Thoughts on GRIEF

I’m fascinated by Mamie Till – Mobley, the mother of Emmett Till. Particularly, her decision to have an open casket funeral after the horrific murder of her son. She said at the time, “I want the world to see what they did to my boy”. She wanted the world to see the brutality and cruelty, the dehumanization, the desecration of his body.

I wonder at what was behind those words, what was going on in her mind that led her to make her decision. Perhaps it was anger and the outrage she felt at the murder. But it also might have been a way of sharing her grief, her overwhelming pain and sense of loss. She might have thought that if people saw Emmett’s body, then it would not be just her grief to bear alone.  If others could feel some small part of what it was that she was feeling, to share what she’d witnessed, it might lessen the burden, the pain – if only a little bit. 

Of course, I can only speculate why she made the choice she did. However, I do think the decision was mostly driven by outrage. I think wanting the world to know was a noble way of framing it, but I believe that it was the personal outrage that drove the decision. Her need to enhance, to amplify her pain so that it was large enough that others might feel what she was feeling. Through a kind of empathetic communion, she might be relieved of some of her suffering. 

The process of creating this work caused me to think a lot about mothers and some of the things that we hear about a mother’s love. How the worst thing for a mother (or parent) is to lose their child. A child dying before a parent is almost unbearable. It also reminds me, and I know this may be a little sacrilegious, of Mary, the mother of Jesus and the loss of her Son. I think of the images and iconography that came out of the Catholic Church during the Renaissance that depict the Madonna and Child (sweet and peaceful), Mary holding the dead body of Jesus across her lap (grave and numb in her loss). The contrast of those two images, the power of the Pieta, this production wants to live in that world of things.

Maybe the reason those images, those religious images, hold such power is because we all on some level understand the pain of a mother losing her child. We empathize with the feelings of that situation. It makes God, as manifested in Jesus, more understandable, more human, He dies just as we do. We feel compassion for Mary in her loss and by extension for God. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel postulates, “God learns from us”. As a result, the vengeful God of the Old Testament is transformed into the compassionate God of the New Testament. And we too are expected to become compassionate.

The murder of Emmett Till and the crucifixion of Jesus were both brutal acts. We know from religious texts that Mary witnessed the crucifixion, she was there. She watched, she saw, the brutalization and suffering of her son. Not just the crucifixion itself but she also saw the crowning with thorns, carrying of the cross, the Roman soldier piercing His side with a lance, His being given vinegar to drink. Seeing Emmet’s mutilated body, Mamie Till-Mobley imagines his suffering just as Mary witness the suffering of Jesus. Till-Mobley wants us to see her son’s body then imagine his suffering just as she must has done when she first saw it. It is because of what she imagines, not just his death, I think, that makes her pain unbearable, what outrages her. She wants us to see through her eyes and feel through her nerves the dehumanization of her son, how he was diminished and disregarded.

Despair, anger, and rage are feelings that probably accompany the murder and slaughter of one’s child whether it is Mary, Mother of Jesus, or Mamie Till-Mobley. I suspect those feelings are ones that we all might have when we grieve.

Donald Byrd May 2022