Grief Tourism

Traveling to the memorial services or home towns of those who have died, in order to pay one’s respects – despite having no personal connection with the deceased.

“For two years the people of Wootton Bassett, Wiltshire, have stopped to pay their respects to dead soldiers repatriated to RAF Lyneham and driven through their town en route to the mortuary at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford,” Will Pavia wrote in The Times of London:

The memorial has become a meeting place and the offerings left there a talking point. But [on July 28], for the first time, the chief topic of conversation was the ceremony itself. …

The delicate question being addressed is whether the tributes for which the town is now famous have got out of hand.

According to Pavia, the increasing popularity of these ceremonies (on July 14, thousands of people came from all over Britain to pay tribute as the bodies of 8 soldiers killed in Afghanistan were driven through the town) has prompted some unease. One “softly spoken lady” told Pavia:

“I thought it was a three-ring circus … It started as a spontaneous thing, but it’s grown like Topsy, and we’ve lost something. … It’s become an event, trailed in the news … almost as if it was advertised. Personally I think some people came just to see it, like grief tourists.”

Charges of “grief tourism” are not new. In 2002, residents of Soham – the English town where 10-year-olds Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman were murdered – pleaded for a reprieve from busloads of “mourners.” In 2004, Patrick West criticized “grief tourism” in a report titled “Conspicuous Compassion: Why Sometimes it Really is Cruel to be Kind”:

We live in a post-emotional age, one characterized by crocodile tears and manufactured emotion. Ostentatious caring allows a lonely nation to forge new social bonds. Additionally, it serves as a form of catharsis.

We saw this at its most ghoulish after the demise of Diana. In truth, mourners were not crying for her, but for themselves. …

These recreational grievers were now emoting about Jill Dando, Linda McCartney or the Soham girls.

(The University of Central Lancashire’s Dark Tourism Forum offers an academic perspective on the popularity of visits to the Killing Fields of Cambodia, Auschwitz–Birkenau, New York’s Ground Zero, Arlington National Cemetery, and others.)