The Management of Grief - Bharati Mukherjee - 205 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

“The Management of Grief” is a short story by Bharati Mukherjee.


It was published in 1988 as a part of her collection The Middleman and Other Stories. It also appeared in The Best American Short Stories of 1989 and in The Best American Short Stories of the Eighties.


Shaila Bhave, a recent widow, has also lost her sons in a plane crash. The story highlights, along with a family's way of dealing with grief, the horrors of apparent Sikh terrorism.

The story opens in her house in Toronto, with mourners and neighbours around her. Some of them also had their family members die in the same crash. Though she appears calm, she has actually been given Valium to manage herself physically and emotionally. This is mistaken by Judith Templeton, a young Canadian government official, to act as a liaison and translator for her group of mourners. She tells Bhave that she has heard that she is a pillar of the community. Bhave reluctantly agrees to help Templeton, while reflecting that among her own community, her calm affect is not a mark of maturity, but of strangeness. The title of the story comes from Templeton’s conception of “grief management”—her belief that grief proceeds in orderly stages, and that it is an emotion to be controlled rather than given in to.


The group of mourners soon fly to Ireland to identify the dead because that is where the plane crashed. From Ireland they go to India to perform the death rituals. Throughout these travels, the way the family members adapt to their new life without their loved ones is shown in conversations and memories.

The other mourners in Bhave’s group have meanwhile all coped with their grief in different ways. Kusum decides to remain in India and to become an ashram devotee. Dr. Ranganathan finds a job in Texas, where he plans to tell no one about the crash, although he still cannot bring himself to sell his old family home.

Back in Canada, Bhave is shocked to see racial prejudices towards Sikhs and Indians, by representatives like Templeton. She rejects not only friendly advice and grief management by the government official, but also turns to her native Indian rituals and reaches out to family for comfort.



Image - A Widow performs ritual immolation (Sati) - an ancient tradition of India where widows would jump into the funeral pyre of their husbands as they would not deem it fit to live after they are dead.