We no longer grieve as we once did.
As long as there have been men and women, parents and children, friends and family, human beings of any variety, there has been grief. From the earliest stirrings of consciousness in our kind, from the first gatherings of our progenitors into communities, we – human beings - have been grieving.
We learned to grieve because we suffered. We learned to grieve because of our loss.
That suffering, that loss, and that grieving looked very different 100,000 years ago.
One hundred thousand years ago, human communities themselves looked very different. We existed in tribes of a dozen dozens or so, migrating through a temperate but hostile Africa. We lived and loved in ways that seem alien today: there was no patriarchy; there was no misogyny; there was no deceit. Our survival depended upon the highest standard of cooperation we could manage.
We achieved that in two ways – through an utterly pervasive empathy and deep intimacy throughout the tribe, not just between parent and child, but universally. A human being can manage something over 100 close relationships – that's how much the available tissue in our social brain processing components can handle. And in the paleolithic past, that’s as many people as we ever knew.
Put another way, our Cro-Magnon ancestors lived and loved more deeply than we can even imagine. They were bonded far more completely than we can conceive. They had to be, to survive.
One hundred thousand years ago, our bonding kept our tribes, our families, our communities alive. But there were costs.
Back then, we were the smartest, the most connected, the most bonded of all species – but still, we weren’t running the show.
We were predators, to some degree – we knew how to take down the gazelle and turn it into a family dinner.
But we were the family dinner – or, at least, the truck stop snack – for more than a dozen species of predators that made us look like choir boys and girl scout cookie promoters in comparison. For 7,000 generations, we were more the hunted than the hunters.
Imagine what that must have been like. Being bipeds, we were quite simply the easiest targets on the savanna. We could no longer climb as swiftly as we had in previous iterations; we couldn’t run nearly as fast as even our chimp cousins. Oh, we did have fire, and that kept us safe at night; but unless we were already aware of the cat and armed with spears, that cat would have one of us.
This is why we died so young back then. We know that the human lifespan petered out around the mid-20s, and it wasn’t because we weren’t as fit as we are today; we were a bit shorter, but that’s it. We were, if anything, faster and stronger then than now. It wasn’t food – the temperate zones teamed with it, we had a vastly broader and healthier diet, and we were expert at gathering it. And it wasn’t disease; nomads provide no crucible for it.
We died because the oldest among us were the slowest. We all lose a step after our early-20s peak, and slow down as we slide into our 30s. We become the one the cat catches.
Graphic death was all too common, then, in our prehistoric existence. The numbers tell us it was frequent. Today, we lose someone close to us once or twice a decade; back then, it would have been several every year.
And even that’s not the point: in our paleolithic communities, we knew almost everyone intimately. Children had extended groups of parents; adults of both genders had multiple partners. Everyone was related to a significant degree. We were born, raised, and ended with the same group of people, excepting females who out-migrated to neighboring tribes.
So every death would have been horrible for almost everyone. A vanished child would be a source of anguish, not to a pair of parents, but to dozens; the taking of a tribe’s oldest woman – still a very young woman by our standards – would have been traumatic for everyone.
We see, then, an endless cycle of grief, for which war can be the only modern comparison. We see a people far closer and more deeply intertwined than even small frontier communities could be in our era, pummeled by loss.
They would, of course, have gotten used to it, since it happened so frequently. But their losses would have been far more painful than ours.
And they would grief as one – together, expressing not abstracted sympathy but genuine shared suffering. Because of their frequency of loss, they would have a collective grieving. This explains why, when there was still a body to be honored, even the Neandertals would offer it reverence in ritual, tens of thousands of years before the invention of religion.
I have been to three funerals in two years. One was for the grandmother of someone I love, a woman I never met and only saw once in life, in a hospital bed. Another was for the father of a casual friend I’ve only known a year or so. The most recent was for the brother-in-law of the brother of someone I love, whom I had met on several occasions. In all three cases, I, like so many of those in attendance, was a stranger to the deceased. My presence at the first was to comfort the person I love; the second was an act of friendship, without grief. The third, family support. None of the losses were, to me, personal.
We often say our rituals are for the living, and of course they are – but real grieving seldom occurs there. We have long since taken to grieving in private, alone, accepting comforts momentarily and sporadically and from well-meaning people who did not know the missing person we have loved and lost and are not truly grieving with us.
Our pain goes largely unshared – and largely unprocessed. So we continue living beneath it, accepting it as permanent, never fully emerging from its shadow.
Such a circumstance leads us into diminished lives, where the weight of what we carry begins to numb us, to hollow us out a little at a time, to build up distance between us and make us feel a little more alone.
In our distant past, our gathering together in grief was a collective acknowledgment of deep loss, a unified healing, a bonding that made us feel less alone, not more. In our distant past, our grief was as much a survival tool as our spears and our fire, strengthening rather than weakening us.
But in the here and now - we no longer grieve as we once did.
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