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grief can provoke strange long-term responses in folk.
i don't see any reason to scoff at this woman--for me, the article was extremely sad.
i don't have any particular criticisms of her or the people around her--i have encountered enough loss in my own life of people very close and very dear to me to know that grief can be a very specific space, a very deep tunnel. sounds to me like she was basically performing dynamics specific to that across the medium that was to "compensate" her for her loss.
there is something absurd in the idea that something like this can be endured and in "exchange" you get handed a huge wad of cash, as if that makes everything better. "i dont want the cash i want my husband back" is not at all an unreasonable response.
i have nothing to say about whether the converse would obtain--that there should have been no cash directed at surviving relatives, etc--because it seems ridiculous.
but i dont understand how anyone, anywhere, would imagine that the cash transfer fixes anything at all in itself...which seems to be the assumption behind many of the dismissive posts above.
maybe cash transfers fix the sense that the wider society should "do something"--but that is not about the survivors, not about what they are or have gone through--it does not cross with anything about being in that position---it is about the emotional requirements of spectators.
but then maybe this is all a function of my own relation to cash--i look at it as like the sewage system in a city--fundamental to the operation of the space--a real problem when the system stops working--but nothing interesting in itself, nothing worth focussing on--infrastructure.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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