Grief expressed out loud, whether in or out of character, unchoreographed and honest, for someone we have lost, or a country or home we have lost, is in itself the greatest praise we could ever give them. Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.
The bodies of all religious who, called by God, depart from this life, should be carried to the grave amid psalms and the voices of the chanters only, but we absolutely forbid burial songs, which are commonly sung for the dead, and the accompaniment [of the corpse] by the family and dependents of the deceased, beating their breast. It suffices that, in the hope of the resurrection of the Christians, there be accorded to bodily remains the tribute of divine canticles. For the Apostle forbids us to mourn the dead, saying: “I do not wish you to sadden yourselves about those who are asleep, as do those who have no hope” [1 Thess. 4:12] … Therefore if the bishop is able, he should not hesitate to forbid all Christians to do this. Clerics, too, should not act in any other way, for it is fitting that throughout the world deceased Christians should be buried thus.*
Decree XXII, The Third Council of Toledo,
sixty-two bishops attending, 589 AD
I don’t know why I’m always so surprised, in this day and age, with so many possibilities and choices at their fingertips, how people, who having lived for so many generations, so distant from any semblance of the old wisdoms known to their ancestors about what the living should be doing when someone dies, will so wildly and emotionally defend the unemotional flatness and spiritual vacuum they have come to live in and accept a repressed lack of expression as a normal existence, coming to its defense with more energy than it would actually take to have a tangibly good custom of storytelling, weeping, and active grief, as if such sanity were some backwards barbarity!
One night a little while back I remember how a very Midwestern friend called me the day his old-time mother had passed quietly away. Because he had been on good terms with her, and because his father was already dead, he as the oldest son had been put in charge of the funeral proceedings, as was his family’s custom.
The entire extended family including himself had been raised to be very “stoic” Lutheran Christians, and excepting himself, all of them were still governed by that kind of “minimalist” Northern European ethos.
Nonetheless, my friend, though he loved his people, had over the years become somewhat more adventurous and called himself an “alternative person,” which translated to his relatives as “overly dedicated to diversity”!
He had listened to recordings of my talks on grief and had attended some lectures and conferences, and in keeping with what was taught there regarding the welfare of both the living and the spirit of the deceased, he wanted to make certain he was doing everything possible during that strange trancelike place that happens after someone close dies, to see that his dead mother was well grieved, mourned, and “sent on” in a good way to the “next” world.
He wanted my advice and direction to make sure he wasn’t overlooking anything. She was lying in state in a little mortuary chapel in his hometown and would be buried the following afternoon at the direction of the same Protestant minister who had always been the family’s old-time minister.
“Well,” I replied, feeling that I would probably be too overtly pagan to have any advice of mine remotely embraced by his American-born Scandinavian flatlander relatives as anything proper and real, “if it were me, the first thing I would do would be to feed the soul of the dead and to spiritually notify your mother’s last happy ancestor in the other world to get ready to receive her. The problem, I said, is that all of this generally involves the entire family, as it needs everyone and should be a group effort.
“The next main thing is a fire has to be kept going gently, nonstop, without ever flagging. If a fire can’t be had, then burn seven candles in front of her body. When one gets low, add another to it. The soul of the dead needs the people to care about them, out loud, but in such a way as to make sure their spirit doesn’t linger about. Your mother’s soul needs to start to travel to her new ‘home’ away from here. To do this the spirit needs to ‘ride’ the story of her people’s origins back to their spiritual origination place ancestrally. She will get to that place of origin by someone singing or speaking the story of their origins from the beginning all night long from sundown to sunup. This is called paddling home. The sun should rise just as the story of her passing is added on to the old story.
“Typically this story is told as two people prepare the body, by meticulously binding up the midriff and groin of the dead with a continuous handspun cotton thread which is wound around and around as the story of origins, her life, and death are told—ending at sunup. This thread is the story, and the deceased is ‘bound’ into it to carry the soul home.”
“Martín?” he interrupted.
“Yes,” I said.
“I can tell you right now, I’m pretty darn sure they’re not going to go for any of that.”
“Well, just see what they say and call me if you need any help.”
Two hours later he called me:
“No one will help with the story, forget the thread—and after an hour of arguing, my mother’s sister said one candle might be alright. What do I do now?”
“Then, you’re going to have to tell the whole story by yourself. Get a beautiful bead, tie a string through it like a fishing weight. Call the bead the ‘belly button of time,’ light the candle at sundown, and begin to slowly wind the thread around the bead like a ball of yarn as you begin to tell the tale of all your mother came from: the whole story. Don’t worry if you forget anything, just keep going. If you get stuck just begin to sing her favorite songs, best as you can, then go ahead with the story—always winding the ball of thread with the bead as the core. If you begin to cry, let her loose, don’t hold back the tears; then when you’re ready as soon as you can, begin to sing, then go ahead and keep on telling the tale. Keep the one candle burning all night. When the Father Sun begins to crown onto the horizon, commend your mother’s spirit to him and add on the story of her passing. At that point stop winding the ball of string, put your breath on this ball and hide it in a pocket. Before the burial takes place that afternoon, put the ball into the coffin before they close it. When you all get to the grave and they start piling on the earth then begin your real heartfelt weeping, and sing. Sing and weep with honor. Sing your mother on home.”
