Grief Tourism

Traveling to the memorial services or home towns of those who have died, in order to pay one’s respects – despite having no personal connection with the deceased.

“For two years the people of Wootton Bassett, Wiltshire, have stopped to pay their respects to dead soldiers repatriated to RAF Lyneham and driven through their town en route to the mortuary at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford,” Will Pavia wrote in The Times of London:

The memorial has become a meeting place and the offerings left there a talking point. But [on July 28], for the first time, the chief topic of conversation was the ceremony itself. …

The delicate question being addressed is whether the tributes for which the town is now famous have got out of hand.

According to Pavia, the increasing popularity of these ceremonies (on July 14, thousands of people came from all over Britain to pay tribute as the bodies of 8 soldiers killed in Afghanistan were driven through the town) has prompted some unease. One “softly spoken lady” told Pavia:

“I thought it was a three-ring circus … It started as a spontaneous thing, but it’s grown like Topsy, and we’ve lost something. … It’s become an event, trailed in the news … almost as if it was advertised. Personally I think some people came just to see it, like grief tourists.”

Charges of “grief tourism” are not new. In 2002, residents of Soham – the English town where 10-year-olds Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman were murdered – pleaded for a reprieve from busloads of “mourners.” In 2004, Patrick West criticized “grief tourism” in a report titled “Conspicuous Compassion: Why Sometimes it Really is Cruel to be Kind”:

We live in a post-emotional age, one characterized by crocodile tears and manufactured emotion. Ostentatious caring allows a lonely nation to forge new social bonds. Additionally, it serves as a form of catharsis.

We saw this at its most ghoulish after the demise of Diana. In truth, mourners were not crying for her, but for themselves. …

These recreational grievers were now emoting about Jill Dando, Linda McCartney or the Soham girls.

(The University of Central Lancashire’s Dark Tourism Forum offers an academic perspective on the popularity of visits to the Killing Fields of Cambodia, Auschwitz–Birkenau, New York’s Ground Zero, Arlington National Cemetery, and others.)

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steve wang July 30, 2009 · 3:30 pm

To develop a ritual that honors the dead–especially soldiers who died for their country–is of the highest good.

For that ritual to become widely acclaimed and widely attended is a sign of civilized culture.

Roman July 30, 2009 · 4:19 pm

Is going to a place such as the USS Arizona memorial to pay tribute to lost sailors wrong? No, war casualties have always been honored with memorials and paying tribute to the lost is an important aspect of human nature and citizenship.

karen lyons kalmenson July 30, 2009 · 4:21 pm

echo-tourism…travelling someplace where you can hear yourself talk over and over again

Beth July 30, 2009 · 4:56 pm

Sorry, it’s creepy. And it bogarts the genuine emotions of genuine grievers by trivializing it. How can you grieve, honestly, for a stranger and a stranger’s loss? It’s none of your business.

As for Princess Diana, that’s a different case: she touched many lives in a personal way, and her loss was genuinely felt.
Michael Jackson: well…I can see where fans would be sad (I’m not one). But the media reaction was totally out of line and over the top.

A friend of mine once traveled to Nova Scotia to visit Catherine’s Cove, scene of the plane disaster. Despite knowing no one on board, not even knowing anyone who knew anyone on board. Grief tourism at its worst: I was appalled at the looky-loo aspect. We’re no longer friends.

Kate July 30, 2009 · 5:24 pm

I think these “recreational mourners” truly feel a connection to the deceased. The question is why?

Scott hester-Johnson July 30, 2009 · 5:56 pm

Souvenir sellers at Ground Zero, anyone?

Despicable.

Lee Niven July 30, 2009 · 5:58 pm

When 9/11 happened we New Yorkers were urged by Guiliani to attend police & firefighter funerals. I went to two & felt good about it… there were so many & I think the families appreciated the turn-out. I would never dream about attending a funeral to which I had no connection, but people who’ve died for their (our) country? – We are all brothers.
– Lee

sipa July 30, 2009 · 6:13 pm

So if you did not lose anyone in Vietnam, going to the Vietnam memorial to pay tribute to the dead , would be ostentatious grief tourism?

Nancy B. July 30, 2009 · 6:31 pm

“In truth, mourners were not crying for her [Diana], but for themselves. …”

This in itself is not a new idea. Consider “To a Young Child,” a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins:

MÁRGARÉT, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
___________

Yes, there may be something rather ghoulish in our displays of grief for people we’ve never known, but perhaps our mourning is for what we don’t know and have yet to learn about ourselves.

