Grief Is Not a Verdict: This Is Not Really an Essay About Gloria Steinem
We grieve the worlds we’ve known and what it felt like to live in them.
Someone who respects my opinion sent me a message recently about the social media controversy surrounding Gloria Steinem's death. They expressed that they felt sad about her passing and asked me what I thought about that grief. Was it wrong to feel this way? Was she worthy of such emotions? Did their feelings land poorly with me? I am not inclined to answer any of those questions, but I am inclined to explain why.
Most of the arguments about who Steinem was, what she represented, and how people ought to respond to her passing are uninteresting to me.
I met Steinem when I was in college, and I'll admit that it meant something to me then, as a developing feminist. But Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth also meant a great deal to me as a developing feminist, and given the turn Wolf ultimately took, let's just say that the admiration of my youth does not always hold.
Some people have responded to Steinem's death by describing her work and its transformational context, or by sharing personal stories about what she meant to them. Others have emphasized her involvement with an organization funded by the CIA. If you know much about the history of that era, and about the ways governments and intelligence agencies seeded movement and cultural spaces with funds, the fact that someone wound up entangled with a CIA-funded project is not, by itself, an earth-shattering revelation.
To me, it is far more significant that Steinem later spoke in glowing terms about the CIA, describing the agency as "liberal, nonviolent and honorable." The use of that language about an agency whose violence has long maintained colonialism, imperialism, and empire amounts to a warm, flowery erasure of coups, massacres, genocides, and repression. Steinem made that statement in 1967, years after her entanglement with the CIA—an he’s always been nice to me take that I can find no evidence of her ever walking back, not even after the CIA’s role in the Dirty Wars became public.
As recently as 2015, The New Yorker was still quoting Steinem as saying that, if she had the CIA-funded work to do over again, she would.
In 2017, when asked what she would change about her past, Steinem said she “probably shouldn’t have” gone to the two Soviet-era youth festivals around which her CIA-funded work had been organized—but not because of the CIA’s character or conduct. Her stated concern was that, due to those activities, people still referred to her as a former CIA agent. She compared that criticism to being called a former Playboy Bunny because of her undercover reporting and dismissed both labels as “empty symbols.”
Did learning these things affect my opinion of Steinem? Absolutely. She was someone I once admired, whose work meant something to me at a particular moment in my life, and whom I came to think about differently over time. I can say, with no particular animus, that I am not among her mourners.
But I also have not chided my friends who are mourning her. I have not scolded anyone for being sad.
This is not because I have some personal policy about respecting the dead. I certainly do not. I have celebrated the passing of war criminals, right-wing public officials, and others who I consider worthy of great disdain. I think people should try to live in ways that do not entice decent people to dance on their graves. When Donald Trump dies, you will not find me reverent. And during my limited time on this earth, I hope I give my enemies every reason to celebrate my death, when my time comes.
This is about something else.
I have largely stayed out of the debates about Steinem and her legacy because I do not find it useful to pick fights with friends and co-strugglers who are grieving. And I do see a distinction between people simply getting swept up in a public narrative that they feel compelled to participate in and the actual experience of grief.
When liberals were suddenly eulogizing John McCain, for example, I had very negative feelings about that behavior. With rare exceptions, this man had not held an important place in their lives—they were simply embracing a narrative about him, a list of adjectives, and the idea that having been staunch about one’s positions was somehow admirable, even if those positions were harmful. A moment of national importance was unfolding, and people wanted to participate. That’s not real grief, even if the motions collectively gone through look like grieving.
So what am I talking about? I am talking about loss that we deeply relate to or feel related to—the kind of loss that creates a meaningful sense of absence in our lives. There are people in my community, and people who share my values, who are having that experience around Steinem’s death. These are people I care about, and people I intend to struggle alongside. If I do not take their experience of grief seriously, I will incur a cost for that choice.
So, why should I navigate carefully around such feelings, if I don’t share them?
I could start with the most obvious strategic point: as my friend Mariame Kaba taught me, you cannot organize people you have contempt for. If you have an army of perfectly like-minded people I don’t know about—people whose attachments, grief, and affections never stray from what you think they ought to feel about anyone or anything—feel free to skip the rest of this piece. You obviously have it all figured out, and don’t need anything from me.
