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The Journal of Value Inquiry

Erschienen in:

30.03.2020

Grief, Love, and Buddhist Resilience

verfasst von: Emer O’Hagan

Erschienen in: The Journal of Value Inquiry | Ausgabe 1/2021

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Should we be troubled by the thought that, after the death of a loved one such as a spouse, we might be resilient? That is, should we be troubled by the thought that we might adjust well, suffer little depression, anxiety, or inability to cope with or enjoy life, after a person we love very dearly dies?¹ When we reflect on how much our parent, spouse, child, or friend means to us, the mere thought of life without them can be distressing. We don’t presume that we will adapt and get on with our life after such a loss. So we tend not to be troubled by the thought that we may well adapt relatively quickly to the significant loss; for most of us the concern isn’t live in a Jamesian sense. But perhaps it should be? …

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One writer of a popular book on grief describes resilience in this straightforward way: “Resilience in bereavement is reaching an acceptable adjustment to someone’s death within a relatively short period of time.” Ruth Konigsberg, The Truth About Grief: The Myth of Its Five Stages and the New Science of Loss (Toronto: Simon and Schuster, 2011), p. 155.

See George Bonanno, “Loss, Trauma, and Human Resilience: Have We Underestimated the Human Capacity to Thrive After Extremely Aversive Events?,” American Psychologist, 2004, S(1), 101-113.

It is well-established that bereavement is associated with higher mortality rates. A recent meta-analysis found the relative risk of death for bereaved spouses to be 22% higher than that of married persons. See, Eran Shor, David Roelfs, Misty Curreli, et al. Demography, 2012, 49(2), 575-606. One study found widowhood to be associated with a 48% increase in risk of mortality (and attributed one third of that increase to the effects of low socio-economic status). See, Allison R. Sullivan, and Andrew Fenelon, “Patterns of Widowhood Mortality,” The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, 2014, 69B(1), 53–62. Another study found the increased risk of fatal or non-fatal heart attack within thirty days of the death of a partner to be double that of the (non-grieving) control group. See, Iain Carey, Sunil Shah, Stephen DeWilde, et.al, “Increased Risk of Acute Cardiovascular Events After Partner Bereavement: A Matched Cohort Study,” JAMA Internal Medicine, 2014, 174(4), 598–605.

See Dan Moller, “Love and Death,” The Journal of Philosophy, 104, (2007).

See Michael Cholbi, “Regret, Resilience, and the Nature of Grief,” Journal of Moral Philosophy, 16, (2019). As I have challenged Cholbi’s account of grief elsewhere, I will not take it up here. See my, CITATION.

See Aaron Smuts, “Love and Death: The Problem of Resilience,” in Michael Cholbi, ed., Immortality and the Philosophy of Death (New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016), pp. 173-188.

Moller, op. cit., p. 308.

Ibid., p. 310.

Ibid., p. 311.

As further evidence, Moller notes that persons with certain affective disorders fail at games of chance because they’ve lost the capacity to see bad outcomes as bad. Ibid., 311.

Ibid., p. 312.

Ibid., p. 311.

Ibid., p. 312.

Moller writes: “We may be desperately needed as companions, friends, sex partners and intimates, but these roles endow us with much less significance than we imagine, given that we can be functionally replaced in these respects.” p. 310.

Ibid., p. 309.

Ibid., p. 313.

Ibid., p. 314.

See Christine Vitaro, “Love and Resilience,” Ethical Perspectives, Vol. 20, No. 4, (2013).

Smuts, op. cit., p. 181.

Ibid., p. 181.

Ibid., p. 179.

Ibid., p. 186.

See George Bonanno, The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss (New York: Basic Books, 2009), pp. 14-20.

One study of bereaved spouses found that about half of them didn’t manifest even mild depression, reporting fewer than two items from the DSM-IV list of relevant symptoms. See Sidney Zisook, Martin Paulus, Stephen Shuchter, and Lewis Judd. “The many faces of depression following spousal bereavement,” Journal of Affective Disorders, 1997, 45(1-2), 85-94.

