Grief is hard — and it often feels like there’s a push to hurry and ‘get over it’. Taking a look at how other cultures handle grief can help us understand how to better navigate it.
In the United States, today, we’ve noticed a ‘chin up and carry on’ mentality when it comes to grief.
There’s an idea that you should be able to go deal with your mother’s funeral, or your dog’s death, and be able to show back up at work in two days to do the exact same work you were doing before that loss. There’s a sense you should be able to move on immediately, with little support or time to recover — and be fine. In fact, there’s something wrong with you if you aren’t fine.
If we look back in time or across to other cultures, we don’t often see this ‘carry on’ mentality. Instead, we see much more extensive grief and mourning practices, rather than the avoidance and suppression of negative emotions that we often see here.
We think that these cultures are able to process through grief and get to the other side much more easily than we do right now.
What to do with grief
Looking back in time, older, traditional mourning practices could be quite extensive. People might keep the body of their deceased love one in their house, washing it and praying over it and living with them for a week. They might wear black clothing, or a black arm band, for a year or more to honor their deceased loved one and to announce to the people around them that they were going through this mourning process.
Mourning practices can extend long past the immediate passing of a loved one. This may look like creating an altar to your loved one with photos, and leaving offerings or lighting incense to mark anniversaries or to engage in moments of prayer or remembrance. In Judaism, mourners may light a yahrzeit candle that burns for 24 hours on the anniversary of death. There are even modern variations of these candles that can be plugged into the wall and burn indefinitely.
In America, we have a funeral and just move on.
We don’t feel that this honors our connections to those relationships, or that it honors the love that is the other side of grief. It doesn’t allow people to heal in a way that doesn’t make their grief like a disease, or illness, or something bad and broken that should be avoided.
It also doesn’t allow for the reality that we may never really recover from our losses. We may carry that grief with us forever. We can look at that in a negative light, as a perpetually open wound — but we can also view this reality as a form of carrying on the memory of our loved one as a piece of us throughout our lives.
Part of what can be so frightening about death is the idea of not being remembered, or of not remembering the person that we loved. When we try to move on without the altars, or black clothing, or talking freely about our loved one with everyone we want — we’re not remembering. We’re, in effect, forgetting that person in everyday life.
The more that we can bring practices of remembrance in to our lives, for as long as we need to, the better we can handle living through the process of grief.
Learning more about grief
We recommend the book When Life Hits Hard by Russ Harris. This book can be helpful for the immediate aftermath of grief, and takes everything back to getting through the next ten minutes, getting through to the next step, and getting through what is right in front of you to the next moment.
It may also be helpful to review the stages of grief. While there is some contention over this framework — how many stages there are, if they arise in a particular order, whether the stages are distinct — the concept of these stages can be very powerful in helping to normalize these emotions in the context of grief. The anger, denial, grief, and other emotions are all okay to experience, and should be observed rather than rejected as something bad or dangerous.
What grief can teach us
In allowing time for the grieving process and engaging in acts of remembrance, we keep death closer to us and are able to better appreciate what we do still have.
Some cultures keep death moments or memento mori as a reminder that life is very brief. The purpose is not to scare ourselves, or to be dark and depressing, but to remind ourselves that life is not to be taken for granted because we only have a short amount of time.
We recommend the book Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. This book engages with the idea that, if we live for 80 years, you will get 4,000 weeks — which is not a lot of time. We should not take the people we love for granted, or take the moment for granted, or let the little things bother us.
This perspective helps us to ride the waves of life more evenly, because it is so brief. It helps us to not hold small and petty grudges, and to not let a little thing blow up into a giant problem — these things are so small in comparison to the bigger meanings of life.
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Wells Medicine is a Houston-based practice designed to provide meaningful care for mental health. Providing targeted interventional treatments for Depression, Anxiety, OCD, PTSD and other conditions, with Ketamine Treatments, Stellate Ganglion Blocks, TMS, and Nitrous-Oxide Treatments. Focused on comprehensive care and integration with Psychiatry, Psychology, and Support Services. We are evidence-based, patient-focused and mission-driven.
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