If you don’t have that army, let’s begin here:
To have any hope of changing the world, you need other people. Lots of them. And the many human beings you will need will mourn all kinds of flawed people. And thank god for that, because we are all flawed people.
We all love and mourn people who have done bad things. We form attachments that do not conform to any moral accounting. People often love parents, siblings, friends, partners, teachers, collaborators, and mentors through contradictions that outsiders may not understand and that they themselves may never fully resolve. Grief is not a verdict, and while I won’t say that mourning should never be adjudicated, I will say that the utility of such review is often limited.
It’s about as useful as telling someone their love doesn’t make sense. To which, I, personally, might reply, when the fuck does it?
There are a lot of things about the internet era that get under my skin, but one of the most relentless is the policing of grief and sadness. When people mourn one tragedy, they are sometimes lectured about another tragedy they have failed to mourn. I have been asked, countless times, why I mourn the victims of the genocide in Gaza while not processing every other contemporary atrocity with the same emotional intensity—and even accused of antisemitism for having a particular investment in the violence being perpetrated by Israel. Other atrocities are equally worthy of my tears, and I do not weep for each of them in the same way. I cannot fully account for the ways some struggles, and some people, have woven themselves into my life and heart. Sometimes it’s happened through acts of care and solidarity, or a sense of shared struggle. Sometimes it’s happened because I heard or witnessed something, or felt understood by someone, at a specific moment in time that still lives inside of me. Some of those attachments are easy to explain and defend, like my feelings about Gaza. Some are messy and mired in contradiction.
I will not live my life trying to account for my grief, and I don't expect anyone else to. If anything, it is the absence or sublimation of grief that is killing us, rather than the presence of grief that some may find unrelatable, or even deem misguided.
When an artist or public figure dies, people who express sadness are often presented with an accounting of that person's harms, as though sorrow were an argument that could be refuted by evidence.
Sometimes, of course, the stories we tell about the dead demand correction. The whitewashing of powerful people matters. History matters. The people harmed by someone's actions should not be erased simply because that person has died. Death does not cleanse anyone's record, and grief does not give mourners ownership of the truth. But I think there are two kinds of patience required here that people often struggle to hold at the same time.
People should be allowed to feel what they feel and speak to what someone meant to them without being attacked. You will not put your hands on a grieving person's shoulders and shake your opinions into them.
People who believe that others are being erased in the public narrative about the deceased should be able to speak about those histories without being portrayed as ignorant villains.
Sometimes, when we are grieving, we must resist the impulse to correct everyone who says something negative—and true—about the person who's passed on. The people we grieve will always be flawed. Sometimes they will have been worse than flawed. Other people will have their own histories with them, their own judgments, their own wounds. Our grief does not erase those things.
We do not need to attack one another or demand emotional agreement. We have to learn to hold our grief, and our truth, without bludgeoning each other with whatever's in our hands.
Not long ago, Buffy the Vampire Slayer actor Nicholas Brendon died. During his life, Brendon was implicated in serious harms, including domestic violence. It is perfectly reasonable that, by the time of his death, many people who once enjoyed his work felt no attachment to him at all, or regarded him with anger or disdain.
What felt less reasonable to me was watching people lash out at Buffy fans who did feel something—and even at people who had known him personally and publicly expressed grief.
I kept thinking, what exactly are we asking of people here?
Many of us know and love people who have caused grievous harm. That does not mean we approve of everything those people have done. It does not mean we have forgotten what happened. It does not mean we have reached some elegant moral resolution that could be summarized in a statement satisfactory to strangers on the internet.
Sometimes someone dies, and a person who loved them, or whose life they touched, simply feels grief.
That is how human connection works, and sometimes continues to work, even when it has been damaged beyond recognition. The grieving do not owe us a dissertation accounting for every contradiction in a relationship before we allow them to say, this person meant something to me, and now they are gone, and it hurts.
Anyone who has ever comforted a friend after the passing of a harmful or abusive parent should understand this clearly. Having been in that position, I know that I do not have to conjure positive feelings about a friend’s dead, abusive relative, who I never knew, in order to respect my friend’s feelings. When I hold them and tell them I understand, I am not appreciating the deceased or asserting their value. I am demonstrating that I value my friend and understand the weight of their pain. Their pain matters to me.
