When I was a kid in East Van, there was an old Italian woman (about the age I am now, probably) who never appeared in the neighbourhood unless decked out chin to toe in black. Her next-door neighbour, my friend’s mom, explained to me the concept of mourning. At least, she explained one tiny part of the concept.
Mourning is a byzantine phenomenon with internal and external components that vary across cultures perhaps more than anything other than language.
As Downton Abbey and other costume dramas remind us, the external components were once far more visible, in dress and behaviour, for mourners of the Anglo-Protestant variety. Tradition still holds among more religiously observant families, including many of multicultural British Columbia’s faith groups. Many cultures — Muslim, Jewish, Orthodox Christian — have set prayers or services laid out on the calendar across a regulated number of days, months and even years after a death. Traditional mourning rituals have tended to take the form of extremely circumscribed rules and processes. If there is any worth in religious dictates and rituals, this seems to me the most valuable: providing a clear set of ritualized steps through which to proceed at precisely the time in life when the simplest decision is too much to undertake.
That British Columbians from cultures other than the once-dominant Anglo-Protestant tradition have tended to do a better job of hanging onto ritual is probably one of the reasons you see crosses at accident sites but not Jewish stars or Muslim crescents or shrines of other traditions. It’s not that non-Christians don’t die in car accidents; it’s probably that the survivors have better ways of expressing their grief.
The contemporary mania for hammering up makeshift shrines and placing flowers, teddy bears and other bric-a-brac at places where people have died is a pale contemporary mourning ritual. I view it as a symptom of disordered grieving, wherein the human need to express grief, frustrated by our society’s lack of ritual, emerges in peculiar ways.
As I’ve written in this series, death in our society is highly segregated from life, so when it hits us, in the form of a loved one lost, it can upend all sense of order to life. Ritual, by nature, restores order. Problem is, as our society has moved away from religion, we have abandoned the rituals that are so deeply entwined with it. Just as one does not need religion to be a good person, one need not be religious to employ ritual. Again, problem is, we haven’t found ways to do that after we’ve thrown the baby of ritual out with the bathwater of religion.
One of the nicest suggestions I’ve heard of at a funeral, for those who are not religiously or even particularly ritually inclined, is that a fine way to memorialize someone is to consider one of the characteristics of the deceased that you most admired and attempt to incorporate that trait more into your own life and behaviours. That seems a lot more meaningful than throwing a six-pack of tulips on a heap of rotting carnations.
The foregoing has been almost all my opinion and prejudices, so I was delighted to find a major study that backs me up. Last year, Michael I. Norton and Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School published in The Journal of Experimental Psychology an analysis of ritual on successful grieving.
Success at grieving, such as it is, is measured in part by restoration of feelings of personal control, well-being and physical health, as well as the ability to think about the lost loved one with some level of happiness at the memories, rather than unmitigated sadness and hopelessness over the loss itself.
Most interesting in the study was that some of the rituals were not what anyone would consider traditional, yet had a positive effect on the grieving person. One woman washed her late husband’s car each week, just like he used to. A man got his hair cut on the first Saturday of every month as he had done with his late wife. A woman would ritually put on Natalie Cole’s “I Miss You Like Crazy” and cry while thinking about her mother. These are not what any religious or otherwise “traditional” person would view as conventional mourning rituals, but the study indicates they worked. Another example in the study cited the deeply proscribed Jewish ritual of seven days’ shiva, 30 days’ shloshim, a full year of observing mourning prayers and rituals and, thereafter, an annual lighting of a memorial candles and saying the Kaddish, the mourner’s prayer.
The juxtaposition of the traditional with the novel is what strikes me most in this study. While people and cultures differ, it seems it doesn’t matter so much what the mourning ritual is, as long as there is ritual.
Part 1 of Dead of Winter series
Part 2 of Dead of Winter series
Part 3 of Dead of Winter series
