Words by Shaeden Berry
In my early twenties—a time far too long ago for my liking—I met a friend at a bar for drinks. During our catch-up, my friend expressed concern over a mutual acquaintance. The mutual acquaintance, they told me, was not doing so well; barely sleeping and experiencing intense anxiety. All of it stemmed from a night a few weeks prior when she had been dining alfresco, near a T-Junction, and, unexpectedly, witnessed a car accident that had resulted in the death of one of the people involved.
“I think they have PTSD,” my friend said.
In that moment, as I felt sympathy, I also experienced a flash of guilt. I realised that it hadn’t ever crossed my mind that a bystander might suffer PTSD after witnessing an accident. Which, in retrospect, was absurd – of course a bystander would be substantially affected by what they’d seen. Why on earth had I been surprised?
I continued to think about the experience of our mutual acquaintance. In fact, I continued to think about it for years and years, until a decade later I even decided to channel my thoughts about it into a short story that would then, in turn, eventually become an entire novel, At Café 64. I couldn’t stop ruminating about how someone in this situation must have been feeling. There’s complexity to grieving when it comes to tragic events, especially when your relationship to the event is not particularly straightforward. Had this person been questioning the depth and breadth of their emotions? Had they felt as if they shouldn’t be struggling, because they didn’t know anyone directly involved? Had they compared their reaction to the reactions of, say, the family of the person who was killed, and tried to temper their own feelings accordingly?
My questioning mind turned to other people who might be required to navigate grief and PTSD differently in the wake of awfulness – particularly when said awfulness stems from the intentional actions of a perpetrator. Specially, the family members of said perpetrator. Because there can sometimes be grief there; grieving the person that they thought they knew, the person that they may have loved. But how can they grieve for someone who has done something horrible? Would they be wondering if it is okay for them to grieve, in the shadow of the other victims who might have lost their lives at the hand of their loved one?
Much of our exposure to tragic events comes via the media. The news reporter standing onsite, gravely delivering the news to the screen, or the stark black and white words of a news article, interspersed with photos of ambulances and police cars and scenes cordoned off from prying eyes. We do hear from people who were on the scene at the time of the event; their experience packaged up to a single sentence in an article, or cut into a short, thirty-second segment in a news report. Often, they’re used as vehicles by the media to flesh out descriptions of what happened. Less often, are they talking about how their bodies are probably still shaking with adrenalin and terror, or how they close their eyes and still see scenes play across their vision. The talk of emotions and devastation is often reserved for those directly involved – whether through loss or injury – which, of course, makes sense, given they are often the most affected.
I think, then, that naturally sometimes our ideas about who is allowed to grieve or struggle in the aftermath of horrific events is shaped by the media. We limit our scope of “victim” to what’s presented to us by news articles and social media and reporting on the television, and that can mean we don’t really sit and think about the sheer breadth of people affected.
There is also the role of the media in the portrayal of family members of perpetrators. In our current world of fast-paced news and whoever gets the headline out first wins, the media often rocks up on the doorstep of the perpetrator’s family before they’ve even had time to process what has happened.
The expected response from them is immediate condemnation, all the while most likely being aware of the judgement of people onlooking, who are raking eyes over them for any sense that they are, in some way, to blame, or knew something and didn’t stop it, or are complicit, somehow.
I remember, once, in the wake of an act of violence, the parents of the perpetrator being interviewed less than 24 hours after the fact, standing outside of what looked like their house, microphones in their face, popping up on my Instagram feed under a news account. A comment caught my eye – “leave them alone,” someone had written, “they’re victims too.” Compassion: a rarity on social media. But, as I scrolled other comments, the sentiment echoed in others. “They’re victims too.”
They are victims, and so are people who are bystanders and witnesses, and so are the people who lose their lives, and people who are injured, and people whose livelihood is affected and the first responders – the reverberating effects are like the ripples from a pond after a pebble is dropped in the centre. No one has a monopoly on being a victim, or on grieving.
Conversations around issues like these are complex and extremely tricky to have, because no one – least of all me – wants to take away from victims and survivors, from people who are killed or murdered or injured or assaulted. It is a balancing act between having empathy and an understanding of the nuances and simultaneously not wanting to drown out the voices that rightfully deserve to be heard the loudest.
When I wrote At Café 64, I wanted to look at grief from all angles – a bystander, a family member of the perpetrator, a woman who lost her fiancée – and in giving equal voice and emotional weight to all three arcs, try to find that balance. I wanted to give readers pause, to give them food for thought, to leave them with the question, but maybe not the clear-cut answer to: who do we allow to grieve?
