August 28, 2026

Some Deaths Get Grief. Others Get Applause.

What Dolly Parton’s death, and several others, are teaching me about grief, gravity, and why we sort the dead before we let ourselves feel anything for them.

I saw something recently that I haven’t been able to shake.

A woman was sitting in the gallery at the Lindsay Clancy murder trial in Massachusetts, where a mother who killed her three young children is being tried to determine whether she was criminally responsible for what she did. The camera found her, and she smiled. She winked. She seemed to be enjoying the attention. All I could think was, what are we doing?

Three children are dead. Whatever you believe about Lindsay Clancy’s mental state, whatever verdict you think the jury should reach, three little kids lost their lives. Their names were Cora, Dawson, and Callan. They were five, three, and eight months old. There is nothing light about the room where their deaths are being examined. Nothing.

Maybe that’s why the image bothered me as much as it did. Because lately I keep seeing versions of the same thing.

Massachusetts recently passed another law expanding protections around abortion care. I watched women surrounding the governor smile, applaud, and cheer as the bill was signed. I understand that people profoundly disagree about abortion. Some see that legislation as protecting women’s freedom, healthcare, and gaining control of their own bodies. Others see it as permitting the taking of an innocent human life, one that will never have a voice or a say of its own. That’s almost beside my point. Whatever side you’re on, what exactly are we cheering? Abortion is, at minimum, an extraordinarily serious decision involving pregnancy, a woman, and a developing human life. Even if you believe unequivocally in the right to choose it, shouldn’t there still be some gravity attached to the choice? Why must everything become a celebration?

Then there was Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare executive shot to death on a Manhattan sidewalk. Before his body was even cold, people online were making jokes, celebrating his killer, and treating murder as some kind of righteous act of resistance. You can despise the American healthcare system. You can believe insurance companies have hurt people. You can believe executives should be held accountable for the decisions their companies make. A wife still lost her husband. Two boys lost their father. A man was shot in the back and left to die on a sidewalk. That should sober us.

Then Charlie Kirk was assassinated while speaking on a college campus. Again, almost immediately, there were people celebrating. Maybe you hated Charlie Kirk. Maybe you believed everything he stood for was wrong. Maybe his politics offended you. He was still a husband and father who was shot to death while speaking. His wife became a widow. His children lost their dad. That should sober us too.

Watching all of it, I found myself asking a simple question. Have we forgotten how to mourn?

And then Dolly Parton died. Her passing has been met very differently. People are mourning her. They’re sharing songs and stories. They’re talking about her humor, her generosity, her faith, her philanthropy, and the strange gift she had for seeming to belong to everyone without really belonging to any political tribe. People are sad. I find that reassuring, because it means we haven’t completely lost the instinct I’m talking about. We still know how to stop, remember a life, and feel the weight of someone’s passing.

Which makes me wonder if I’ve been asking the wrong question. Maybe we haven’t forgotten how to mourn. Maybe we’ve started deciding who deserves to be mourned.

Dolly doesn’t require much sorting. Most people liked her. She crossed political, cultural, and generational lines in a way very few public figures do. We don’t have to figure out whether she was on our team before we allow ourselves to feel something about losing her. But Brian Thompson required sorting. Charlie Kirk certainly did. Even the life involved in a pregnancy gets sorted according to what we believe about abortion. Even the deaths of three children can become wrapped inside an argument about their mother’s mental illness, criminal responsibility, postpartum psychosis, and the justice system.

And maybe that’s where something changes. We encounter death, then immediately run it through the machinery of ideology, grievance, politics, and tribe. Was this person one of us? Did I agree with him? Did she represent something I support? Did he work for an industry I despise? Does this death prove my side was right? Did the person have it coming? Only after we’ve sorted the dead into the proper category do we decide what emotion we’re permitted to have. Grief. Sympathy. Indifference. Sometimes even celebration. We sort the dead before we let ourselves feel anything for them.

So why do we do this?

Here’s where I’m landing, at least for now.

I think part of why this happens is that grief for someone on the other side can feel like a concession. If I let myself feel something for a man I disagreed with, some part of me worries it means I was wrong to disagree with him at all. So instead of feeling the loss, I protect the position. I let the side I’ve already chosen decide the emotion for me before the emotion gets a chance to show up on its own.

There’s probably something safer in that too, though I’m still working this part out. A confident reaction feels like conviction, whether it’s grief or contempt. Sitting with a complicated feeling about someone you didn’t like doesn’t feel like anything at all. It just feels like confusion, and confusion isn’t rewarded anywhere, not online, not in conversation, not in how we see ourselves. So we skip it. We reach for the side instead of the feeling, because the side is available immediately and the feeling might take longer than we’re willing to sit with.

I’m genuinely still trying to understand why we do this. This is just where my thinking is right now.

I’m not suggesting these situations are morally or legally identical. They aren’t. What strikes me is how differently we react to them.

There used to be things that made people lower their voices. A funeral. A courtroom where someone’s death was being examined. A family receiving terrible news. The taking of a human life. These were moments that called for a certain humility, even when we disagreed about everything that came before them. Death reminded us, at least for a moment, that we were dealing with something bigger than our politics.

Maybe that’s the distinction I’m struggling to put my finger on. We probably haven’t lost our ability to mourn entirely. What we may be losing is the belief that death itself deserves some reverence, even when we don’t particularly like the person who died.

I think we need some of that back. Every death isn’t morally equivalent. Every person isn’t innocent. The hard questions around abortion, mental illness, healthcare, and political violence don’t disappear simply because I’m asking for more restraint. It’s precisely because those questions are hard that serious things should make us serious. Death should make us a little quieter, a little more humble, a little slower to turn another person’s tragedy into content, a punchline, a political victory, or an opportunity to perform for a camera.

Maybe that’s what’s bothering me enough to write about this in the first place. I don’t have the whole answer. I just know there’s something deeply unsettling about a culture in which our first response to death can depend on whether we approved of the person before they died. Because once we decide that some deaths deserve grief while others deserve applause, the problem isn’t simply our politics anymore.

The problem is us.