https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/post/23536922667/sonder
sonder
n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
Transcript:
Good morning. This is just a - felt like a heavy day, so I felt like I would chat a little bit about grief. As many of you know, I am currently commemorating a first anniversary of a significant loss last year of… I won’t go into who, but it was a very significant loss. I put up a memorial of it. And I have been reflecting a lot on the sonder of it all.
Sonder is another word from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows that refers to the sudden realization that everybody else has a life and an internal experience that is likely at least as vivid as yours, if not moreso, and that they all have as many life experiences as you had at their age, and their life experiences are just as significant to them as yours are to you.
And so, one thing I come back to is just the astonishment that I don’t see more people openly weeping - like on the bus or in the street, when people have just lost their mother. People have just lost their friend. People have just lost their partner. People have just lost their child sometimes. And we don’t talk about it. We don’t talk about grief. It’s this private thing that we all have to just keep inside, it feels like in this culture. Maybe it’s different in other cultures. Maybe it’s more open.
I know when I was in Turkey, it felt like people really wanted to know how my family members were. And they remembered who my family was from conversation to conversation, even if I didn’t know them that well. It was just very important to them to be aware of who was grieving, it felt like. And I don’t feel like we have that in American culture. I feel like it’s considered rude to bring up. It’s considered to be flamboyant in some way. Attention seeking .
And then the consequence is that we just, it just gets heavier over time if you don’t talk about it. If you don’t bring it up. I’d like you guys… [I’d like[ to invite people, if they feel like it. You may want to make an alt account, a throwaway account for this, but if you would like to share your expeirences of grief in the comments, I would appreciate reading about it and knowing I am not alone. Otherwise, I hope that you’re having a good day.
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To add to this as well, in Turkey, the custom is to wear a photo of the deceased person on your shirt, along with the birth and death year, and to wear sunglasses, at least at the funeral I attended. This way, people understood why you were crying without having to ask. I thought that was such a wonderful thing.
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