Grief as Taboo: Lewis, Burleson, and the Communication of Grief

Introduction

Grief is a part of life. In writer for The New York Times A. C. Shilton’s view (2021), “Grief is an innate part of what it means to live a full and rich life as a human” (p. D6). Most, if not all, people experience grief and sorrow and all need support and comfort. If this experience is universal and human, why is grief so often viewed as a taboo subject of communication?

Baxter and Wilmot (1985) define a taboo topic as a “form of informational control,” meaning a topic perceived to be “off limits to one or both of the relationship parties” (p. 254). In her work on family secrets, Vangelisti (1994) conceptualized a taboo topic as something people refrain from speaking about “to avoid negative reactions from others” (p. 116). Is part of the taboo view of grief connected to how little education, training, advice, or role modeling many people receive on how to communicate grief or respond to others’ grief? One goal of this chapter is to counter the view that communicating about grief is taboo. In that pursuit, the objective of this chapter is to address this question: What is the best way to communicate with someone who is grieving, given a prevailing view that grief is a taboo topic?

Background

A long-held interest in C. S. Lewis, particularly his most personal book, A Grief Observed (1961), prompted this author’s current inquiry into grief as a taboo topic of communication. While many people know and admire Lewis for his writing and radio sermons, only in recent decades have scholars from the discipline of communication begun to study Lewis as a “master communicator” (Beebe, 2020, p. 1). When this chapter’s author studied Lewis at Oxford, under communication scholar Professor Steven Beebe’s tutelage, Lewis’s writing about grief was of compelling interest. But it became clear that effort needed to be made to ground or connect Lewis to a contemporary program of research that resided in the communication discipline. That motive led to a bridge between Lewis’s work on grief and interpersonal communication scholar Brant Burleson’s research on supportive and comforting communication.

Lewis links grief and communication in A Grief Observed. When reading about how Lewis grieved the death of his beloved wife, Joy, passages about the awkwardness of people’s communication with him about his loss emerge as salient. People often admit that their aversion to grief events stems from an awkwardness about what to say or how to comfort the bereft. Confronting such emotions happens less frequently for most people than happier occasions, so people also tend to have less experiences that are instructive in how to communicate about a loss and how to respond appropriately to the bereft.

Role models for grief and communication tend to be members of the clergy, people in roles that require certain rituals or conventions of communication. As Thai (2018) explains, “Religion may offer words of comfort, for every religion has its rituals and ceremonies to mark out death and grieving” (p. 1). However, Thai also contends that “religious ritual does not always offer the interpersonal or conversational words we need to support one another, to help each other grieve” (p. 1). The average layperson is untrained in forms of communication readily produced by members of the clergy, nor would such communication from a layperson likely be perceived as appropriate. The absence of experience in how to effectively respond to someone’s grief contributes to the view that expressions of grief are taboo, as though grief should be censored.