In all my many years as a grief counselor and educator, I have been privileged to companion thousands of grieving people. I consider this work both an honor and a calling. But despite my schooling and experience, I am not the expert. It is the grievers themselves who are the experts. After all, they are the only ones who can teach me what their unique grief is like for them. My main responsibilities are to listen, learn, and empathize—and, in my teaching and authoring roles, to share their lessons of hope and healing with others.
As I progressed in my career and understanding, the more love and grief stories I listened to and learned from, the more I became aware of some quiet patterns. These patterns are important because they can help grievers like you embrace your grief and find your way to reconciliation.
One of those patterns was something I’ve already mentioned: that mourning, or the outward expression of grief, helps people heal. I saw that those who were more open and authentic in their grief and mourning—in ways that suited their unique personalities and needs—were more likely to work their way to renewed meaning and purpose in their continuing lives.
Another pattern I noticed was the converse of open, authentic mourning: a lot of people carry their grief instead of mourning it.
We humans have the capacity to keep our thoughts and feelings inside of us, and pretend, on the outside, that nothing is amiss. (Some people even have the capacity to barely acknowledge their own grief inside themselves.) If we grieve but never mourn after a significant loss, we end up carrying our grief, often for years and decades. And carried, or unacknowledged, grief creates insidious symptoms, such as ongoing anxiety, depression, and problems with intimacy. I call it “living in the shadows of the ghosts of grief” because it causes people to die inside while they are still alive.
And the third and perhaps most mysterious pattern that emerged as I learned from grievers is that while it takes both active mourning and time to heal—and there is and should be no timetable in grief—some people did seem to authentically reconcile their grief more expediently, even people who had suffered profound and traumatic losses.
For years I bore witness to these remarkable grievers’ stories, and slowly I discerned that many of them had something in common. They acknowledged and expressed their grief—yes. They actively remembered the person who died—yes. They developed new self-identities apart from the person who died—yes. They searched for spiritual meaning—yes. They often had good support from friends and family—yes. In short, they actively worked on the six needs of mourning that we will soon discuss.
But there was also something else—something unassuming and rather simple—that seemed to lift them up and carry them on a current of hope. What was it?
Often unknowingly, these grievers had leveraged the power of ritual to supercharge their healing.
First of all, what do I mean by ritual? Does the word have you picturing a weird, cultish rite around a bonfire in the middle of a forest in the middle of the night? Or does it conjure images of rote, by-the-book religious ceremonies?
Don’t worry—those concepts of ritual are not what I mean.
Wikipedia defines ritual this way: “a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and performed according to a set sequence.” That definition is a bit too prescriptive for our use, but it’s getting closer to what we want.
In contemporary parlance, we often use the word “ritual” in the context of self-care routines. We have our morning coffee-and-news ritual. We have daily grooming rituals. We have getting-ready-for-bed rituals. We have exercise and relaxation rituals. That routine you have of taking off your shoes after a long day and curling up in your favorite chair with your beverage of choice and your companion animal? That’s a ritual.
We also have rituals for luck, such as crossing our fingers, and rituals of preparation, as when a baseball player steps through a series of taps and shuffles before entering the batter’s box. Formal and informal spiritual rituals abound, too, from services at places of worship to prayer beads to singing bowls to labyrinths.
The word “ritual” comes to us from the late-16th-century Latin ritualis and ritus, meaning an act performed in a ceremony. That’s what rituals are as we will discuss them in this book—actions that we perform in a certain way and in a certain sequence, for a purpose that has emotional and spiritual meaning and is greater than the sum of its sometimes banal parts. And rituals don’t have to be formal ceremonies. In fact, most of the rituals in this book are brief, informal, and simple, and they can be performed alone. They pack outsized healing power into just a few minutes.
When it comes to death and grief, the funeral, of course, is a keystone ritual. After a death, since the dawn of human civilization, we grievers have relied on funeral rituals to take us through the transition in ways commensurate with the life-changing nature of the experience. We don’t just toss dead bodies into the trash and call it good. In fact, that very idea is so shocking and distasteful because we intuitively and deeply understand that the loss of a loved one demands time, respect, and care.
That is why when someone we care about dies, we often drop everything else we are doing—work, school, vacations, daily tasks—and turn our attention to the person who died, the family of the person who died, and the time-worn rituals that step us through the coming days. From caring for the body and the visitation to the ceremony and all its many elements (music, readings, the eulogy, flowers, candle-lighting, etc.) to the funeral procession to the cemetery and the graveside goodbye to the gathering afterward, there is a time-tested sequence of steps we follow.
The funeral ritual provides a structure that holds us up at a time when we might otherwise collapse. It gives us things to do and places to go. But it’s also much more than an empty scaffold. It slows down time, creating space for respect and care. It a spiritual encounter with the meaning of life, love, and death.
I hope you were able to participate in a meaningful, personalized funeral experience for the person you love who died. If you were, you know that an authentic funeral helps you set out on a healthy mourning path and begin to meet your six needs of mourning (see page 17). A great funeral can provide a great start and has the springboard-like healing boost inherent to all grief rituals. (And if you weren’t fortunate enough to take part in an excellent funeral? The group rituals in Chapter 7 can be used as follow-up funerals of a sort.)
But we’ve done ourselves a disservice in thinking about the funeral as a ritual of closure. The funeral is better understood as a ritual of beginning. It is a rite of passage from life before the death to life after the death. As such, it marks the beginning of our new lives. I often say that the funeral is less about saying goodbye and more about saying hello—hello to our changed world, hello to our grief, hello to the new selves we are forced to become, hello to a search for renewed meaning and purpose.
People in other times and places have better understood this. For example, the Victorian tradition of formal mourning for a year or more, characterized by mourning clothing and various social rituals, gave continued structure and acknowledgment to people’s necessary, ongoing grief long after the funeral. Around the world, during festivals like the Day of the Dead in Mexico and Chuseok in Korea, grievers to this day continue to set aside sacred time for rituals honoring those who have died.
In present-day America, some grievers instinctively plan or take part in additional rituals after the funeral to help them continue on the path of healthy grief and mourning. Have you? Group memory ceremonies (sometimes orchestrated at holiday time by hospices or funeral homes); family cemetery visits, tree plantings, or fun runs in memory of a loved one; annual fundraisers to support a nonprofit or cause dear to the person who died; and gatherings that mark the anniversary of tragedies are a few examples of the kinds of group rituals that are sometimes held. All help grievers meet their needs of mourning, and I recommend all of them.
But in our culture, these follow-up rituals are relatively uncommon. Rarely do I meet grievers who have participated in additional ceremonies after the funeral—and a larger and larger percentage of people are skipping the funeral itself. So…there’s a disconnect! On the one hand, I know that ritual is exceptionally powerful at helping grievers heal, yet on the other hand, I see that death and grief rituals are rarely used.
I hope this book not only moves us toward re-ritualizing death and grief but also helps more and more grievers begin to understand and embrace the power of all rituals—big and small—during their time of grief.