But what about strangers or relative strangers? What about artists, writers, musicians, and public figures? In these cases, I think we often misunderstand something fundamental when we imagine people are simply grieving a person they believed to be wholly good.
Often, they are grieving a kind of accompaniment.
They are grieving the way someone's music, art, words, performances, or ideas helped carry them through the world. They are grieving who they were when they first encountered that work. They are grieving a bedroom they sat in twenty-five years ago, listening to the same album over and over, or a book that knocked down walls when they were nineteen. They are grieving nights spent with friends they no longer know and conversations they can barely remember. They are grieving their own proximity to death, as marked by the disappearance of someone whose presence in the world always seemed continuous with their own, until it wasn't.
This world is no longer the world they learned to live in, and it hurts.
For some people, that kind of change happens all at once. For most of us, it happens one death or disappearance at a time.
When you’re young, history is full of ghosts and headstones, while your own life is populated by the living. As that border shifts, it becomes harder to imagine certain versions of yourself, certain times in your life, as still being close behind you—maybe close enough to touch.
The musicians who made the soundtrack of your adolescence begin to die. Writers whose books reframed your reality pass on. Stills from your favorite television shows and beloved album covers become the stuff of memorial posts. People whose presence and voices had always existed somewhere in the world, as you understood it, vanish.
You can't take a stroll down memory lane without stepping over graves.
Sometimes, that's why we're weeping, or nostalgically rewatching Buffy, or grieving the loss of someone whose ideas helped move us from one place to another, even if we ultimately wound up on a very different journey, and couldn't bring them or our former ideas about them along with us.
We grieve the worlds we've known and what it felt like to live in them, and people are part of that. We grieve the fact that someone or something that accompanied us through the world will no longer accompany us through whatever comes next.
When my father died, my map of the world collapsed. That would be true even if you hated him, and even if you'd had a good reason to. When David Bowie died, the person who created the most magical soundtrack of my life was gone, and my own relationship to history, mortality, art, and life shifted. This was true even though he was accused of actions that made expressions of sadness about his passing triggering for some people.
I don't think we should treat such feelings as trivial simply because they are tangled up with contradictions. (They usually will be.) And I am also not asking people to make room for one another's feelings merely for the sake of being kind. (Though it’s good to be kind.)
I am trying to remind us that a lack of patience for the stuff that makes us flawed, stumbling human beings has consequences.
We are living through overlapping crises that demand a great deal of us: schemes to sabotage elections and wreck mail-in voting, climate catastrophes unfolding while access to aid is weaponized and politicized, immigrants hunted in the streets. We need people who can prepare together, defend one another, care for one another, and remain in relationship through fear, grief, disappointment, and conflict. We need people who can hear an uncomfortable truth without treating it as an annihilation of everything they have ever felt. We need people who can witness someone else's pain without demanding that the pain conform to their own analysis.
I worry when I watch people who desperately need one another routinely denounce and reject each other, over every topic of the day, as though this were the work of doing politics. The demand that everyone feel the same thing, at the same intensity, for the same reasons; the assumption that someone else's sadness must be treated as a battle line; the conviction that correcting a person's feelings is an urgent contribution to the work—what is all of this for, and who does it actually serve?
I want us to talk about preparedness. I want us to talk about defending one another and what we owe each other. I want us to reclaim as much power as we can from systems and institutions that deem people disposable. I want us to build relationships sturdy enough to survive disagreement. I want us to be able to hear one another. And I want us to treat our allies' and potential allies' tears as worthy of compassion even when we do not believe the person being mourned is worthy of their tears.
Because grief itself is not a measurement of merit, nor is it something awarded only to the righteous. It is something that happens inside people when a relationship to the world is ruptured.
You can tell me what someone meant to you without demanding that they mean the same thing to me. I can tell the truth about someone's actions without demanding that the truth extinguish what you feel. We can refuse the impossible project of sorting the dead into those whose loss may be felt and those whose loss may not. We can accept that human beings form attachments in a broken world, to damaged and damaging people, under conditions none of us chose.
And perhaps, rather than trying to make one another feel correctly, we can ask a more useful question: Now that we are here together, carrying all of this—our dead, our histories, our disappointments, our anger, our attachments, our grief—how are we going to take care of one another and endure what comes next?
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