The central conflict of “The Management of Grief” is between those directly experiencing grief (represented by the protagonist Shaila Bhave) and those who know about grief secondhand (represented by Judith Templeton, a Canadian government official who manages the government benefits for the family members of those killed in the plane bombing at the story’s center). Judith reads textbooks on “grief management” and insists that there are proper steps—“rejection, depression, acceptance, reconstruction”—to manage grief. But Shaila, who lost her husband and two sons in the bombing, experiences grief as something much more mysterious and overwhelming. Sometimes Shaila’s grief threatens to tear her apart, while at other times she has visions of her absent loved ones, who comfort her in her pain and ultimately bless her to continue the adventure they began together. In that sense, the story presents grief as something more like an uncontrollable storm, something that must be experienced, not controlled or managed.
Shaila struggles to explain these more potent, unpredictable aspects of grief to Judith, and she eventually stops helping Judith communicate with the other families affected by the plane bombing because she’s so frustrated that Judith can’t understand. In that rejection of Judith—and in the peace that Shaila finally finds—the story suggests that Judith’s approach to “managing” a supposedly predictable kind of grief is ineffective. Instead, as Shaila demonstrates, processing grief requires fully experiencing it without knowing where it might lead.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Managing Versus Experiencing Grief ThemeTracker
Managing Versus Experiencing Grief 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.”
I wonder if pills alone explain this calm. Not peace, just a deadening quiet… Sound can reach me, but my body is tensed, ready to scream. I hear their voices all around me. I hear my boys and Vikram cry, “Mommy, Shaila!” and their screams insulate me, like headphones.
“Why does God give us so much if all along He intends to take it away?” Kusum asks me.
“Nothing I can do will make any difference,” I say. “We must all grieve in our own way.”
“It’s a parent’s duty to hope,” [Dr. Ranganathan] says. “It is foolish to rule out possibilities that have not been tested. I myself have not surrendered hope.”
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!”
[My mother] grew up a rationalist. My parents abhor mindless mortification.
The zamindar’s daughter [my grandmother] kept stubborn faith in Vedic rituals; my parents rebelled. I am trapped between two modes of knowledge… like my husband’s spirit, I flutter between worlds.
“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.
I do not know where this voyage I have begun will end. I do not know which direction I will take. I dropped the package on a park bench and started walking.
