The Catharsis of Grief
By Colonel John C. McKay, U.S. Marine Corps (Retired)
May 2019
This speech was given at the Marines’ Memorial Club in San Francisco, California on 22 February at the 2019 California Gold Star Mother’s Honor and Remembrance Formal Dinner. A video of the speech can be found here courtesy of the Marines' Memorial Club and Contrast Productions.
In peace, children inter their parents; war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children.
– William Shakespeare
We live in a society that skirts around speaking of grief, even more so, of death. All of you are poignantly enduring one of the most tragic events in any person’s life. You are all in a dark, raw place. The meaningless flutter of platitudes, the misplaced focus of awkward proffering of condolences in the guise of others’ own—almost universally minor—trials and tribulations, more often the fumbling offerings of insensibilities that neither grasp nor can even begin to appreciate your acute pain. These gestures, well-meaning in principle, offer scant recognition that you, all of you, are in an unknown and terrible twilight from which you will never entirely emerge.
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2019/may/catharsis-grief
