9. The Science of Grief and Bereavement
About the episode:
About today’s guest, Isabella Cheremeteff: She is currently studying to get her Master's degree in Forensic Psychology at George Washington University and interning with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. She earned her Bachelor's degree in Psychology at Skidmore College in 2020, with her senior thesis focused on the significance of the corpse to the grief and bereavement process. She’s extremely passionate about deconstructing the social taboos around death, dying, and grief, and hopes to continue her career in helping families and loved ones suffering from ambiguous loss in situations where there is no body to bury or recover (such as natural disasters, abductions, large-scale terrorist attacks, etc.)
On today’s episode, Isabella and I discuss:
Her thesis, which aimed to answer the question: why do humans care about what happens to the bodies of their loved ones?
The funeral business in America, and how capitalism has shaped how we grieve
The shift of how we interact with our loved ones’ dead bodies in the last 100 years
How certain animals interact with their loved ones’ dead bodies
How averse our culture is to death and dying
Ambiguous loss when the body cannot be recovered or found, and how that affects the grief
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Listen to “The Science of Grief and Bereavement” Deleted Scenes
Quotes:
"You can't answer the question of why do we care about what happens to the bodies of our loved ones without considering the history, how we as humans evolved... Disposing of a body was vital to our survival as a species."
"In the early 1900s, death happened primarily in the home with the family, and the family was primarily responsible for taking care of the body... But today, statistically, most deaths happen in the hospital, and bodies are not usually brought back home."
"It’s very culturally ingrained in American culture specifically, but also Western culture as a whole, that the living do not interact with the dead... There's a stereotype of a creepy mortician, and it’s a cultural phenomenon to tear people away from their dead."
"In studies of pet owners... there are pet owners who viewed and interacted with their pets' bodies, and there are pet owners who did not... Pet owners who interacted with their pets' bodies reported fewer of those false cues like hearing a collar jingle or a bark."
"I describe grief as like a ball in a box. In the beginning, your brain is quite small, and the ball is quite big... but as time goes on, the box grows, and the ball hits the sides less often... It will happen less and less often, but it will never stop."
"Would I rather endure the pain of holding out hope for this tiny, tiny possibility? Or would I rather try and accept it and gain closure at the risk of them coming back and not only hurting me but hurting them as well for, you know, being like, 'How could you think I was dead? You know, why didn’t you wait for me?'"
"It is both a failure of the medical system as well as an inconvenience to the productivity of society. Because when somebody is grieving, they can’t work as well as they did. They can’t participate in society the same way that they did before."