(featured image: The Commonwealth/Flickr (CC BY NC ND 2.0)

The decease of Queen Elizabeth II, aged 96 and in less than perfect health, was hardly a great surprise. If anything, it was the fact that she was still alive at such an advanced age that was unusual. Nonetheless, her death triggered a remarkable reaction in millions of people, not just her subjects in the UK and the commonwealth countries where she was the head of state, but across the planet. Why do people feel grief, not only when a close loved one dies, but also when it concerns someone we have never met? And why do they subsequently do things in response that seem to have no material or instrumental purpose?

Good grief

Grief when someone dies is associated with the notion of , the psychological connectedness between humans, developed by British psychologist John Bowlby (in particular the attachment between parents and children). Once again, evolution plays a part: children need their parents to care for them until they can look after themselves; parents need their children to survive and prosper so they can pass on their own genes. When they get unexpectedly and involuntarily separated, both tend to get very upset. The emotional response at a (temporary) loss makes good sense: it triggers action to rectify the situation. Small children will make big noises to attract (their parents’) attention, parents will panic and go searching for them (and call the emergency services). It may also encourage action to avoid undesired separation in the future.

But that does not explain why, as adults, we experience the same emotion when the person we are so attached to dies, and we know they will most definitely not return. It is pointless to try and find someone whom we know has died or to entice them to find us, and to avoid the actions that led to the definitive separation of death. Still, the emotion of grief is very much with us. If it really was maladaptive, it would have been bred out of us, so its continued presence probably means it does serve a meaningful purpose, just like physical pain (which grief resembles more than a little). Queen Elizabeth herself said, to the grieving families of the 9/11 victims, “Grief is the price we pay for love”.

Grieving, a bridge to a life without the deceased (image via DALL·E 2)

One explanation is that it helps foster the transition to a life without the deceased. We not only need to fully accept the loss, but we must also prepare for life in which someone, without whom some of our goals may no longer be achievable, is absent. Only when we have reached that acceptance, and considered how we will lead our life henceforth, will the pain recede. Randolph Nesse, an evolutionary psychiatrist, suggests some additional adaptive motivations for grieving, including signalling a need for help, and joining with relatives for mutual protection and support. (Also, even if certain characteristics seem maladaptive, evolution is ongoing and works on long timescales. What may have been useful for our ancestors a mere 500 generations ago — more than 10,000 years! — may no longer be for us, but it takes a lot longer than that for evolution to deselect a trait completely.)

Not so close

The evolutionary explanation for grief primarily fits the loss of close relatives, who are the most instrumental in securing the passing of genes. Queen Elizabeth had quite a few relatives (not least because she lived to such an old age) but her death has touched many, many more people, who have neither a family nor a friendship connection with her.

But grief at the death of a child or a parent is, in a way, one extreme end of a spectrum that represents how we react to a loss. We need stability, security and predictability in our life in order to thrive and survive, and losing people (and indeed objects) can disrupt this. When that happens, we grieve for the loss of what was safe and familiar, and we may well feel as if things will never be the same again. The impact of losing our job, our best friend emigrating, or even the closure for good of a favourite store may not be quite the same as when someone dies, but the emotions we experience will similarly motivate us to try and mitigate the loss one way or another, and take steps to avoid it in the future. Exactly how significant a loss is, is a personal matter, depending on the nature and the depth of the relationship one had with what (or whom) is lost.

The sense of loss that many people experience at the passing of Queen Elizabeth can be seen from that perspective: for over 70 years, she was a prominent symbol, in Britain for sure — on banknotes, coins and stamps and in public life- but also well beyond. To many, she was even a more personal symbol — of a steadfast sense of duty, of compassionate leadership, of dedication to her country. Even when the actual footprint of such a person in someone’s life is modest, the twin features of death, definitiveness and irreversibility, can elevate the event to something more momentous. Someone told me just the other day she recently heard that a former colleague whom she had not any contact with for over forty years, had died last year, and how learning this had touched her more than they had expected. Whatever a person meant to us, after their death, all we have is memories, and the future will be one without them.

We are all mourning people

Yet this still does not quite explain the mass public mourning. It is one thing to shed a tear in private while watching news footage of the Queen’s mortal remains being carried along Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, it is quite another to queue for hours (if not camping overnight in the rain) in order to be able to see the Queen’s lying-in-state. 33,000 people filed past her coffin in Edinburgh; some reports suggest up to 3 million mourners will come to London in the run-up to the funeral service.

There are a few possible explanations for this. One is that this collective display of grief in itself creates a bond, a sense of belonging that not only helps people process the sadness, but generates wellbeing in its own right: we like to belong to a group that is likeminded. Even those who don’t make the effort to stand in line for hours to pay their respects or to line the roads as the coffin is taken in perhaps not the best of weather may find a sense of togetherness in the sight of large numbers of people simultaneously participating in the mourning.

Not THE Queen, but many mourned him when he died, too (photo: Ingmar Zahorsky/Flickr (CC BY NC ND 2.0)

Signalling is another possible motive. When we grieve in public, whether it is for the death of a close relative, or for a celebrity (remember the deaths of John Lennon, Queen’s Freddy Mercury or the Queen herself) we show that we care about the deceased, that they were important to us, that we will miss them. The signalling cements the belonging, but it also says something about us: we are fellow humans, touched and saddened by the loss. And perhaps the signal is not just intended for others, but also for ourselves: it asserts our own humanity, and reinforces our self-image as a person who feels genuine emotion on a sad occasion.

The quite considerable sacrifices some people make — in money, effort and time — are, perhaps, in part compensated by the emotional boost of belonging, but that may not be the full story. Many people feel they make the sacrifice “for the deceased”, not for their utilitarian selves. Our sense of reciprocity and obligation to a person does not die with them. We tend to continue to act in accordance with a dead relative’s preferences, although they are no longer here to approve or disapprove, or even follow their instructions like caring for their plants (rather than let them wilt and get rid of them) or their pet (rather than take them to an animal welfare place). In the absence of someone else to benefit from our sacrifices, why do we then do it?

This may well provide a fundamental insight in what drives human decision making: the millions of people who do what they do on this occasion are doing what they feel is right. And so do we all — even if we do not all do the same.