the entire response to death.
Finding Curb 129: My Grandmother’s Peaceful Green
Summer Yoshiko Hsu
“I think it’s at Curb 129, near the trashcans.” My mother pointed to a bright yellow curb painted with dark block numbers. “And that’s Curb 127, so we should be there soon.”
Sweat beaded on my forehead as I trailed behind her. We were at Rose Hills Memorial Park, where my grandmother was buried. The park looked the same everywhere: soft rolling hills scattered with smooth stone plaques, flowers, and the occasional extravagant marble grave from a wealthy family.
“Found it!” She stopped at a brown stone plaque with a portrait and signature engraved in the center. It was dusty, and the vibrant grass had almost covered my grandmother’s face.
“...Should we wash it?” I asked. I felt slightly reluctant about letting the earth reclaim her grave without any protest.
“Oh. Okay,” said my mother. She pulled out a plastic water bottle and trickled some water onto the grave, then wiped it with a pack of tissues she found in her purse. The dust smeared, leaving brown streaks across the stone. “Hi, mom,” she said awkwardly. “It’s me again.”
Was she mourning? My only memories of my grandmother were of an emaciated figure who looked strikingly similar to my mom. She died before I turned three, and I did not have clearly defined feelings about her. At the thought of attending my own parents’ funerals, though, tears filled my eyes, and I imagined my swollen eyes months, or even years after their deaths.
“Let’s take a selfie!” My mother pulled out her phone, beckoning me next to her. We squatted so the grave was in frame, smiling. She took the picture, then scrolled through her photos, and I glimpsed a picture of us at my grandmother’s grave last year. Each year, she took a photo and kept it. I realized all of her actions were part of a ritual formed after years of grappling with her mother’s death–a ritual I was just beginning to understand.
As we walked back to the car, my mother stepped back over Curb 129, and I knew next year we would spend too much time looking for it. But I also knew we’d come back and find our way.