George A. Bonanno, “Loss, Trauma, and Human Resilience: Have We Underestimated the Human Capacity to Thrive After Extremely Aversive Events?,” American Psychologist, S(1), 101-113, 105.

Ibid., p. 105.

Ibid., p. 102.

Bonanno writes: “Bereavement is essentially a stress reaction, an attempt by our minds and bodies to deal with the perception of a threat to our well-being. And like any stress reaction, it is not uniform or static. Relentless grief would be overwhelming. Grief is tolerable, actually, only because it comes and goes in a kind of oscillation.” The Other Side of Sadness, 40.

Bonanno outlines his findings in Chapter Four of The Other Side of Sadness, 45-65.

Peter Harvey describes the Four Noble Truths as four dimensions of existence to which one may become attuned in order to transform suffering: “(i) the features of life which exemplify dukkha; (ii) the key cause for why we experience such pains; (iii) the reality of an end to dukkha by ending what causes it; and (iv) a path of practice leading to this.” In “Dukkha, Non-Self, and the Teaching on the Four “Noble Truths”,” in Steven Emmanuel ed., A Companion to Buddhist Philosophy (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2013), p. 26.

Donald Lopez, Jr., The Norton Anthology of World Religions: Buddhism (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015), p. 178.

For an account of some Mahayana Buddhist practices that use suffering to cultivate wisdom, see Emily McRae’s “Suffering and the Six Perfections: Using Adversity to Attain Wisdom in Mahayana Buddhist Ethics,” Journal of Value Inquiry, Vol. 52, No. 4, (2018).

“The Dart,” Samyutta Nikaya: The Connected Discourses of the Buddha, trans. Bhikkhu Bodhi (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2000), p. 1264.

Ruth Davis Konigsberg cites some evidence that public opinion about remarriage has, in the recent past, become more conservative including a survey study from 1970 that was replicated in 2000. Initially 31.5% of the respondents held that remarriage after one year’s time was alright, but in 2000 only 8.8% held it to be alright to remarry after one year. See, Bert Hayslip Jr. and Cynthia A. Peveto, Cultural Change in Attitudes Toward Death, Dying and Bereavement (New York: Springer, 2005), p. 92.

Evolutionary psychologists like Robert Wright claim that our complex feelings about ourselves and our social interactions provide often illusory assessments of our environment (false positives about dangers) which are beneficial from an evolutionary point of view, but stressful. See his Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017).

See, for example, "Skinny Gotami & the Mustard Seed," Therigatha: Verses of the Elder Nuns, trans. Andrew Olendzki, (ThigA 10.1) https://www.accesstoinsight.org/noncanon/comy/thiga-10-01-ao0.html The story is part of commentary on the Therigatha, a collection of poems attributed to senior female monastics that is part of the Pali Canon.

Peter Harvey, “Theravada Philosophy of Mind and the Person,” in Buddhist Philosophy: Essential Readings, W. Edelglass and J. Garfield (eds.), (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 267.

I have argued for the contemplative strategy interpretation of the doctrine of no-self in my “Anatta and Ethics: Kantian and Buddhist Themes,” in Gordon Davis (ed.), Ethics without Self, Dharma without Atman: Western and Buddhist Philosophical Traditions in Dialogue (Springer International Publishing, 2018), pp. 145-159.

“Upatissa,” Samyutta Nikaya: The Connected Discourses of the Buddha, trans. Bhikku Bodhi (Somerville, MA, USA: Wisdom Publications, 2000), p. 714.

Peter Harvey, op. cit., 2013, p. 41.

“Things to be contemplated,” Anguttara Nikaya: The Book of the Gradual Sayings, Vol. III., trans. E.M. Hare (Oxford: Pali Text Society, 2001), p. 59.

Smuts, op. cit., p. 186.

Titel: Grief, Love, and Buddhist Resilience
verfasst von: Emer O’Hagan
Publikationsdatum: 30.03.2020
Verlag: Springer Netherlands
Erschienen in: The Journal of Value Inquiry / Ausgabe 1/2021
Print ISSN: 0022-5363
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-0492
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-020-09737-2

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