The death of Queen Elizabeth II at the age of 96 has caused a wave of emotions in the United Kingdom and around the world. Her family and confidants are grieving for someone they knew and loved. But what do the other mourners feel? Is it even possible to call your feelings towards a person whom you have never met in person grief at all?
So far, mourning research has mostly focused on the loss of parents, close friends or life partners, reports Michael Cholbi, philosopher and ethicist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. There is only a one -sided relationship to famous personalities or members of the royal family, also called "parasocial relationship". But she could also give cause for grief, says Cholbi. "I don't know why we should assume that grief only occurs in the context of mutual relationships."
Some researchers attribute parasocial grief to the loss of opportunities: "The experience of grief is a kind of disturbance in the experience of the world. If this happens, our assumptions will be shaken in a way, " says the philosopher Louise Richardson, co-director of a project at the University of York in the UK on the topic of grief. She refers to a theory that she calls the "assumptive world" and which assumes that a person has fixed basic assumptions about the world. "The losses we mourn are those that disturb this assumed world. This may explain the grief over the death of the queen," she says.
Cholbi can understand that people mourn the loss of public personalities associated with their own identity, for example because they shared their values or admired their attitude. Such a person also played a role in his own life. "So it not only feels as if you have lost this person, but also in a way a part of yourself."
How do people get over the loss? Research from 2012 suggests that identification processes such as introjection can help with coping. Even if we only know a person from a distance, we perceive certain characteristics in him, explains Andy Langford, clinical director of the London-based grief organization Cruse. "For some people, it's about saying to yourself, 'I really admired this trait, and that's why I'm going to keep standing up for her,'" Langford says. He considers the grief for a public figure to be real: "These feelings are real, the grief is real.«
However, Langford assumes that the grief will decrease faster after the death of a person not known personally like the queen than after the loss of close people. The bond that we build on someone depends on three things: time, local proximity and familiarity, he says: "These three facets determine how much we mourn."
It is "highly unlikely" that the strong grief for the queen among those who did not know her personally would last for months or years – that is, that a persistent grief disorder would develop, says Katherine Shear, director of the Center for Prolonged Grief at Columbia University in New York City.
It is still difficult to empirically review theories for mourning. "How can you test something if you don't know exactly what it is," says Richardson. "There is no mourning gland in the brain, the activity of which could be seen from the degree of grief." Grief is very complicated, adds Shear: "It is not just an emotion, but a whole group of emotions."
What is clear is that many people who mourn the queen actually feel grief. "We experience it as if we are losing a part of ourselves, even if we have never met the queen," says psychologist Mary-Frances O'Connor of the University of Arizona in Tucson. »We lose a source of inspiration and encouragement and a section of our own personal history and cultural history.«
