Devotion as Reciprocal Accountability

Mirabai's devotion was not passive admiration but active relationship demanding her full presence and integrity. She could not claim to love Krishna while living falsely. This model of devotion includes accountability: to love someone or honor their memory means examining how we failed them, neglected them, or took them for granted. Collective grief of public figures or tragedies offers a moment for this difficult accounting. Why did we only recognize this person's worth after death? What did we overlook about this tragedy until it exploded into visibility? Grief becomes the space where communities acknowledge their complicity, negligence, or blindness. A beloved artist mourned widely may have struggled with isolation we did not acknowledge. A tragedy may expose systems we benefited from while others suffered. The examined heart in collective grief asks these uncomfortable questions. This transforms mourning from sentimental tribute into something more rigorous: a commitment to see more clearly, to honor more actively, to fail less completely in the future. Communities that grieve with this accountability become communities that change—not out of guilt but out of deepened devotion, a determination to truly see and support those we claim to care about before loss forces our hand.