Many people here in England (and elsewhere too) loved Queen Elizabeth II. She gave a sense of continuity to a whole nation through both calm and turbulent times and did so with dignity, and for a very long period of time. She was a stable and totally reliable point of reference in a constantly changing world. After seven decades on the throne, she came to embody the nation itself, even for some of those opposed to the monarchy as an institution. No wonder people loved her.
Source: WikiImages/Pixabay If people loved Elizabeth, it follows perhaps that her death should trigger a grief reaction in them. If the media in the U.K. is to be believed, this is exactly what is happening. Newspapers and TV stations tell us that the people are grieving and that there will be "a difficult period of adjustment for each one of us following her death," as if this was comparable to a death in the family, or the passing of a very close friend. It is easy to get carried away with this type of narrative, but real bereavement is a very different experience.
Love can take many shapes and have many intensities. We normally (not always) love our immediate family, but we can also genuinely love others. However, the number of persons who are deeply meaningful to us is in fact very small, as research has shown. Beyond this tiny number, there are others who populate our existence in different roles and with different levels of significance, from colleagues, neighbors, and acquaintances to TV personalities, artists, and politicians. When one of these individuals in the outer layers of our personal universe dies, we feel an emotion that shares some aspects with grief: we are sorry they died, we remember why we liked them, and for a while we may find it difficult to accept their death and feel as if they should still be here with us. But this doesn't amount to a real grief reaction.
To equate our sorrow for the death of the queen to a death in the family (or to imply this similarity, as many in the media have done in the last few days) belittles the enormity of the pain we feel when we are confronted with a truly meaningful loss and the difficulties we may have to endure in the process of coming to terms with it. The "long period of adjustment" that the TV commentator thinks we'll need to accept the death of our queen will in fact be over almost immediately, not because we are shallow creatures, but because life would be unbearable if we did go into full grief reactions when somebody we never met dies.
Many loved Elizabeth, but only as much as they could love a person they never interacted with, and who was as distant to them in the social strata as anyone could possibly be. They will miss her, but her loss will be a mere footnote in their life histories. This is how it's meant to be.
THE BASICS