In grief we need each other

After my dear wife Carina passed away in December 2023, I quickly learned about grief. The words of Psalm 42:3 – “tears have been my food day and night” – took on new meaning. Some Bible verses are best appreciated after you have experienced lament and grief.

Recent developments in the world of Artificial Intelligence (AI) have sought to assist those who are dealing with grief with an emerging “digital afterlife industry.” One development is so-called “griefbots,” which use data trails to simulate the patterns and personality of a dead loved one. By training on emails, messages, and voice recordings left behind, such a chatbot can enable people to continue conversing with a simulation of their deceased loved one.

Using a griefbot to postpone or deflect the journey of grief is going to have consequences. Early research is already suggesting that high use of AI companions leads to more loneliness, not less. I suspect that research will eventually show that AI bots which promise comfort to the grieving will, in the end, compound grief. There is no way over, around or under grief. One must go through it, and it is only by going through it that you can enter a healthy state of adapting to the loss.

Sitting beside

One of the most helpful things for me was the presence of other people in my grief journey. In his book Lament for a Son, philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff writes, “What I need to hear from you is that you recognize how painful it is. I need to hear from you that you are with me in my desperation. To comfort me, you have to come close. Come sit beside me on my mourning bench.” A chatbot does not have feelings, empathy, understanding or embodiment. It cannot do what Wolterstorff asks.

Another AI development is the emergence of “therapy bots” to provide counseling. Already in the 1960s, the early AI pioneer Joseph Weizenbaum explored the notion of automating psychotherapy with a chatbot named ELIZA. “I had thought it essential,” Weizenbaum observed, “as a prerequisite to the very possibility that one person might help another learn to cope […] that the helper himself participate in the other’s experience of those problems.” Weizenbaum concluded: “There are limits to what computers ought to be put to do.”

A Christian anthropology sees humans as distinct from machines, a someone rather than a something, made in the image of God. In grief we need each other; an AI has no empathy and cannot take a meaningful place beside us on the “mourning bench.”

What I did find immensely helpful was meeting with other people who were grieving, including in grief groups like Griefshare. What I have appreciated most were people who came alongside me – without platitudes or pious pronouncements – and simply sat with me on my mourning bench.

In addition to the comfort of others, the Christian faith teaches about a God who understands and is “acquainted with grief” (Isa. 53:3). I am grateful for my faith which enables me to grieve with hope and a comfort that death does not hold the last word. Wolterstorff observes that “Faith is a footbridge that you don’t know will hold you up over the chasm until you’re forced to walk out onto it.” My faith has certainly held me up and even grown through the journey over the chasm of grief.

“What is your only comfort in life and in death?” the Heidelberg Catechism asks. Its answer is simple yet profound: “That I am not my own, but belong – body and soul, in life and in death – to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.” I find that a deep comfort, one that I believe no technology could ever offer.