Nat Case July 30, 2009 · 7:17 pm

Why is going to the funeral of a neighbor you didn’t know any different from paying respects to a private figure who dies in a public way. It is not wrong to pay respects to ANY dead person. What IS needed is some sense of public decorum, of rules of etiquette. These are important when we know the deceased or their family, and they are important when we enter this relatively new arena. Or maybe not so new. What is new is the way the story of a public death becomes public fodder, and the funeral and memorial move from private to public. But private citizens have long been adopted by the public in death, sometimes with the blessing of family, sometimes not. But trying to tell people not to allow their grief play, to not pay respects, is itself disrespectful.

ellie July 30, 2009 · 7:37 pm

How good to hear about the Dark Tourism Forum! I am going to check that out in the hope of better understanding the hordes of tourists descending on NYC since 9/12/01 to “pay their respects” at “ground zero.” It wouldn’t bother me quite so much if they just admitted they wanted to see for themselves where thousands of people died and buildings toppled to the ground…but this thing about “paying one’s respects” (as if anyone cared ).

I wasn’t aware of the phenomenon until Thanksgiving of 2001. A large group of tourists was walking behind the table where I was having dinner with a friend when one of the mothers in this group hectored the teenagers with her: “Y’all have to git up early tomorrow if ya want to go to ground zero!” Everyone I knew here in NYC was sickened by thought of going anywhere near that site, so it was quite a jolt to learn what a big attraction it had become for tourists and that it was now called “ground zero.”

More recently, a couple of months ago I was on a subway here and the leader of a large group of French tourists was outlining the itinerary for the next day, which included “dejeuner a Ground Zero!”

Tushar Aggarwal July 30, 2009 · 8:20 pm

I would certainly adore to visit Amsterdam where Anne Frank was trapped before being taken to a camp. I would also wish to visit the camps to really feel the atrocities of the Nazis.

In my context, Grief tourism would certainly mean that. Visiting places in Holland, Russia and other countries where such inhuman actions have taken place, or worse, still taking place.

Earth-resident July 31, 2009 · 4:34 am

About traveling in general:
most of the travelers have no place and nothing to do where ever they go.
P.S.I myself did never flew ( from Europe) to my producer´s funeral ( USA).

Philip Stone July 31, 2009 · 5:24 am

I am the Editor of The Dark Tourism Forum (as mentioned in this article) based at the University of Central Lancashire in England, where as an Academic, the intention is to ‘shine light on dark tourism research’. The Forum is an online collaboration of academics and other partners, from across the world, where we attempt to understand (and publish) interrelationships with the dead, the commercialisation of death, and its public contemporary consumption.

With a new book due out in September 2009 about the subject, I would suggest that so-called ‘grief tourism’ or ‘dark tourism’ is more about life than death, thus the three central facets of the grief tourism concept, to me at least, is about a broader understanding of morality, mortality, and consequent meaning…. people of course will have variable views on ethics and how to deal with death (in public); yet it is these very conversations (views) that add to our understanding – so long may they continue – the (moral) conversations that is!

miriam July 31, 2009 · 9:34 am

A letter to the editor this past Monday from the director of the Hart Island Project led me to more Web pages about Hart Island, the site of the city’s potter’s field. Hart Island is off-limits to the general public; were it not, it would be overrun by tourists who would never find what they’d come for.

Aging Boomer July 31, 2009 · 6:36 pm

Ellie quoted a visitor to NYC as follows:

“Y’all have to git up early tomorrow if ya want to go to ground zero!”
____________________

Why couldn’t the poster have made this a declarative sentence, one that would have better suited the serious tone of a discussion about death and mourning? Was the mimicking of dialect really necessary? It smacks of class-based prejudice to me.

Ellie, I assume you “Love New York,” as the advertising slogan goes. If you’re representative of residents of the city, I’m loath to visit the place again. Thank you for helping to deplete the tourist revenue there.

Aging Boomer July 31, 2009 · 6:41 pm

I said earlier that Ellie’s comment “smacks of class-based prejudice to me.” I might also add that there’s a certain provincialism in what she says.

That’s it. I’m not usually one to make ad feminam (or ad hominem) statements, but I was surprised that she used a forum on grief tourism to speak of her disgruntlement at those who help to fill her city’s coffers.

ACW August 2, 2009 · 4:48 pm

The highly overwrought displays of public grief for strangers – especially for Princess Diana and then Michael Jackson, but also regarding the WTC – are about the “griever” rather than the lost one. They are striking a pose, loudly inviting everyone to admire the depth and quality of their grief, and what sensitive souls they are. Come off it.

The real griever, I think is more like Cordelia, who refused to heave her heart into her mouth.

And having heard, more than once, exactly the kind of comment recounted by Ellie – complete with accents, and with no trace of grief at all, but with exclamatory, delighted eagerness – at a time when the WTC was still a big, smoking hole in the ground – I’m sorry, but I’m with her. There were a hell of a lot of people who came to gawk at a site of mass death and were almost certainly disappointed not to see dismembered body parts lying around. I’m sorry if that’s cruel, but I was in this city and I heard the tourists’ conversations myself.

mjwalrus August 4, 2009 · 1:02 am

We have Katrina Tours in New Orleans. Every time I see the buses drive by I get really grossed out.