Blurb:
| Dune’s mother is patient zero of a mysterious illness that stops people in their tracks—in mid-sentence, mid-action, mid-life—casting them into a nonresponsive state from which no one recovers. Dune must navigate poverty and the loss of her mother as Detroit’s hospitals, morgues, and graveyards begin to overflow. As the quarantined city slowly empties of life, she investigates what caused the plague, and what might end it, following in the footsteps of her late researcher father, who has a physical model of Detroit’s history and losses set up in their basement. She dusts it off and begins tracking the sick and dying, discovering patterns, finding comrades in curiosity, conspiracies for the fertile ground of the city, and the unexpected magic that emerges when the debt of grief is cleared. |
“Grief was an amalgamation of absence narratives layered
over each other”
Death
positivity is the philosophy that death and grief should be spoken of
openly and that treating the subject as taboo does more harm than good. It
encourages people to learn about end-of-life care, make plans for their own
deaths, be involved in the care of their dead loved ones, and explore their
curiosity and feelings surrounding death. In a way, Grievers is a death-positive
book. The story explores what it’s like to lose the people you love, care for
the dying, prepare for death, and the mourning process. Most horror skims over
the death of its characters, their lives nothing more than cheap fodder for the
reader’s entertainment. But in Grievers, you feel the weight of every
death.
A mysterious illness is sweeping Detroit and killing its
Black population. Dubbed “H8”, it leaves its victims frozen in place with
grief-stricken faces. A social justice activist named Kama is the first to
contract the disease. Unable to afford a hospital, Dune, Kama’s only child,
cares for her mother at home by feeding her, changing her, and keeping her as
comfortable as she can. Dune, distrustful of the system that failed them,
decides to cremate her mother herself when Kama finally passes. Dune’s act of
cremating her own mother (although not something I would recommend as it’s
neither safe nor legal)
is described as “sacred work,” a ritual that allows her to be close to her
mother one last time.
Death rituals, whether religious or secular, perform a
necessary function in the grieving process. In his research on grieving
rituals Michael I. Norton, a professor at Harvard Business School, discovered
the following:
“Despite the variance in the form that rituals take… a
common psychological mechanism underlies their effectiveness: a restoration of
feelings of control that losses impair. Indeed, people who suffer losses often
report feeling out of control and actively try to regain control when they feel
it slipping away; feeling in control, in turn, is associated with increased
well-being, physical health, and coping ability.” [1]
In the story, a group of traditional Chinese medicine
practitioners perform grieving rituals believing that this will protect them
from H8, a disease, they theorize, that targets the lungs where grief
is held. Dune performs grief rituals to help overcome the immense sense of
loss she’s experiencing. The first is cremating her mother in her backyard. The
second is “telling” her dead father that her mother has passed. The third, and
most important, is creating a record of everyone who has fallen ill and marking
their locations with pins on her father’s model of Detroit. The last project
gives her something to do, a way of combatting her sense of helplessness as the
world falls apart around her. After slipping into a deep depression and
shutting herself away, collecting data on the infected gives Dune a new sense
of purpose and feeling of control. She organizes her data onto index cards and
files them away, creating order out of chaos.
The way Brown represents grief is both beautiful and
heartbreaking. Dune isolates herself from the world, too depressed to even plan
a memorial service for her mother. She physically carries the weight of her
grief as she gains weight during her depression. Eventually, Dune finds ways to
cope with her grief. In addition to the rituals providing her with a sense of
control, Dune also focuses on survival and caring for her elderly grandmother,
Mama Vivian. She harvests produce from community gardens and cans them for the
winter. She changes, feeds, and sings to her grandmother. She eventually
reaches out to one of her mother’s activist friends for emotional support. It’s
not always easy. Dune blows up at a volunteer food distributor without really
knowing why, other than just needing someone to lash out at. She dips back into
a depression when other people she cares about die. But she keeps surviving,
and slowly things start to improve. Brown describes the feeling of slowly
emerging from a deep depression perfectly: “Dune was beginning to feel aware of
her own aliveness again - not quite a desire to live, just a growing,
surprising awareness that she was not dead.” While this may not sound like much,
it’s still a step forward in Dune’s path to healing and an improvement from the
beginning of the story when “the detritus of grief became Dune’s comfort.” As
someone who suffers from clinical depression themselves, I can say that just
feeling alive again is such a huge step forward. At the same time, her father’s
model, now thick with markers, is starting to sprout little green shoots: new
life that has started to grow in the basement against all odds.
A year defined by a pandemic and protests, 2020 was
especially difficult for Black Americans. Black communities were hit especially hard by Covid-19, and our anger and frustration with a racist system reached
a boiling point with the murder of George
Floyd by a White police officer. Grievers may be fiction, but it
captures the very real feelings of pain and loss the Black community has been
feeling recently. The H8 virus is a metaphor for both Covid and the pain caused
by racism. “Hate” is literally killing Black people by destroying them
emotionally and no one seems to be able to quell the spread of the disease. Like
Covid, everyone knows someone who died from the virus. The city seems to shut
down overnight as the wealthy flee and hospitals are overwhelmed.
Grievers does not follow a standard three arch story
structure. There’s no antagonist to overcome, no climax, or satisfying
resolution. If you’re looking for traditional storytelling, then this book
isn’t for you. If you want a beautiful, heartbreaking, death-positive horror
story that focuses on one woman’s battle with grief and just trying to survive
a pandemic that feels all too familiar, I highly recommend Grievers.
[1] From the Journal of Experimental Psychology
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