A Hindu cremation by the Ganges in Varanasi, India (Getty)
“Contemporary existence isn’t big on ritual, even at people moments that can define us, like bereavement,” says author and philosopher Jules Evans, author of Philosophy for Life and policy director for the Centre for the Background of Feelings at London University. “This is a shame, as it’s hard to invent your own response to death. Ritual is comforting, enabling us to express some thing we struggle to put into phrases.”
According to new study by Dying Issues, a coalition doing work to get much more people discussing death and bereavement, only 25 per cent of bereaved folks across Britain really feel supported following a death, while 32 per cent do not truly feel their employer treated them compassionately.
Psychotherapist Ingrid Collins believes the ritualised grieving in a lot more standard cultures offers a solace we lack in our secular society. “They surround the bereaved with enjoy and comfort, but we hurry by way of it, expecting men and women to be back at operate following a couple of weeks. We want to soldier on irrespective of the emotional value.” Soldiering on is a peculiarly English trait. The Victorians have been the last generation to make a pageant of grief – female mourners have been even needed to put on black underwear – but clinging to elaborate public mourning practices throughout the Very first World War could have brought the country to its knees. As an alternative, the message that pain and grief should be packed away “in your old kit bag” was a effective one.
In her guide Death in War and Peace, Pat Jalland argues that Churchill’s propaganda broadcasts lauding the indomitable Blitz spirit had been partly responsible for entrenching within our collective nationwide psyche the sense that grief need to be suppressed. It’s some thing we cling to, in spite of the psychobabble of the countercultural rebellion of the mid-20th century, when services like Cruse, the UK’s greatest bereavement charity, emerged.
As a result, says Evans, grief has become medicalised, rather than accepted as an inevitable response to a universal human issue. “The human emotions engendered by ‘ashes to ashes’ or a requiem Mass have saved men and women from the pits of despair as usually as present day psychiatry,” he argues.
Death terrifies us, considering that we have, as the historian Philippe Ariès argued in The Hour of Our Death, “banished it from our society”. “Animal slaughter has been shifted out of sight and human illness moved discreetly into hospital. Alternatively of accepting death as organic, medication helps make us feel something can always be done to stave it off,” says Evans, pointing out that several of us by no means see a dead body until we’re grownups.
Jewish mourners, over, observe 7 days’ formal grieving (Getty)
But are cultures with more extended mourning rituals genuinely greater off? If I’d been a Hindu would the elaborate approach of building a funeral pyre been much more comforting for me? Would I have coped far better if my mother’s funeral had been a neighborhood occasion, as it is in Japan?
“After my father died in October I was shattered, so following distinct measures about how to dress, eat, behave carried me along and absolved me of generating selections I wasn’t capable of,” says Abigail Cohen, who grieved according to the ritualised approach of Jewish mourning called shiva. After the funeral Abigail was confined to her home for a week, wearing a black funeral dress symbolically torn across her heart. Close friends brought food, but she wasn’t obliged to communicate. As an alternative she was “like a baby, in a function of total surrender, protected from the world. My non-Jewish friends who’ve seasoned reduction are envious.”
In Irish communities, grief helps cement household relationships. “I’ve noticed a return to the tradition of ‘waking’ the dead, or laying out the body, in personal homes,” says Rosa Corcoran, from Drogheda, whose grandmother was waked in a museum she founded. “The return of the previous approaches is a welcome response to many years of treating grief with antidepressants.”
While we may possibly have lost several rituals ourselves, multiculturalism signifies we’re surrounded by examples from other cultures. A Turkish good friend tells me about cooking akibe sweets and helva with her mother to mark the 40th day of her brother’s death. “British men and women are embarrassed by grief,” she says. “In Turkey we know exactly how to behave, how to dress, even what we eat. This doesn’t make it less sad, but it does make the ache much less disorientating.”
And but, although it’s effortless to point to the increasingly secular nature of our lives for the erosion of grieving rituals, it’s certainly nothing at all new. It began with the Reformation, when Luther abolished the Catholic practice of having to pay for Masses for the dead. By the 17th century, ritualised behaviour such as mourning gloves and funeral events had expanded to fill the gap Protestantism developed. Prof Douglas Davies, director for the Centre of Death and Existence Research at Durham University and writer of A Brief Background of Death, believes the Bad Law of 1830 was also important in reinstating ritual, because it stated the bodies of those who died in penury could be confiscated for dissection by health care schools, a practice right up until then confined to criminals. “Elaborate funerals and a ‘good send off’ arose, as households did not want their loved ones handled like rubbish,” says Davies. Funeral directors – who, into the 20th century, were typically the regional cabinetmaker – and personal insurance coverage organizations encouraging individuals to save for funerals emerged then. “Aristocrats had their crypts and mausoleums extended before, but by the late 18th century the tradition of a showy funeral was emerging as a middle-class practice.”
