There’s a version of grief we’re comfortable with.

It’s quiet, but not too quiet.Visible, but not inconvenient.Broken, but still polite.

We expect tears at the right moments. We expect voices to crack on cue. We expect a certain softness something recognizably human, something we can label and move past.

And when grief looks the way we expect it to, we rarely question what’s hiding behind it.

That’s where immunity begins.

In the case of Mary Beth Tinning, grief didn’t raise suspicion. It erased it.

Nine children died in her care over the course of fourteen years in one of the worst cases of Munchausen by Proxy cases in history. There were nine funerals. Nine explanations. Nine moments where the system could have paused and said, something isn’t right.

But it didn’t.

Because Mary Beth Tinning was a grieving mother, and she treated that identity like armor.

Doctors saw tragedy, not pattern. Neighbors saw loss, not repetition.Authorities saw a woman already punished enough.

Each death reinforced the narrative instead of disrupting it. She wasn’t someone to scrutinize she was someone to protect. To comfort. To excuse.

Grief became her alibi.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth: it wasn’t just the deaths that shielded her. It was how she carried them.

She cried. She attended services. She spoke the language of loss fluently enough to pass every test we never realized we were administering.

Because grief, in our culture, is not something we understand. It’s something we recognize and recognition is often mistaken for truth.

We see this pattern again and again.

We distrust the mother who doesn’t cry enough.We side-eye the widow who moves forward too quickly.We grow suspicious of grief that feels “wrong.”

But we almost never question grief that feels familiar.

Which brings us to a different kind of case and a different kind of veil.

In the aftermath of her husband’s death, Erika Kirk stepped into public view not as a strategist, not as a power player, but as a widow. A woman framed by loss. A woman shielded by sympathy.

And behind that framing, she moved.

Grief softened scrutiny. Mourning delayed resistance. The optics of loss made ambition appear distasteful to challenge. Because who questions someone who has already “lost everything”?

But grief doesn’t erase motive. It just makes people uncomfortable naming it.

This is the danger of what I think of as performative grief, not grief that is fake, necessarily, but grief that functions socially. Grief that shapes how others behave. Grief that redirects attention away from accountability.

And to be clear: this isn’t about saying grief isn’t real.

Mary Beth Tinning may have experienced genuine sorrow. Erika Kirk may have experienced profound loss after her husband’s horrific and public execution.

What these cases reveal is something deeply human and deeply flawed in us.

We want grief to mean innocence.We want suffering to equal goodness.We want pain to absolve people of the need to be questioned.

Questioning grief feels cruel.

But cruelty isn’t asking hard questions. Cruelty is what happens when we refuse to.

Grief does not cancel agency, nor does it negate intention.And grief should never be treated as moral proof.

In Mary Beth Tinning’s case, children paid the price for our hesitation.In Erika Kirk’s case, power shifted while people were too polite to look closely.

Grief didn’t just accompany these stories; it protected them.

And maybe the most haunting part is this: if grief is allowed to function as immunity, then the people who know how to wear it will always have an advantage over the people who simply endure it.

So the question isn’t whether someone is grieving.

The question is whether grief is being allowed to stand in for truth.

And how many times have we mistaken the two?

—Rae