Compassion, Mourning and Sharing the World

It is widely recognized that adopting an emotively charged attitude to others comes at a cost. An obvious example is the phenomenon of ‘compassion fatigue’ suffered by care-workers who frequently deal with human suffering and undergo considerable emotional strain as a result. A comparable but more widespread phenomenon occurs with the loss of someone close. In this paper I compare two attitudes to death, and two ways of understanding mourning: one emphasizes the need to move on after loss has been suffered, the other stresses the need to reaffirm the value of what was lost. I argue that the former approach, which has dominated recent thought on this topic, represents a potentially damaging withdrawal from the socialemotional grounds of compassion and related values.