How what could have been a dull discovery became an illuminating one, and how that illuminating discovery, in turn, flipped other elements on their head—allowing them to be read as something transcendental instead of transactional. But really, a window into what we’re searching for (internally and externally) when we’re searching for answers about grief.
As it turns out, data began with death.
In 1640s London—the years before the bubonic plague—a fellow named John Graunt began collecting and publishing the number of deaths each week, the number of deaths in different age groups, and the causes of those deaths.1 As plague crept into cities and townships, Graunt’s mortality-based bookkeeping provided a framework for calculating and tracking the sudden horrors.2 And overtime, his general practices proved helpful in a variety of applications.
Horror and devastation: the birthplace of statistics.
Now, as I’m neither a big fan of running the numbers nor of historical epidemiology, you should know this isn’t just some tidbit I’ve been carrying around in my pocket. Rather, I accidentally called it up the other day while down an otherwise mundane rabbit hole having to do with keyword phrases for one of my consulting gigs.3 There I was: Pointing and clicking and clicking and pointing, when a characteristically petulant mid-afternoon voice in my head asked, “What kind of asshole invented data, anyway?”
Punching that (more or less) into Google led to my discovery of Graunt’s Bills of Mortality and the connection between data and death—but it was the next step that nudged me into an even more interesting meta-level wading pool of statistical analysis and ennui.
Instead of continuing on with the original task at hand, I clocked myself out of client work for the day and sidetracked back to a keyword analytics site I had come across earlier, one offering to take your essential topic or product and “collate, track, and alert you to the important questions being asked [about it] on Google.”
You could do it for baseball hats, miniature handbags, frozen gluten-free pizza dough, coffee mugs, attorney services, lawnmower repair, toxin-free nail polish, or whatever other hole or need you’d like to fill.
Me, being who I am, I typed in “grief.”
The results I was served—sortable in infographic formats or in a list (and complete with cost-per-click dollar amounts, search volume data, and links to the live Google search result pages)—were rounded up into the Five Ws and then some.
To a marketer’s eye they were customer insights.
To my eye they were ten stanzas that read like a search song; like questioning choruses, searching verses, and querying refrains.
“Google searches are the most important dataset ever collected on the human psyche,” reads a pop-up on the site from a data exec whose book is called Everybody Lies. Okay, sure, but they can also be a tone poem, a post-modern lyric sheet, a mirror.
I sat with the questions in the tone poem for a long time, thinking of the states of being that prompted their arrival into the Googlesphere—and then, mildly horrified that I went there first, I thought of the states of being that prompted their arrival into human consciousness to begin with. Who are these people? What are their stories? How are they doing, today—right now? Did they find the answers they needed?
Eventually I played with adding my own lines; drawing out and interweaving a narrative. I played with scrambling the lines and rearranging them. I made up some constraints for how I might interact with the questions and make them my own, and then I played around with that.
But the questions are not my own and that’s the point. They’re all of us. And on their own, like us, they are tender and vulnerable and poignant and banal and mysterious and worrisome and sometimes funny.
In the end, I resisted even giving them a title.
They’re here for you, below. The raw data itself.
How much of yourself do you see in these queries?
Are grief and sorrow the same?
Are grief and depression the same thing?
Are grief and sorrow the same thing?
Are grief and sadness the same?
Are grief and guilt the same thing?
Are grief support groups helpful?
Can grief make you sick?
Can grief kill you?
Can grief cause dementia?
Can grief cause anxiety?
Can grief make you tired?
Can grief cause memory loss?
How grief works
How grief affects the brain
How grief affects the body
How grief changes you
How grief changes relationships
How grief affects mental health
What grief looks like
What grief means
What grief feels like
What grief does to the brain
What grief does to the body
What grief really looks like
When grief goes deep book
When grief is overwhelming
When grief hits
When grief is too much
When grief comes knocking
When grief runs deep
Where grief resides
Where grieving begins
Where is grief stored in the body?
Where is grief held in the body?
Where does grief live in the body?
Where does grief sit in the body?
Which grief pattern is universal?
Which grief is the worst?
Which grief and sorrow?
Grief which chakra?
Which profound grief?
Which stage of grief is the hardest?
Who said grief is the price of love?
Who wrote grief comes in waves?
Who prolonged grief disorder?
People who grief
Someone who grief
Who is grief stricken?
Why grief is important?
Why grief is like a ball in a box?
Why grief is good?
Why grief is so hard?
Why grief counseling is so important?
Why grief comes in waves?
Will grief affect my pregnancy?
Will grief aon?
Will grief be banned mtg?
Will grief kill me?
Will grief ever end?
Will grief ever go away?
SOURCE: Journal of Official Statistics
SOURCE: 365 Data Science
So many great questions.
I'll take a stab at addressing a few:
I have wished grief would kill me so my sorrow would end.
I believe that grief is, indeed, the price of love. Love is expensive in this way.
Grief lurks about, huddles in the corner and sneers.
Grief and depression are not exactly the same thing (otherwise we would not have two words to describe it, but only one. Perhaps other languages have many. If I were like you, I might Google this and discover treasures to have and to hold).
I am often overwhelmed by grief, and I give myself to it freely and gladly, though I am not sure this is a healthy thing to do.
Sadness is a state of mind; grief envelopes the entire being.
Grief has aged me like nothing ever has, and yet I continue to seek love.
Grief can be exhausting. The antidote is sleep.
Thank you, Laura. I love the work you do.
Just a big thank you. I loved this…so good for my brain/heart and my grief/heart.