collective mourning

M. Wolf-Meyer writes:

I think the standard American model of mourning or sadness or depression is basically egocentric, i.e . it's about a You. Maybe there's a way to think of these things as a We of some sort. Because, I would argue (if that's not too strong of a word for this purpose), mourning, sadness, depression, et al., are social, they're reactions to loss, to a short (or missing) circuit in the network. It's never something that one does to one's self, but rather an external/secondary action that causes a reaction in the You. That maybe -- in rough fashion -- makes a new You. But that You doesn't really exist outside of the new (melancholy) collective, the new society configured through the lost unit (thing, person, place).

Thinking like this might be a way to connect disparate mournings, depressions, losses -- it might unify talking about the loss of a loved one, the loss of a monument (a home or other community site), the loss of a particular future or past, etc. New societies, new collectivities, new mournings -- it's all one and the same thing, right?