“Alright, Martín, I’ll do my best, since its only me.”
I gave him my blessing and that was that. I didn’t hear any more that night or the next day or the next, but three days later I got a call.
“Well, how was it then for you and your mother?” I asked.
“My relatives thought it mighty barbaric to have a candle there; it had never been done they said, but all in all the night part went pretty much like you said. That went okay.”
“But the next day, during the funeral, when I threw in my ball of string before they closed the lid, things started heating up. But nothing as hot as when we got to the cemetery and I began weeping as they began to throw dirt on the coffin and fill the grave.”
“I tried to step up for my mom, Martín; I think you’d have been proud of me. I kept on weeping, and shaking then singing as they buried her away, and as the earth began to cover her, my people wanted to leave, but I didn’t want to. I couldn’t stop crying; it just came right out of me like a broken dam and was flowing so well I dropped to my knees and shook and wept and sang some more. People were running around and kept asking my relatives what was wrong with me, and my aunties kept asking me if I was alright, and this all went on of course until the ambulance arrived. I didn’t know who it was for, but it turned out it was for me!
“They tried to haul me away, convinced I’d lost my marbles and needed some drugs, but I just kept on weeping. The minister had called the ambulance; he thought I was sick and had gone overboard.
“Finally I let them take me to the local clinic. I didn’t really care because it felt so good to weep, and in the end they just let me go when I cooled off.
“I asked my relatives why an ambulance was called. They said, ‘You were crying and shaking and singing. You looked like you were in terrible distress!’”
“That wasn’t going to bring your mother back,” they said.
“I wasn’t crying to bring her back. I was weeping to help her get where she was going faster and easier. Then I told them how you had advised that grief was a good thing for both the dead and the living. You could’ve heard an ant sneeze it got so silent.
“Then my auntie spoke up and said, ‘Well, you can’t blame us, no one ever wept at a funeral, much less a man. We didn’t know what you were doing.’
“Well, Martín, I feel good about it and thank you but that’s what grief gets you in the Midwest: an expensive ride in an ambulance!”
Grief is praise of those we have lost. Our own souls who have loved and are now heartbroken would turn to stone and hate us if we did not show such praise when we lose whom we love. A nonfake grieving is how we praise the dead, by praising that which has left us feeling cold and left behind. By the event of our uncontrolled grief, wail, and rap, we are also simultaneously praising with all our hearts the life we have been awarded to live, the life that gave us the health and opportunity of having lived fully enough to love deep enough to feel the loss we now grieve. To not grieve is a violence to the Divine and our own hearts and especially to the dead. If we do not grieve what we miss, we are not praising what we love. We are not praising the life we have been given in order to love. If we do not praise whom we miss, we are ourselves in some way dead. So grief and praise make us alive.
There are many traditions of grief among the peoples of the world. Throughout the planet at any moment, anywhere, you could be part of some of the most amazing sequences of the forms grief takes. In some places it’s this way, in others that way. In every case where grief and praise are still honored, there is one aspect that remains the same with all people: grief, even for an individual’s loss, is a thing for which a lot of people are necessary. A tribe is necessary even if it’s just to be a kind of resilient nonjudgmental human basket, against which the griever is able to thrash. I doubt if anybody’s relatives could be that for us. A tribe lets us say things we may or may not believe, be filled with the grief in whatever form it takes without hurting ourselves or anybody else, unworried that the sometimes uncharacteristically expressive being we might turn into when in the necessary state of grief will be held against us when the blessing of life has healed, and we can continue slowly returning to its more regular flow.
So real communities are a necessity for people to grieve in a real way. In a real tribe there are no secrets; everybody knows everything about everybody and in exaggerated form. They simply aren’t ashamed of their changeable proud natures. Are there any real communities like that in the modern condition? Where your love of whom or what you’ve lost could fully praise what you miss with real grieving that isn’t just some vacant “unloading” in an anonymous therapy group? Maybe there are. But for most people they are left alone to swallow their grief and “just get on with it.” Terrible.
