Judith Templeton’s approach to grief exemplifies a kind of bureaucratic coldness that the story condemns. At the beginning of the story, Judith—a white Canadian woman—enlists Shaila to help her navigate “the complications of culture, language, and customs” that she faces when she meets with grieving families who immigrated from India. Judith seems, on the one hand, aware of her own shortcomings—and, by extension, those of the Canadian government—when communicating with families affected by the tragedy. But she also views cultures, languages, and customs different than her own first and foremost as complications that can be bureaucratically solved.
That perspective, and its deleterious effects, become clear when Shaila accompanies Judith to meet with a Sikh couple who lost their sons in the plane bombing. Judith aims to persuade the couple, with Shaila’s assistance, to sign papers that will ensure they receive benefits from the Canadian government. The couple insists, though, that God will provide for them, not the government, and that their sons, who were killed in the attack, will help them when they return. After Judith and Shaila leave without getting the couple to sign the papers, Judith says to Shaila, “You see what I’m up against? … Their stubbornness and ignorance is driving me crazy.” Shaila thinks of pointing out the shortsightedness of Judith’s approach by telling her, “In our culture, it is a parent’s duty to hope.” She refrains from doing so, though, because it has become futile to try to effectively communicate with Judith. Judith has become rigidly attached to a bureaucratic mode of understanding the world, which organizes grief into predictable stages and sees people grieving the death of their sons as obstacles to be overcome and complications to be untangled, not human beings to be understood.
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Bureaucracy Quotes in The Management of Grief
Dr. Sharma, the treasurer of the Indo-Canada society, pulls me into the hallway. He wants to know if I am worried about money. His wife, who has just come up from the basement with a tray of empty cups and glasses, scolds him. “Don’t bother Mrs. Bhave with mundane details.”
“Nothing I can do will make any difference,” I say. “We must all grieve in our own way.”
Kusum and I take the same direct flight to Bombay, so I can help her clear customs quickly. But we have to argue with a man with a uniform… Kusum won’t let her coffins out of sight, and I shan’t desert her though I know that my parents, elderly and diabetic, must be waiting in a stuffy car in a scorching lot.
“You bastard!” I scream at the man… “You think we’re smuggling contraband in these coffins!”
“In the textbooks on grief management,” [Judith] replies—I am her confidante, I realize, one of the few whose grief has not sprung bizarre obsessions—“there are stages to pass through: rejection, depression, acceptance, reconstruction.” She has compiled a chart and finds that six months after the tragedy, none of us still reject reality, but only a handful are reconstructing. “Depressed Acceptance” is the plateau we’ve reached.
“God provides and God takes away,” he says.
I want to say, But only men destroy and give back nothing. “My boys and my husband are not coming back,” I say. “We have to understand that.”
Now the old woman responds. “But who is to say? Man alone does not decide these things.” To this her husband adds his agreement.
