Nancy Berns: “Closure Doesn’t Exist,” Let Grief and Joy Be Intertwined

“What have you grieved in the past?” asks Nancy Berns, a sociologist at Drake University. “What might you grieve in the future? And some of you are grieving today. It’s not just the death of loved ones that we grieve. Our life is full of losses.”

These include the losses associated with transitioning between homes and cultures, away from family, friends, and the familiar.

When faced with that grief, we usually look for ways to move on, to find closure. But according to Berns, “Closure doesn’t even exist. It’s a made up concept that we use to talk about loss and grief.” And trying to gain closure “can do more harm than good.”

in her TEDxDesMoines talk below, Berns, author of Closure: The Rush to End Grief and What It Costs Us, says that we shouldn’t box up our pain, close the lid, and walk away to look for a separate place of joy. In a previous post I asked, “Can Grief and Joy Coexist?” Berns is convinced that not only do they exist together, but they are intricately intertwined.

Listen to her explain this relationship and open a box to share stories of people expressing their grief . . . and joy. Hers is a message for those who are grieving and for those know others who are dealing with sorrow. And that pretty much includes us all, doesn’t it?

Knowing that joy and grief can be carried together is so important,” says Berns, “because it’s a long journey without the possibility of joy.”

So the next time that you see someone who’s entering that space of grief—might be a family member, might be a friend, a coworker, just someone you recently met—don’t hand them a box. Don’t tell them to find closure. Meet them where they’re at. And they might be broken and down and beaten up.

Then, kneeling on the stage, she continues:

Meet them where they’re at. And while you’re there, take a moment and look around, ‘cause you might be surprised at the view you have when you’re on your knees. And if you’re the one broken, you might be surprised at how comforting it can be to have someone just meet you where you’re at, not to try and get you to stand before you’re ready, not to try and take away your pain or explain it away. Just to be with you. And when you’re ready, to give you a hand up, to take those steps. . . . You see it’s not about closure. Healing? Yes. But that’s different.

[photo: “Box 5,” by Brenda Clarke, used under a Creative Commons license]

Nando’s: Tastes like Chicken, Looks like an Art Gallery

The Obama family are currently in South Africa, as part of a three-country visit to the African continent. The president will not meet with Nelson Mandela, who is in the hospital, but he has spoken with Mandela’s family by phone. While there, they will also tour Robben Island, where Mandela was a prisoner for 18 years.

I’ve never been to South Africa, but would love to visit. I have, though, found a place (somewhat) closer to home that might some day give me a taste of the country.

In Chris Stark’s interview with Mila Kunis, Stark invites Kunis to a Nando’s for some chicken (to which she responds, “You’re teaching me so much.”)

So what is Nando’s? Why, it’s “Home of the legendary, Portuguese flame-grilled Peri-Peri chicken,” of course.

And what does that have to do with South Africa? Go to the “Story of Nando’s” and you’ll see an animated history of how the restaurant came to be. In a nutshell. . . . Years ago, exploring Portuguese sailors ended up in Mozambique where they discovered the African Bird’s Eye chili pepper. Some 400 years later, some of these Portuguese left Mozambique for Johannesburg, taking with them their peri-peri chicken recipes. (Peri-peri is how they pronounced the Swahili name for the chili.) In 1987, Fernando Duarte and Robert Brozin bought a chicken restaurant—featuring peri-peri sauce—in the Rosettenville suburb of Jo’burg. They changed the name from Chickenland to Nando’s, and the chain was born. Nando’s restaurants are now found around the globe, and while they’re present in the US, they’re (so far) confined to Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, DC.

While each Nando’s is unique, one constant is that they all display artwork from South Africa. Their “art project” started in 2002, and since then, Nando’s has become the self-proclaimed “largest buyer of South African contemporary art in the world.”

What we like most about our art project is that it’s given undiscovered, emerging and established artists from diverse social and economic backgrounds the opportunity to have their work on display in our restaurants around the world. It feels really good to know that we’ve helped give many artists the freedom to focus on their art full time, and that we’ve given our customers something beautiful to look at, without having to set foot in a gallery. (from “Our Restaurants“)

Nando’s even has an online display of over 170 pieces of their South African art, produced by “everyone from bushmen on community farms to renowned Johannesburg painters.”

Here’s a recent commercial for Nando’s in South Africa. Eyes down. Now up. Now look closely and you’ll see some of the South African art on the wall.

[photo: “Nando’s Peri Peri Sign,” by Mr T in DC, used under a Creative Commons license]

Serving Globally: The Tuggings on Our Souls

I’d like to point you toward two recent thought-provoking articles from Christianity Today. Both appear under CT‘s “This Is Our City” banner.

