What are the identity conflicts in "The Management of Grief"?

In Bharati Mukherjee's story "The Management of Grief," we see quite a few conflicts of identity. First, the narrator, Shaila, experiences a conflict within herself as she deals with the tragic deaths of her husband and sons. She does not, she explains, grieve as Hindu women are supposed to grieve. She remains calm, mostly because she feels numb, yet she also feels as though she has lost herself.

She spends some time in India, but then, after a vision of her husband, she returns to Canada to try to continue the life they had started together. She does not know, however, exactly what that life is and what she is to do. She has no job and no real goals. She struggles to help Judith Templeton connect to the families of the other victims, but eventually, she realizes she can do so no longer. Her identity has for so long been caught up with her family that she struggles to find herself.

We also see a conflict of identity between Judith Templeton and the people she is trying to help. While Judith has the best of intentions, she does not understand the families' culture. She does not realize, for instance, that the only thing keeping the elderly couple from despair is the hope that their sons are still alive and will return. This hope is part of their cultural outlook, part of their identity, and Judith cannot understand it.

On a more domestic level, we see a conflict of identity between Kusum and her daughter Pam. Pam has completely embraced Western culture, but her mother remains committed to Indian ways and cannot understand her daughter's desire to work at McDonalds or become an actress. Pam feels quite a bit of resentment toward her mother, because she believes that Kusum would have preferred that Pam die in the crash rather than her sister because Pam is the rebellious one. This shows that Pam is somewhat conflicted within herself as well and feels guilty for her desire to have a different life.

Finally, the men who have lost their wives in the crash experience a conflict of identity when their families wish them to remarry almost immediately. Many feel they must comply with their traditional customs, so they marry widows with children and end up the husband and father of a new family while they are still grieving their old one. Some of these men become resentful toward their new brides. Other men refuse to remarry, challenging cultural expectations and working to redefine what it means to be an Indian man.

What are two conflicts in "The Management of Grief"?

In this story, an Indian woman named Shaila Bhave loses her sons and husband when a bomb explodes the plane on which they are flying. As Shaila copes with her loss, she is forced to deal with the culture clash in two directions, creating an associated conflict: neither fully Indian any more nor fully Canadian, she finds herself torn between the two cultures. She clashes with Western culture, but she also is not at home in India. 

Western culture is represented in Judith Templeton, a young social worker with blond hair and blue eyes who comes to offer grief counseling to the many Indians who have lost family members on the plane. She admits she doesn't know how to cope with a disaster of this magnitude, and has, as she says, no experience with the "complications of culture, language, and customs." She asks Shaila for help because Shaila has been described as calm and strong, "a pillar."  Shaila, however, has a negative reaction to Judith labeling some of the wives who have lost husbands "hysterical." Shaila knows that the good behavior Judith sees in Shaila through the lens of Western culture would be seen as strange through the lens of Indian culture, and that what Judith sees as "hysterical" would be seen as normal grieving in India  "I am a freak," Shaila says, because she is not reacting to death as an Indian ought to. Later, Shaila perceives that her family surrounds her in spirit, as in an 'epic.' Judith has no way to grasp this aspect of Indian culture in which the spirits of the dead commune with the living, and Shaila has no way to communicate to Judith that she is fine--that her life is "thrilling"--as Judith worries because Shaila is not working.

But just as Shaila has had to deal with the culture clash with the West, as represented by Judith, when she returns to India for the funeral she experiences a different kind of culture clash. Her parents want her to stay in India, not return to Canada:

 "I am trapped between two modes of knowledge," Shaila thinks. "I am too old to start over and to young to give up. Like my husband's spirit, I flutter between worlds."

Indian culture offers her both her parents' extreme rationalism and its "Vedic rituals." Shaila is not wholly at home with either one. The Indian men who have become widowers from the plane's destruction also have to cope with culture shock as their families arrange marriages for them: "In a month they will have buried one family and returned to Canada with a new bride and partial family." 

While Shaila makes her "offering of flowers and sweetmeats" to an animist god in Himalaya, her husband appears to her in spirit. She asks him if should stay in India and he tells her, before disappearing, that she should finish what they had begun. Her parents don't believe in spirits, but since she does, she returns to Canada.

Caught between two cultures, Shaila continues to commune with the spirits of her dead family while living in Canada. Her moment of truth comes when she refuses to be a bridge between Western culture and Indian culture for Judith. She won't continue to visit grieving families and try to "translate" between them and Judith, as she realizes it is impossible. As Shaila accepts that she is part of two cultures that can't really speak to each other, she gains self acceptance. She is neither fully Indian, nor fully Western. She is her own person. When she embraces this identity, the spirits of her family leave her and she can move on, finishing the work she and her husband began of forging new lives.