I remember back in my days in the Tzutujil town of Santiago Atitlán, how often, at least every week or even more often later on, with all the terror and death of the wars, how down all those volcanic cinder–sanded pathways, someone, accompanied by a group of helpful friends and relatives, would come rolling, or crawling, or stumbling. It was usually during the evening mealtime, at the time when out of every hut and house, the delicious smells of food and smoke issued from the cooking fires covered in bubbling clay pots and sizzling griddles, around which entire families happily chatting, joking, and eating together would become aware of the highly emotional, gradually incrementing sound of a tearful tenor singing or yelling, praying, cursing, bellowing, wailing, or whimpering coming from some grieving person—perhaps in a state of exhaustion—out there in the street.
Because a village is a close place, and people are always nosey gossips, somebody in every hut would already know which villager this would be without looking, and that he or she was returning when the group burying someone they loved broke up after the long all-night group vigil of grief. But traditionally the younger generation would be sent to quietly crane their little brown necks over the walls of the basaltic fence, and run back holding their raggedy pants or wraparound skirts to report to the adults in great animation what everybody already knew they’d seen.
“Big Nettles” (a man’s name), whose brother was killed yesterday in that landslide on the coast, is just now returning from their burying of him. ‘Biis nubaan ah,’ that man is doing grief. His brother-in-law, ‘Eater of Ants,’ and his sidekick’s wife, ‘Flappy Gums,’ are watching over him, along with his derelict cousins.”
Everyone would sit tensely waiting, quietly straining against all patience until one of the adults gave the signal “Let’s go listen,” at which point the entire mob of the extended family would rush outside, their dogs would bark, and the people themselves like puppies lined up along their mother’s nipples would jostle to get a place, shoulder to shoulder with their chests against the wall to get a full listen and a glimpse.
Dead silent they’d listen, wide-eyed and respectful to the man Big Nettles, who’d rage then roar, all in love, then weep then wail, then scathingly criticize the dead. Then in a sound whose heartbreak made everyone in earshot tear up and cry a bit for they knew how much this man loved his dead brother, and they too felt for the village’s loss of the dead person, remembered each in their own experience but also because weeping now would help Nettles live and help his dead brother get “home.” But you couldn’t help tearing up because you had to feel that man’s sound; it was a sound that went straight to the core. Grief has a sound, and it goes to the core. If the sound doesn’t go to the core, it’s not grief.
But now he’d collapsed into a nap. All was silent.
Then it was all song again, a song the brothers used to sing when fishing together in the lake with spears for which they were well known. Then there was a prayer to the glory of life left unfinished. Then crunched down to the ground, his head between his knees, Nettles would make the heroic effort to rise, and rise he did with his friends on his arms as supports, and like a long wave they all processed another hundred yards closer to home, where bellowing like before this normally quiet slow-talking, broad-shouldered fisherman clumped back to the day-heated black sand of his home village to be heard again a little closer to home, sitting like a boneless stuffed bear, while a new crowd came to listen. We admired him. I think everyone did.
In the end, by the end of the day everyone in the 40,000-person village would’ve heard such a person, as he or she processed through the town in a route prescribed by grief’s wild whim, until the heart was finished talking and emptied out, and in a total mess, the wandering griever would be carried home by as many as five or seven people. So much praise of life through wild active grieving makes a person weighty.
It was unthinkable to stop the griever from yelling. No one ever tried to “heal” him, or hush up any inappropriate blather they might spout. The people knew grief was not a sickness nor any kind of an affliction, but a pain-filled testament of courageous praise they bore whomsoever their heart had lost.
Everyone knew none of it was a performance, an act, because a person normally calm and collected in grief was so different, and whether inebriated or totally sober, was never thought of as any kind of disgrace or somehow made lesser in the people’s eyes. Grief would come, grief would go, life would heal, Nettles would be Nettles again.
Grief’s poem, no matter how messy, inappropriate, amateurish, or loud had to be heard, they thought. People also knew by instinct that they owed it to their own souls to listen to the honest grief and praise of someone deep into it.
In the village there were a few people in those days who worked for other people as paid employees. None of them would lose their job if their boss found out they’d collapsed in the middle of the village after a long night and day of grieving out loud. It would be only a matter of time before the boss himself would be in the streets doing the same thing anyway.
After a woman losing a parent wandered weeping through the streets, would anyone say, “She needs psychological help, she’s not fit to be a mother of small children, after acting like that in public”?
Would the village announce, “We have to let him go as an avocado farmer (or a crab fisher) after weeping his heart out for all to hear”? No, that would be unthinkable and peculiarly backwards.
I wonder how much things have really changed since the edicts of 589** and thereafter. Would any nontribal person be involved with what for them might seem something so outlandish, inefficient, and so undignified as the ancient custom of open grieving into the village ear? But what about human dignity? Can it actually be measured in microtones of flat gray, especially by those who cannot grieve and refuse to praise those who can? God cannot possibly be nourished by humans so unappreciative of the gift of life that they conform to living inside the boundaries of imperceptible gradient hues of cultural mediocrity and think they are somehow more advanced than the flamboyance of an expressive people.