The first is written by Rachel Pieh Jones, who blogs at Djibouti Jones. It’s titled “You Can’t Buy Your Way to Social Justice,” with the tag, “Why the activism of some fellow Americans scares me.”

At her blog Jones writes,

Today I have an article at Christianity Today and I’m kinda scared about it. [. . .] The article looks at the current trends of using intentional purchases (fair trade coffee, etc) to fight injustice worldwide, from the perspective of someone (me) who has spent more than a decade living overseas, working toward development and human dignity in the Horn of Africa. [. . .] I’m afraid people will be offended or get mad. [. . .] But . . . well . . . there it is. I have a lot to learn, which I hope comes across in the essay and I look forward to learning from you because overwhelmingly, you challenge me to think better, to not be complacent, and you handle my messy process with grace.

From the CT article: “I have a theory about what is partly contributing to the dearth of young Americans willing to spend their lives on behalf of others,” Jones writes. “They think they already are.”

The second article is “Choosing Marriage over the Mission Field,” about “How Tim Kietzman, a successful missionary eye doctor, chose quiet faithfulness despite enormous needs in Pakistan.”

After moving with his family overseas, Kietzman served 10 years as an ophthalmologist in the Pakistani valley of Gilgit. But according to the article, his “boldest act for God may have been coming home from Pakistan to repair his marriage of almost 30 years.”

How he came to make that choice involved re-understanding something Kietzman calls the “Isaac syndrome.” “Missionary kids are the sacrificial child for their parents doing what God wants them to do,” he said. “A lot of times they feel like they’re under the knife . . . like they’re second-class citizens.” Compounded by the sense of missing out on their home culture, the Isaac syndrome can leave missionary kids with spiritual baggage.

The Kietzmans returned to the States when “the Isaac role quietly fell on their marriage,” when it “eventually proved too much.”

Read these articles to have your thoughts challenged on making a difference globally—challenged by people who are not writing about theories, but who are writing about the push and pull and stretch and pressures on their own lives—lived “over there” and “over here.”

(Rachel Pieh Jones, “Why I’m Afraid of American Christians,” Djibouti Jones, May 15, 2013; Rachel Pieh Jones, “You Can’t Buy Your Way to Social Justice,” Christianity Today, May 14, 2013; Anna Broadway, “Choosing Marriage over the Mission Field,” Christianity Today, June 13, 2013)

[photo: “Tug of War,” by toffehoff, used under a Creative Commons license]

The Changing Face of the World, with or without Plastic Surgery

In 2011, when National Geographic reported on the global population reaching 7 billion, it determined that the “most typical” person in the world is a 28-year-old Han Chinese male.

But that doesn’t mean that the East Asian look is the most popular. Many Asians, such as those in South Korea, are using cosmetic surgery to gain a more Westernized appearance. While Americans have the most plastic-surgery procedures each year, on a per-capita basis, South Korea comes out on top, with 16 procedures per 1,000 people in 2010. Here is the complete list of the top-10 countries:

South Korea
Greece
Italy
Brazil
Colombia
US
Taiwan
Japan
France

In South Korea, as in many East Asian countries, popular procedures—aimed toward an idealized Western appearance—include narrowing and sharpening the nose, adding double creases to eyelids, lightening skin, slimming round faces, and reducing calf size.

But using surgery to chase the features of another culture carries “complex psycho-social implications,” says Mario Dini, director of the University of Florence’s School of Plastic and Aesthetic Surgery. “A foreign patient who wants to westernize their face, which is universally considered ‘successful,’” he tells La Stampa, “hopes that the scalpel will change their culture too—but this isn’t possible.”

Anthropologist and journalist, Geneviève Makaping, from Cameroon, agrees:

The risk of unconditionally accepting to operate on patients and respond “yes” to all of their requests is to leave them in a cultural limbo. The people who want to erase, or minimize, their physical origins usually aren’t completely assimilated with Westerners, and are turned away from their own social groups who criticize and stigmatize this choice because they feel their faces are being discriminated against.

Of course, global norms and ideals continue to change. Watch this National Geographic video and you’ll see that by 2030, the most typical person will be from India.

Given time, though, due to intermarrying across cultures, we all my end up looking like Brazilians. Stephen Stearns, an ecology and evolutionary biology professor at Yale, tells LiveScience that since the invention of the bicycle the distance between potential spouses has continually increased. Bring in paved roads, automobiles, and airplanes, and our wold has become even smaller when it comes to finding a mate. This means that recessive traits will become fewer and fewer, and other traits that separate us now will blend together. What will this look like? In a few hundred years, according to Stearns, it will look Brazilian.

