If you have tears prepare to shed them now: Why grief is adaptive.

In whose memory will the dead endure? For how long? Having recently lost a dearly loved family member I am braced against the whirlwind of mortality realised. Overwhelmed in grief and in grieving, and seeking to rationalise this anguish in its strictest component beyond my wider and more bitter accusations against the world entire, I cannot help but consider why such a misery as grief is, ultimately, necessarily, adaptive. How has this painful reckoning and its attendant gnashing of teeth and tears over the hundredfold millennia of our evolutionary past conferred survival and reproductive advantage? Why do we weep, beyond merely the coming to, and the leaving from, this great stage of fools?

For I would not sit long in bewilderment muttering at the conceit of grief's purported stages, at gods and villains, or shadows and mirrors; nor am I prepared to fund the nihilist bank my mind’s aimless wrath would readily open in these moments. Rather, I would challenge the priests of Darwin break op their oracles and make, like alchemists, a poetry from their sacred biology; make me shun such as Seneca who in Stoic resignation wonders, “Why weep over parts of a life; the whole of it calls for tears.”

And not until the last tear shed will you recognise that your body has possessed all this time like a maniacal hoarder such a store of them. They are like little prisoners pent up and built up in a cellophane thin corral and when but one pricks the film the whole host will make their break as well. And we, too, should speculate whether or not like heartbeats or ovaries we are in possession of but a finite supply of them and when the last tear has been wept, regardless of age or of deserving, all our industry of being will shut down.

Or at least these are the musings of a sane and thoughtful thinker, such as I am; one possessed of a well-rounded conscience, one whose amygdala and frontal lobes are, arguably, as they should be and thus enable me to function functionally, on average, in an average manner in any little enclave in any random village or any vast and clanking city, regardless of my colour or culture, whether the machinations of my socialising are relevant or irrelevant to observing anthropologists in the context of my precise place in this world. So much for relativism. But this is not about me or you in this moment. It is about all of those who came before us. This is about each of them, each in their millions and billions, each one alone or grieving together, over the hundreds of millennia, men and women, like us and yet increasingly less like us, in their days long past, weeping in their individual moments. The grief we experience today is, because it was fit for purpose then, and its legacy, like the recipe for tears, endures in our gene pool.

In the many and varied environments, the ecosystems, that stretch and wrap across the earth or that issue up from the oceans and rivers giving commerce and sustenance to the smallest microbe or the greatest mammal, man, in his hunting and gathering and usurping across them all, is understood to occupy, transcendently, the cognitive niche. If so, we must surely understand one another or perish. Who are you? Can I trust you? What do you think or feel? Who do you love? Who bears the load of your loathing? For whom would you grieve? “I did love you once.” “Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.” You should not have believed me…” There will be these moments of reckoning when the pallor of faces will make our truths known. For I would know the severest truth of where you stand, you in relation to me and to my kin and kith; are you friend or foe, ally or malfeasant or a careful measure of each; who, truly, are you? For as we are surely gifted detectors of cheating and of cheaters in all forms of human interaction, from a merchant’s price for a lolly to the judgements of gods, never will the machine of our cognition be more tightly wound to detect the signals of deception or sincerity as when it is made to measure the representations of grief. What greater test can there be than the emotion we make at the enormity of death? Here, there is no relativism of cultural happenchance. (It makes no difference to the gene where in this world you are born: if you step barefoot on a nail you will cry out in a familiar tone.) Our mirror neurons are universal and are innocent of our language and longitude and sit like monks in the windows of our eyes. Before there is loss there is value and value making; there is benefit unmindful and contemptuous of its cost; there is flourishing and well-being ever under scrutiny and measure; and a history of our investment in these things not for our self, but for the well-being of the individual, the subject of our care. In the face of someone else's death do we ourselves feel cheated out of our investment? If our moral signalling were flashes of light they will bear the full spectrum of it, the retreating reds, the incoming blues, and nuances of wave, at intervals of implication and meaning and representation beyond our understanding yet there like neon on our faces, signals to be read by each observer, man the great seer of his own pettiness or magnanimity. Has my moral circle found you in its radius? Am I in yours? How will we know, for know we surely must. This is the very career of relationship councillors despite their ignorance of the neurology in it: the balance sheet of reciprocated or unreciprocated altruism between one person and another in or out of balance, the credits or debits amassing or reducing, the columns misaligned, the cost of you begins to exceed your benefit to me and I will collect my debt from the cheater with no little vengeance and see the balance restored. The neural networks churn away in silence like clock gears behind our faces. Our altruism seeks reciprocation as water finds its level. Rough hew it how we will, this is the divinity that shapes our ends.

And so I would know where I stand even by the hour; and I would know where another sits in another’s circle, whether in the centre in its beating heart or at rim’s edge in ambivalence or beyond in contempt and disregard. This then is the wellspring of our theory of mind. This is the algorithm to make our sums, wherein a man does measure another by the proofs of his sentiment, the integrity of his moral code, the veracity of his meaning. For in the cinema of our imaginations we can easily conceive of Pleistocene moments when the ancients were asked to gamble all upon the answer and, where trust and valour triumphed, we could forgive them their having made manifest an agency for gods. I would not let my daughter marry a man who has not wept nor cannot weep; nor would she have him, for just as the perceived beauty in our bodies and our faces is but the symmetry that suggests our physical fitness, so too our personalities have their respective scales of measure which sit behind our eyes, and, if an accurate reading would be known, require a deeper and more studied scrutiny. So much for sexual selection in this context. It is this way now and has this way always been and is a better thing than our anthropocentric minds would feign admit. Gaze into the eyes of the ape. Pick your choice among us: we know that chimps grieve and to my layman’s eye surely they are like the princes of a primitive mirror neuron kingdom. Their faces are conspiracies of obvious affect. Monkey see monkey do, indeed. Whether in joy or in misery a chimp’s face will speak its mind. How the troop does watch and listen. Is it primitive therefore that a young chimp, her mother having perished, may herself die of a broken heart? How far back does nature carry such nobility of sentiment and sentience? How deep within the basal cortex? No Lamarckian softness here scratching meekly at memes and surfaces, only the hard adamantine wiring connecting the years in millions. No one need teach an ape to grieve, either we will or we will not for this is the way it is. If one can love, one will grieve. And why love is adaptive needs no explanation.

But man has the art of language and therefore like an artist a man can lie. We watch and listen like owls in these moments and our heads spin at the creak of deceit. Mind, the accountant, ever tallies and makes our countenance. Beyond this our ruddy faces will make our speeches; and bruised eyes voice our soliloquies. We grieve because we love and we are common; and it is in these base moments of commonness and vulnerability, bewildered before the momentum and marvel of this world, that we are all most alike one another, most human. Our grieving is our affirmation that we are, and the brutal understanding that once upon a time you, too, were. And you were deeply loved.


(In loving memory of Anna Panousakis)

© Rhett Talley