The Japanese, over, favour colourful funerals and mourn as a community
The Victorians, inspired by Queen Victoria’s pathological mourning for Prince Albert, revelled in grief, with women sporting black capes and bonnets and glass lockets representing tears. As I stumbled by way of the days after Mum’s death, dishevelled in jeans and jersey, I couldn’t assist feeling that this may well have been rather comforting.
When I put this to Prof Tony Walter, director of the University of Bath Centre for Death and Society, he disagrees. “Many ladies hated the demands of mourning, and by the late 19th century needed to reclaim grief as a personal expertise,” he tells me. In her book Mourning Dress, Lou Taylor, professor of dress and textile history at the University of Brighton, argues Victorian mourning was really about sustaining patriarchy, given that a female was expected to mourn longer for her husband or father than mother or child. By the 1880s, the same upper-class girls who have been turning into suffragettes rejected what they saw as meaningless rituals subjugating them.
But where does this leave the bereaved today? When Jo Smythe lost her 5-year-outdated son to cancer, the world wide web grew to become her lifeline. “It was this kind of a relief obtaining individuals who had been via the exact same experience,” says Jo, a humanist, who channelled her grief into fundraising and volunteering at a cancer charity. “The help and advice I found from actual people on the web saved me, as I did not truly feel I could talk openly to anybody else about my son’s death.”
It was partly in response to this lack of dialogue about death that in 2011 Jon Underwood produced the very first British Death Café, inspired by Swiss sociologist Bernard Crettaz’s tradition of café mortels. There are 537 cafés and six,000 members globally, with 142 cafés in Britain. Anyone can join. In early January I sipped tea with two dozen strangers at Stratford on Avon’s inaugural Death Café.
I identified solace in the two hours I spent discussing the single occasion that unites us all. Some members were lately bereaved, others had lost a child decades ahead of or have been “interested in dying and grief, but do not know exactly where to speak about it”. Conversation ranged from the psychological cost of grief to managing a terminal sickness, to the merits of a Christian versus humanist funeral. Humanist funerals are gradually gathering momentum, from only 5,000 a decade ago to more than 15,000 these days.
“Humanist funerals are frequently described as a celebration of lifestyle, given that we emphasise the existence you have now, not that of the spirit,” says Isabel Russo, head of ceremonies at the British Humanist Association. To me this sounds stark, as grieving Mum’s death would have been considerably tougher without having my conviction I’ll see her yet again, but Isabel argues that humanists think the dead carry on to perform a dynamic role in daily life. “While there is love or memory there, the connection with the living goes on, and humanist funerals can be a brilliant way to mark this.”
The family members of a cremated Indonesian guy gather his ashes, above (Mitchell Kanashkevich)
Pat Winslow is a humanist celebrant, describing her favourite solutions as “a bit wild, although never ever disrespectful. 1 lady gave her father a coffin like a red toolbox, carried in a silver hearse. She wore a red wedding ceremony dress, with her youngsters in her father’s clothing. It was joyous seeing grief experienced like this.”
Pat’s words remind me that even though I had to fail to remember the burning ship sent into the sea, there have been other, modern rituals I could have picked. You can blast your loved one’s ashes into space, or have them produced into diamonds. Facebook and the millions of photographs we consider also suggest there are limitless techniques to indulge in multimedia mourning.
Douglas Davies suggests that although these rituals all around death may possibly have altered, the emotional encounter is unchanging across continents and by way of time. “History exhibits us people suffer in the identical way with the death of a single child right now as they would have completed when many died in childbirth 200 many years in the past,” he says. The distinction could lie in the fact death feels “unrehearsed, due to the fact we’re employed to feeling like we’re masters of our personal destiny, and suddenly we really don’t know what to do”.
To illustrate the unchanging nature of grief, he points me to the epic Gilgamesh, perhaps the oldest written document in the background of mankind. On the death of his good friend, Gilgamesh states, “I am afraid of death.” Gilgamesh “makes the exact same psychological journey you’ll go through about in any modern self-help manual – his agony, his want to set up a memorial, and his journey towards a conclusion,” says Prof Davies.
There is one thing comforting and comical in pondering I share an emotional expertise with Gilgamesh. And grief does change. I can walk though the days now, not stumble waves of pain nonetheless hit me, but it’s not the storm-battered ocean crashing close to me that it was in December. But while I want to go on remembering, because, as WB Yeats put it so effectively, “Lets talk and grieve/For that’s the sweetest music for sad souls,” now, I’m conscious of a deafening silence.
Have the British forgotten how to grieve?
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