But why stop at a few hundred years? What about in 100,000 years? Artist Nickolay Lamm teamed up with Alan Kwan, a computational genomicist, to illustrate what they think future humans might look like. Published two weeks ago at MyVoucherCodes.co.uk, Lamm’s renderings show features brought on by increased brain size and life in space colonies. Maybe those old movie images of aliens with large foreheads and oversized eyes were on to something.

(“A Cut Above,” The Economist, April 23, 2012, using information from the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery; Rosalba Miceli, “Plastic Surgery as a Way to Look Less ‘Ethnic’—and Get Ahead?” Worldcrunch, April 15, 2013, translated from “La chirurgia plastica ‘e tnica’ può cancellare i pregiudizi razziali?” La Stampa, April 2, 2013; Natalie Wolchover, “Will Humans Eventually All Look like Brazilians?” LiveScience, September 18, 2012; Nickolay Lamm, “What Will Humans Look Like in 100,000 Years?” What’s Hot, MyVoucherCodes, June 7, 2013)

[photo: “Eyes,” by XracZ, used under a Creative Commons license; illustration by Nickolay Lamm, used with permission]

Anne Frank: The Immeasurable Value of a Red-Plaid Diary

If Anne Frank hadn’t died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945 and had gone on to survive the normal maladies of life, she would have turned 84 on June 12 last week.

It was on her 13th birthday, 71 years ago, that she received the gift of a red-plaid autograph book and began using it as a diary. The first words she wrote were,

I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support.

She then continued to chronicle her life as a young German-born Jewish girl living in Amsterdam under the tyranny of German occupation, as she and her family hid from the Nazis in a set of secret rooms. After two years, in 1944, they were discovered and deported to Auschwitz.

In describing the role of her diary, Anne is also defining the roles of a good listener: A rare confidant who values acceptance over judgment (realizing there will be time for editing and feedback later). A safe friend who reflects back what is heard, allowing the speaker to work through her problems rather than forcing quick solutions. A concerned companion who offers silence—like blank pages—to be filled with another’s valuable stories. An empathetic advocate not afraid to hear raw emotions and honest truth.

May we all be givers of that kind of comfort and support. May we share the qualities of Anne’s red-plaid diary. May we be that kind of gift to someone who needs to be heard.

(Anne Frank, Trans. Susan Massotty, The Diary of a Young Girl, Eds. Otto H. Frank and Mirjam Pressler, New York: Everyman’s, 2010)
[photo: “Anne Frank Diary at Anne Frank Museum in Berlin,” by Heather Cowper, used under a Creative Commons license]

Comfort Food, Stress, and Life Expectancy

Chocolate. Macaroni and cheese. Ice cream. Potato chips. Hot dogs. Chocolate.

When we feel down, we often turn to familiar foods, junk food, or other “guilty food pleasures” for comfort. The stresses of living in a new culture often provide the emotional downturn, and that, coupled with the fact that our usual feel-good foods are hard to come by, means that we want comfort food even more.

But comfort food, like many things that we enjoy, is a double-edged sword.

First, while we often look to food for a pick-me-up, a recent study suggests that typical comfort foods—which are often not the best health-wise—can actually make you feel worse. Researchers at Penn State University found that among women who are concerned about their body image but also have “high levels of unhealthy eating habits,” negative moods were “significantly higher” after what they called “disordered” eating.

Added to this, more research has found that mildly depressed people can have more difficulty discerning fatty tastes in food. A study, the results of which were published last week in the scientific journal PLOS ONE, used happy, sad, and neutral videos to alter the moods of participants. While those with mild (nonclinical) depression typically had normal perceptions of fat content in foods, after increased positive or negative moods, they lost that ability to discern between high-fat and low-fat foods. Thus, people seeking comfort from food are more susceptible to make unhealthy eating decisions.

But there may be a silver lining: Being somewhat overweight can improve your health. Of course, severe obesity is never good, but according to an NPR report, an analysis of literature by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found a 6% decrease in the risk of death for people who are slightly overweight (as measured by body mass index [BMI]). The findings, published in JAMA, have been met with skepticism by some in the medical community, but others find common ground.

As reported in a Worldcrunch article (translated from the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung), since 1999, studies in several countries have shown that overweight people with BMIs of around 27 to 30 have higher life expectancies than their thinner counterparts. It is important to note, though, that the extra weight is helpful when it occurs in places like the arms, legs, hips, and bottom. When it’s around the waist, as in a “spare tire,” though, it does more harm than good.

