Death has been a popular topic lately with the recent losses of Alan Rickman, David Bowie and Glenn Frey. Some have even had the unfortunate experience of losing a loved one recently. How are we dealing with the mourning process of losing someone, whether it’s someone close or just someone we know of?
I lost my dad to cancer last year. Of course it was devastating to me, and I was heartbroken. I grieve in a very different way than the average person, and that is disturbing to a lot of people. My sister, my boyfriend and myself went up to North Carolina to my stepmother’s house for the funeral. After the funeral we were mingling with everyone and I was talking, laughing and acting like my normal and happy self. A woman who I had never met before came up and said, “Aren’t you sad? Why aren’t you sad?” Obviously I was offended. Of course I was sad. Why would she ask such a thing right now?
We’ve come to a point, at least in America it seems, when someone dies, it becomes a competition for the living. It becomes a competition to prove who was closer to that person, or who is grieving the most because of the death. This woman was thrown off because I wasn’t battling for the sadness spotlight with my stepmother or my sister. I wasn’t trying to be more sad or trying to prove that I was closer to him than either of them.
Have you ever lost someone close to you, and all of a sudden people who haven’t been in touch with that person for years are all of a sudden in despair over their death? That’s not to say we shouldn’t be sad when someone we know dies. Of course it stirs up all kinds of emotions -- it reminds us of our own mortality. That being said, it is universally known that we all experience loss. Even cross-culturally, one would assume that as humans we would have some sort of shared mourning process for when a loved one dies. However, this is not the case.
Some cultures don’t even have equivalent terms to our English word grief. The Japanese language, for example, does not. The closest word they have is Hitan which translates to “sadness and sorrow,” but the word is not connected to death like grief is. Mourning refers to the set of customs and behaviors one would do following a death learned from their family, friends and culture.
In the Romani and Gypsy culture, tears are expected to be publicly displayed. Latinos believe that it is acceptable for women to openly weep loudly, but the culture prizes “machismo” in men who are not to show too much emotion. In Bali, women are strongly discouraged from crying. In the Philippines, it is acceptable to wear white or black during the mourning period, but the color red is deeply frowned upon. They believe that anyone who wears red within nine to 40 days of the death will die or get sick. In the United States, black is generally the color of mourning.
At my father’s funeral, even though I was grieving, I was not showing it. I was not mourning properly, and it caused that random woman to react. Her reaction was to ask me why I was not sad -- because I was not competing for the spotlight because I was not crying in a corner and because I managed to have a smile on my face, she assumed I was not sad. I knew that other cultures had mourning rituals, but I never really understood what ours was in the United States was other than wearing black and attending a funeral.
We are indeed expected to wear black, cry and take off days from work or school. It is normal for us to talk back and forth about the deceased, sharing stories and fond memories. Women are expected to cry and it's OK for men to cry too. If men give each other hugs, then they give each other those macho, painful, slappy hugs (you know what I'm talking about), but those hugs are filled with tears as well. Every culture has a mourning process and every one is unique.
