FROM THE ASHES

Labor journalist Jaffe delivers a searching meditation on grief and its misapprehensions.

The world is burning—literally, with climate change remaking the planet and pandemics and political violence upending the nations. Against this backdrop, Jaffe posits, her private griefs are not lessened, but they stand in a kind of communion with the grief experienced by so many others: grief born of the death of loved ones, of injustice, of the need to leave one’s country and flee to another. Such griefs, Jaffe writes, constitute “a sudden, abrupt, even violent break from the status quo”—and if there’s anything capitalism hates, it’s a departure from the status quo and the demands that owners make on the worker bees’ lives, without time allotted for grieving but “only to attend a funeral.” Though her musings never quite cohere into a manifesto as such, Jaffe’s book constitutes an informal set of philosophical propositions: Capitalism wants us to be monads, easily separable, in a society that “hasn’t been set up to understand collective decisions”; because grief is universal, it is definitively collective; therefore, as one therapist tells her, “We’re communal beings. We should be heartbroken for each other.” Whether that sense of broadly distributed grief can do anything to lessen individual sufferings is a point of debate, but certainly it invites the reader to summon more empathy upon learning of the death of a friend’s pet, the loss of a job, the failure of a marriage. All of this hinges on a perhaps unexpected outgrowth of grief, namely hope in the form of the realization that we have no control over the world—but, even so, “changing the world is a process that will require many of us imagining and struggling together.”

A fresh way to look at the psychic pains that we bear mostly alone—and unnecessarily so.