Grieve or Celebrate? It Depends Who Died.

While everyone is glad to see extremes (like bin Laden) eliminated, and no one is glad when an innocent is killed, what do we do about the messy middle?

Sep 24, 2025

Grief is a Fickle, Tricky, Complicated Beast

Question for you: Is there a proper/improper way to feel when someone dies?

Generally speaking I’m of the opinion that we should be reaaaalllly slow to judge how another person grieves.

Grief is a fickle, tricky, complicated beast. It causes even the best of us to lean away from our angels and toward our demons.

People do and say weird and very-unlike-them things when they’re acting out of grief places.

The other night I watched episode 2 of the new incredible HBO show, Task, and there was a scene where one of the members of a gang (the show’s obvious antagonists) made an off-the-cuff statement that really angered the gang leader. The gang leader then stormed across the kitchen, blasted the plate of food belonging to the dude who said the dumb thing, and threatened to hurt him for his careless remark.

The low-level gangster hung his head in shame, scared of his leader, and muttered, “Sorry… I’m just really upset.”

And oh my word if I didn’t have just a small bit of compassion for this bad dude on my TV screen!

Yeah. He was really upset. And scared, and grieving what had happened in the previous scene. And then he said something really stupid, something that triggered his leader. (And for what it’s worth, the leader’s reaction was also kind of warranted. Even if it was over the top, he was in a grief state, too!)

To say it again, grief is weird. It’s complicated. And it makes us do and say the kinds of things that normal, non-grieving us would never say nor do.

My hope is that humans would do their best to cut other humans some slack when they’re acting out of grief.

We just will not be at our best.

What if We Feel… GRATEFUL (!) When Someone Dies?

Okay, but what about when someone dies and our feelings are not so much grief, but more along the lines of… oh, I don’t know… relief?

Or, maybe gratitude?

Or perhaps even in extreme situations, feelings of joy?

Yesterday I wrote about how most Americans not only did not grieve the killing of Osama bin Laden back on May 11, 2011, but we actually felt somewhere on the spectrum from relief to joy.

Joy that someone is killed? Isn’t that… inhumane?

I say yes and no.

Yes because life is sacred. This is why all major religions have attempted to enshrine the value of life by outlawing murder. Killing another person is tragic, and feeling happy about that should indeed sound alarm bells.

And yet…

All major religions have also attempted to reckon with the existence of evil. There seems to be a threshold where a person can do enough wicked to where it then becomes not only justifiable to remove that person from existing, but it might even tip into the category of being for the greater good.

It would seem that whatever good is accomplished by their removal counters (or even supersedes) whatever bad might be accrued by killing a person.

Conditioned to Mourn the Loss of an Innocent and Cheer the Loss of the Wicked

It may be overly simplistic, but I’m trying to make a point.

It seems there exists a reasonable spectrum of what is acceptable to feel when it comes to people being killed.

Here’s a chart I made that illustrates this connection between how much grief/sadness we feel with our perception of how innocent the victim is.

When it’s an innocent person (a child, for instance), we would expect people to feel 100% grief and 0% joy. When it’s an obviously evil person (Hitler, bin Laden, Dahmer, Manson), we would expect to feel very little grief.

I can’t imagine there’s much disagreement with this theory in principle, right?

Almost all our stories, shows, and movies have conditioned us to weep when the hero or the beloved character is killed, and cheer on the ultimate destruction of the “bad guy.”

That’s why yesterday I said that I understood and even agreed with the absence of grief, as well as the expressions ranging from grief to joy, at the news of bin Laden’s eradication.

But what about in less obvious cases?

What about all those in-the-middle scenarios in the chart above? The extremes are pretty simple. But the middle is messy.

To talk about the messy middle I want to talk about my parent’s waterbed.

Boulders on a Waterbed

Before my parents divorced they had a waterbed.

I’m not saying they divorced because of the waterbed, but I’m not willing to rule it out either.

What a weird trend.

Anyway, while I truly cannot imagine trying to sleep on a waterbed, as a kid it was a freaking blast to play on a waterbed. My brothers and I would waste no opportunity on Saturday mornings to not just wrestle my dad and beg him to go to Roth’s IRA and get us donuts, but also wrestle one another on the ever undulating waves of the bed.

Waterbeds are contained in a thick wooden frame, and the frame was the perfect size for small children like us to stand on—as though we stood on the edge of the local swimming pool, ready to leap. And leap we did.

Should we ever dog pile in the center of the bed, our collective mass was so strong that it pulled in the mattress from all four corners. Meaning, if you imagine a blue racquetball ball (because my parent’s used to play) sitting motionless in the corner of the bed, if just one of us jumped in the center then the ball might not move.

Add a second kid? Maybe the ball moves, but likely just up and down as it rides the waves. (Seriously though… who could sleep on waves!?)

But once that third kid jumped on the pile, the sack-that-held-the-water would be depressed significantly enough to cause everything on the surface to be pulled toward the center.

Including that unsuspecting ball in the corner.

The Spectrum of Impact

Let’s tie all this together and see if we can make sense out of this conversation about grief and killing and so on.

Let’s say that the object in the middle of a waterbed represents a person, and the waterbed represents anyone who might experience suffering as a result of the life and actions of that person.

If the person is pure and innocent, never harming a fly, then they would be like a feather on a waterbed. It just sits there. Resting in the center. Having no impact on the surface of the bed because they bring no pain or suffering to anyone.

No one is negatively impacted by a feather.

However, if the person is a bin Laden type, then they would be like a massive boulder. Not only are they crushing multitudes of people directly under their weight, but the ripple effect of their life and their actions extends well beyond their immediate contact and drags down myriad more people in the surrounding vicinity. Even unsuspecting racquetballs in the corner of the bed roll to the center, as virtually everyone is harmed by the impact of this individual.

Everyone is negatively impacted by a boulder.

To stretch this metaphor further, let’s keep with the boulder as a representation of bin Laden and say that those directly under the weight of the boulder are those who were most impacted, aka, those lost on 9/11. As you move out from the center you can imagine the crushing impact of the boulder being slightly lessened. These might be the family members of those lost in 9/11. Those still caught under the edges of the weight of the boulders, but not as directly or intensely as those in the center.

Likewise, people on the edge of the bed were also impacted by 9/11 of course, yet even more indirectly. You could think of the edges of the bed being populated by the rest of us Americans. Destabilized by the boulder to be sure, but not nearly as intense as those directly involved.

And then if we must, we could say that perhaps a few people stood on the wooden edges of the bed. These were maybe the handful of people who truly loved the boulder. I suppose it’s possible that some people (parents? children? maybe…) do indeed grieve the loss of even the most wicked among us.

Okay, do you follow all this?

The greater the weight of the object, the greater the impact of suffering.

Which then means, the greater also the relief (and joy!) when that object is finally removed from the bed (aka, killed by Navy Seals).

Whether it’s psychological or emotional relief (because while they may not have been directly harmed by its presence, the boulder still caused fear and pain) or actual physical relief, we can understand and appreciate that taking a significant weight of oppression off of the backs and the necks of the oppressed would be cause for celebration by those who can now breathe easier as a result.

I say again: no one disputes this when it comes to the extremes.

But what about smaller boulders?

What about people who bring fear and pain to some but not all?

What about individuals whose words and actions are directly (or even indirectly) causing suffering to certain groups of people, but might be providing positive benefits to others?

Instead of a boulder on a waterbed, what if it’s just a bowling ball?