The article also cites the work of Achim Peters, at Germany’s University of Lübeck, and Bruce McEwen, of Rockefeller University in New York, who have developed a theory called the “obesity paradox.” It states that being overweight is a healthy way to manage stress. That’s because Peters claims that the brain is “selfish,” requiring 50% of the body’s glucose when a person is not under stress. But when stress occurs, the brain wants 90% of the glucose. In an obese person, the glucose is tied up in building fatty deposits, which means the brain demands more energy, and the cycle continues. Thus, according to the theory, obesity is caused by, and is a healthy response to, chronic stress. That means that being skinny isn’t always the best thing. In fact, according to Peters, the worst category to be in is “thin and under pressure.”

If all this leaves you a little confused, and if that confusion has you feeling down, don’t despair.

I’ve already mentioned my fondness for Arby’s and my desire to see them expand around the globe. So just relax and follow me over to Arby’s for a comforting meal of a roast beef sandwich (with horseradish sauce), curly fries, and a Dr. Pepper. After all, it is “Good Mood Food.”

(Matthew Swayne, “Unhealthy Eating Can Make a Bad Mood Worse,” Penn State University, March 15, 2013; Petra Platte et al., “Oral Perceptions of Fat and Taste Stimuli Are Modulated by Affect and Mood Induction,” PLOS ONE, June 5, 2013; Allison Aubrey, “Research: A Little Extra Fat May Help You Live Longer,” NPR, January 2, 2013; “‘Obesity Paradox’—More and More Studies Find the Overweight Live Longer,” Worldcrunch, November 8, 2012, translated from Christina Berndt, “Dicke leben länger,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, November 3, 2012)

[photo: “Chocolate Peanut Butter Cake of Decadence,” by Nora Kuby, used under a Creative Commons license]

Paris: The City and the Syndrome

Though I often looked for one, I finally had to admit that there could be no cure for Paris.

These are the opening words of Paula McClain’s novel, The Paris Wife. Told from the viewpoint of Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley, the book shares the story of the young couple as they dive into life in Jazz-Age Paris.

I’ve not read the book, but I’ve read the first page, on the back of the most recent issue of the travel magazine Afar (which, by the way, I purchased with frequent-flier miles). The page is part of an advertisement, displayed on a Kindle Paperwhite held by a tourist overlooking the iconic white and blue buildings of Santorini, Greece. The caption for the ad reads, “Perfect for Getaways.”

It seems that some Japanese travelers have the same view of Paris as Mrs. Hemingway: It’s a condition in need of a remedy.

Back in 2006, BBC published an oft-quoted story about a phenomenon called “Paris Syndrome.” According to the article, each year, a dozen or so Japanese tourists have a psychiatric breakdown of sorts upon visiting the French capital. First identified by Hiroaki Ota, a Japanese psychiatrist in France, the syndrome is brought about when the realities of Paris don’t match the visitors’ romanticized expectations. While some of the symptoms sound like culture shock, others, such as delusions and hallucinations, are more extreme.

While some deny the existence of an actual syndrome, BBC reports that the Japanese embassy in France has set us a 24-hour hotline to help deal with the situation.

Below is a short documentary from John Menick, Paris Syndrome (2010). It takes a more in-depth—and sometimes sceptical—look at the condition, including interviews with French psychiatric professionals. Besides Paris Syndrome, the video also touches on such topics as Stendhal Syndrome, psychiatric portraiture, and historical views of travel-related mental illnesses. It even looks at Mehran Karimi Nasseri, the inspiration for the movie The Terminal.

So . . . what is the cure for Paris? While some are searching for one, most see no need. The author Gertrude Stein, a friend of the Hemingways from their time in France, saw the City of Light as a place that nurtured her creativity. “America is my country,” she said, “and Paris is my hometown.”

(Paula McClain, The Paris Wife, New York: Ballantine, 2011; Caroline Wyatt, “‘Paris Syndrome’ Strikes Japanese,” BBC News, December 20, 2006)

[photo: “Another Summer Day in Paris,” by Trey Ratcliff at Stuck in Customs, used under a Creative Commons license]

Video Poetry

Two wordless videos

One fast

One slow

Striking

Vivid

Lyrical

One from Japan

One from India

Hayaku and

Holi

(Brad Kremer, Hayaku: A Time Lapse Journey through Japan, 2010; Jonathan Bregel and Khalid Mohtaseb, dirs., Holi, Variable, 2012)

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