Betty White and the Power of Collective Grief
The passing of the TV icon engendered a shared mourning, the likes of which we may not see again.
Welcome to 2022, everyone! I know it’s been an age since I posted an updates here on Omnivorous, but I’m back at it just in time for the new year! You can now expect daily updates on everything I’m reading, watching, and listening to. If you’ve stayed subscribed despite my extended hiatus, thank you! If you’re new, welcome!
So, let’s get right into it, shall we?
Just when we thought that 2021 was going to leave us some dignity, Betty White, the beloved television star and national icon, passed away on December 31, a couple of weeks shy of her 100th birthday. Numerous outlets have since sung her praises, noting her many accomplishments in the medium of television, with Megan Garber of The Atlantic describing her “sly sunniness” and Daniel D'Addario of Variety dubbing her “the greatest comic tactician in the history of television.”
Of course, anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock for the past decade or three knew of the venerable White, who experienced something of a career renaissance during the 2010s, appearing in a very famous Super Bowl ad, an episode of Saturday Night Live and, in an extended homage to (and subversion of) her iconic role of Rose Nylund in The Golden Girls, as cantankerous caretaker Elka Ostrovsky in the TV Land series Hot in Cleveland. Though she’d never entirely vanished after The Golden Girls, there’s no question that the 2010s was a golden age, both for White herself and for those of us who have always loved her. Though I love her as Rose, obviously, I also adored her as the snooty Ellen on Mama’s Family and the foul-mouthed widow Delores Bickerman in Lake Placid (in which she utters the inimitable line, “If I had a dick, this is where I’d tell you to suck it.”
What’s especially remarkable about White’s passing, however, is just how widely mourned she was. As several Twitter wits pointed out, it really says something that the the world felt that 99 years was too few, that many wanted this venerable icon to live, well, forever. In this divided and hyper-partisan age, when it seems as if Americans can’t agree on much of anything, the fact that everyone—left, right, and center—felt the pangs of grief demonstrates just how extraordinary Betty White was and how expertly she’d crafted her public persona and how genuine that persona was. By all accounts, she was exactly as warm and gracious and loving in her real life as she was in in public. She was one of the rare cases where the star persona really seemed to match the genuine person.
Her passing was especially meaningful and wrenching for the queer community. In part, this is because The Golden Girls is beloved by queer people everywhere. As I’ve written elsewhere, this series is one of the queerest things to have ever aired on television (even more so that many more straightforwardly “queer” shows). And a key part of its appeal is Betty White’s Rose Nylund who is, I think I can say without fear of disagreement, the very personification of joy. It is literally impossible not to smile along with Rose when, for example, she manages to snatch her teddy bear back from a spiteful girl, or when she wistfully remembers her youth in St. Olaf. Similarly, I dare you to watch the scene in which Rose speaks to her dead husband Charlie about her imminent move to Miami and not sob (it’s a master-class in acting).
Even outside of The Golden Girls, however, White was an outspoken ally and advocate for queer people, going on record numerous times to assert her support for various causes, including same-sex marriage. Like all of her co-stars on the show, she believed passionately in the rights of gay people, and it’s to her credit that she was always willing to say so.
And her queer fans returned that love a thousandfold. On the day that she died, Twitter was full of queer fans expressing their grief and vowing, among other things, to hold Golden Girls marathons in her honor. Like many other queer people, I too decided to watch some of my favorite Girls episodes, immersing myself in this series’ unique blend of pathos and sparkling wit. White, more than any of the others that appeared on the show, was most able to deftly move between these two registers, as the above example of her monologue demonstrates.
For me, the grief was even more personal. White’s death occurred just over a year after my own grandmother’s passing, and it brought up all of the memories of that death that I’d managed over the past twelve months to at least partially submerge. As had been the case with my grandmother, I’d managed to convince myself that Betty White would live forever; it just seemed impossible to imagine a world without her in it. In fact, when I heard from a friend that White had died, I at first thought that it must surely be a hoax. Surely, I thought, she would hold on just a little bit more, if only to celebrate her 100th birthday (given that People had run a cover story on her impending centenary and that the Regal theater chain planned on showing a film about her life on her birthday). I held onto that belief until it became impossible to deny the truth of it. When the news moved from the (faintly disreputable) TMZ to the major news outlets, I knew it to be true.
In part, I suspect that my refusal to believe stems from my own residual grief, but it’s also the case that White, like my grandmother, was one of those people who simply made the world a better place by being in it. White just brought such joy to the world, and she was such an icon—a holdover, as D'Addario points out, of an earlier period of media history—that it truly feels like the end of an era. Betty White has simply become such a monument that, now that she’s gone, I struggle to think of another cultural figure that can bring people together in such a shared experience. (I don’t want to mention any of the potential contenders for fear of cursing them).
It’s for this reason that the collective grief becomes that much more meaningful and important. I spent many hours on Friday just refreshing my Twitter feed, submerging myself in the grief. I cried, yes, but that was only part of the experience. Just as important was the knowledge that, like me, millions of others were not only shedding tears but also celebrating the extraordinary legacy that Betty White leaves behind, as a trailblazer in all senses of the world. As Jennifer Keishin Armstrong notes in her book When Women Invented Comedy, White was a key figure in the development and popularity of the medium, helping to establish some of the key conventions of the genre of the sitcom and, as various accounts have noted, she was also fearless in fighting back against the racist standards of the time.
Though there are many reasons to despise social media and their impact on our society, this is one of those times where I’m grateful for the virtual community. Given that the pandemic shows no signs of abating (and actually seems to be getting worse), the passing of such cultural icons as Betty White can feel even more devastating than they would in normal circumstances. However, spaces like Twitter give us an opportunity to engage in one of our most important cultural rituals: mourning. We can cry, knowing that others are doing the same; we can celebrate a life, knowing that others are experiencing the same bittersweet joy; we can look to the future, knowing that there are others who are doing the same.
Betty White has left us, and the world, as Ryan Reynolds says, is different. However, we can also be thankful, that we had so many wonderful years with her in the world. If we can all of us live our lives as White did hers, the world may indeed become a better place.