People today might think, if they saw someone grieving in the streets, “That person just wants attention, they’re putting on an act so every eye is on them, they are grandstanding,” etc.… And that of course is the danger of even suggesting such a course of life, for it would not be beyond imagining that there might be shallow people who, not really knowing the depth of true love and therefore not really feeling grief, would use a fake show of grief to manipulate people for their own gratification or some agenda. Definitely not good.
People today might say to themselves, “I wouldn’t be caught dead acting like that in public.”
Indeed, if the truth is that grief is not an act, a theatrical exhibit, or the newest pop psychology–controlled therapeutic behavior, then why in the world would any modern person ever want to expose the tenderest and most special heartbreak to the world? Just for attention? I guess. For when love is unreal or real love is scarce, attention is mistaken for being heard. If that is truly the case in today’s world, any sensitive person would probably say, “I’ll do my crying in the rain, thank you very much.”
This is totally understandable. So modern people are not bad or lost. They are stuck in a blast furnace of banality where all of that technology and so-called advancement have been purchased at the price of their losing the most basic of human prerogatives: the art of being deliciously out of control to grieve their dead. It is a terrible source of grief in itself to not be able to grieve.
I don’t think the modern person is really saying, “I don’t want that kind of freedom for my soul,” but they are saying, “There is no village for me, a village who would not only listen but understand. I have no tribe who would admire the depth of my grief as a praise of what I have loved and lost, and consider it a tribal asset. I’m sure no one out there in my world would pick me as their hero for the beauty of my courage to express my love and loss in that way, much less comprehend that’s what they are seeing, when they see me crunched down by myself weeping in the streets. At best they’d pity me instead of admire me.”
There are neighborhoods, and pockets of amazing people, forgotten places and communities that could vie with the old Tzutujil, but for the greater percentage of people living in the modern monetized world today, there is no village, no tribe, no body of humans that constitute a person’s “people.” What is there instead is the “public.”
Their world is populated, that’s for sure, but not with people who know one another, but with a vast “public” of unknown individuals, competing on every level to get above wherever they have gotten to, to get away from the rest of the “public”!
In that business-in-charge world, life is carried out in terms that seem to me not too unlike the same ethos as used to motivate and maintain a war. Anyway, in this modern business competitive world, people are afraid of the public. They pretend to be comforted by being another molecule in a sea of anonymous human beings, but when the chips are down their actions say they trust no one and are scared all the time. Therefore it seems the biggest protection people have adopted is to never look weak to the public so they don’t get “exploited.” “Never leave yourself open, you’ll get ripped off.” “It’s your own fault, if they take you, if you let them.” It is implying of course that it’s alright for you to rip someone off if they let you! Welcome to Western expansionism, on the individual level or on the national-international level.
So … how then could a good human, stuck in a society such as that, someone with a really deep soul, good heart, and capable of love, risk losing their balance on the rung of the ladder they’ve scrambled so hard to get “up” to just weep, sing, go irrationally deep, ecstatically expressing true grief in such a “public,” without being judged as mad, going mad, or being privately wealthy?
“I would be mocked and shunned, I’d lose my job, my debts would go unpaid,” etc. That’s what they would say and they would be right. It shouldn’t be true, but it is.
It’s no wonder then that human beauty and sanity for people today who would even risk grief, keep their sanity, beauty and grief all together locked up in a safety deposit box, where no one but themselves can see it. Then whenever they conspire to, they can in a private moment look at such riches on their own very lonely terms.
So it’s definitely safer to not actively grieve in the modern situation. But the modern world is definitely not as sane as it thinks it is to have lost the arts of grief and praise. There has to be a way.
* Translated from the Latin by David Nirenberg, “The Visigothic Conversion to Catholicism: Third Council of Toledo,” in Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources, ed. O.R. Constable, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).
** The edicts of 589 are only one example of many of how throughout Europe it actually became illicit to grieve one’s losses, as any deep expression of feeling was perceived as an incorrigible adherence to Pagan/tribal ignorance and a blatant refusal to accept the benefits of the “true faith.”
A lot of what little we know of the particulars of the small-town spiritual traditions and customs at the onset of Christianity in geographic Europe survives from the written testimony of the minutes of large meetings of Christian clergy intent on eradicating these very same village spiritual traditions, perceived as a dangerous popular Pagan competition with the religion of the “State.”
Protestant “reformation” did nothing but exacerbate this repression of emotion, perceiving Catholic Christians and others as dangerously flamboyant and excessive. This offers us some insight into some of the reasons behind the otherwise mysteriously consistent distribution of the rampant inability with grief and general hard-faced emotional shutdown that many people descending from this history struggle with today.