The students sat cross-legged on the ground, arms linked, when the police officer pulled the tab on his canister of pepper spray. With the calmness of a graffiti artist laying his background, he let loose a plume of orange chemicals, moving up and down the line with precision, not missing a face. This grim moment during a peaceful protest occurred at the University of California at Davis on a Friday. On Monday, the school's chancellor, Linda Katehi, appeared on TV with George Stephanopoulos, saying, "We need to…try to understand what happened and move on." On PBS, UC Davis police chief Annette Spicuzza said, "We will find some closure with this investigation." (She has since been placed on leave.)
Of the many self-help platitudes invoked during a crisis, none has been more flogged in the past two decades than "closure." No tragedy can be complete until the narrative has run its course, converting sadness and injustice into a three-act screenplay taught in a night school course: happiness, disaster, closure. It's the ultimate celebrity-interview reveal: "I finally have closure," Tamara Mellon, former head of Jimmy Choo, told Interview magazine about her troubled relationship with her mother. Online posters want Rihanna and Chris Brown to get it, and the editors of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills are scrambling to find some for Taylor Armstrong after her husband's suicide.
When news is cast as entertainment, which it is in the 24-hour cable world, stories require endings. The meaning of closure is both mutable and vague – move along, finish up, put away your grief – which makes it highly utilitarian. A romantic breakup, a dead pet, a terrorist attack – closure is the great equalizing imperative, offered as cold comfort. There's something profoundly attractive about closure: In chaos, it's the one clear idea. Closure is something to do.
Yet closure isn't a term used by many bereavement therapists. According to a new book, in fact, closure doesn't even exist. In Closure: The Rush to End Grief and What it Costs Us, Drake University sociologist Nancy Berns writes, "Closure is not some naturally occurring emotion; it's a made-up concept that tells us how we should deal with loss." In other words, it's a prescription that can't be filled.
In the days after allegations against former Penn State University assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, accused of sexually abusing numerous boys, became public, there was a candlelight vigil at the school. Some 10,000 people sang Imagine and the student-body president spoke of "closure for all involved in this tragedy."
In another country, I was just a reader choking on reported details of the passivity and collusion that allowed these children to be fed upon. And if I was reeling, what is it like for the victims and their families, living inside the black corridors of this nightmare, minute by minute? One of Sandusky's alleged victims, now 17, has been so bullied at school that he has dropped out. His reality is so far from "closure" that it's not even a dot on the horizon; to shove him toward it is cruelty.
We live in accelerated times. It has been 12 years since James Gleick published Faster, a best-selling rumination on the cultural need for speed. Gleick wrote that citizens of wealthy and more educated societies develop "a sense of tension about time" – a fear of time running out. Technology's job, via computer or dummy elevator buttons that don't actually close the doors when you press them, is to give people the illusion that they're beating time. When Faster was published, wireless was uncommon and Mark Zuckerberg was in high school. Now texts come and go every few seconds and our offices are carried in our purses. In the effort to gain more time, we've sped up so fast that it can feel like there's none left.
So grief, too, must pick up the pace. Berns writes that the stampede toward closure can be used for political or financial gain. Certainly the cries of UC Davis chancellor Katehi to "move on" came off as a transparent bid to expedite matters and save her career. In Canada, "closure" was much invoked during the government's 2008 apologies for the residential-school atrocities committed against aboriginal people. But while the moment of reconciliation reflected well on politicians, even after such a years-long process, one wonders how "closed" this history feels to the Canadians who live with it.
The truth is that grief is ongoing and laborious. Freud said that "mourning is work," a thing to be wrestled. But it's a valuable struggle; all kinds of truths arise from contemplation. What benefit is there to rush past injustices of the kind we've witnessed these past weeks? Who would be served by closing the door quickly and moving on at UC Davis, at Penn State?
Struggling through grief doesn't necessarily end in its dissolution. The grief recedes and re-emerges, a wound that's sometimes open and sometimes closed, but not to be forgotten.