The Personalization of Grief

Scott Simon

I met Scott Simon in 2001 when we worked on a PBS program together about the anthrax scare and learning to deal with the prospect of bioterrorism in the wake of 9/11. We have been friends since then and now my wife Carolyn and I are neighbors with Scott, his lovely wife Caroline and their two beautiful daughters. This week, the well-respected host of National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition has garnered a good deal of national attention and generated an equal amount of controversy for his Twitter and Facebook commentary from the bedside of his dying mother.

Is it proper to share your personal grief with people you don’t even know? As someone who has spent a lot of time with the families of murder victims, I have some thoughts.

Death is the ultimate reality, and the ultimate emotional challenge, we all must face. As universal as it is, we all face it in uniquely individual ways. There is probably no death in our society quite so searing and devastating as murder, yet I have seen the families and survivors of murder victims react across the spectrum of human experience. As an example, one family could not rest until they had seen their daughter’s brutal killer executed. Another could not rest until they had had a long encounter with their son’s killer in prison and forgiven her. And both families are equally sensitive and loving.

I have read about and seen people criticized for not reacting “properly” to a loved one’s death. In 1932, Charles Lindbergh was criticized for not being emotional in the wake of his toddler first-born’s kidnapping and murder. In 1996, John Ramsey was subjected to the same treatment for his seemingly stoic reaction to his daughter JonBenet’s murder. The public was so outraged in each case that many accused both men of being responsible for or complicit in their children’s murders. The fact is that both men were individuals who were used to reacting calmly and intellectually to crisis and who did their grieving in private.

And yet we see criticism of a man like Scott Simon over the appropriateness of his emotional, highly personal dispatches as he dealt with his mother slipping away.

Frankly, I do not understand this reaction at all, and I say this as someone who not only deals with crime victims but who has experienced just what Scott did with both of my parents and my mother-in-law. If it is not to your taste, don’t read or listen. But also don’t criticize.

Scott is a communicator by vocation and avocation. He has built an impressive reputation from sharing his sensibilities, observations and insights about all manner of things with a large listening audience and people who have never met him feel as if they know him well. The fact that he is willing to share so universal an experience in such an intimate and personal way, I consider a gift. His reactions offer each of us an opportunity to examine our own on a subject we have not and/or will not be able to avoid. And if he had chosen not to be a communicator at this particularly sensitive time and keep all of his feelings and observations to himself, that would have been equally as “appropriate.”

Because I have found that when it comes to dealing with death, there is no wrong answer.

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