Flags may fly at half-staff for a while longer. For the remainder of the baseball and football seasons we’ll hear a new bittersweet note as “The Star-Spangled Banner” is played. But the big ceremonies are over for now.
A week ago Friday, we gathered in city squares, churches, mosques and synagogues to bow our heads in a collective re-enactment of the paralysis that gripped us when those horrifying sights flashed across America’s television screens.
Now comes the tough part.
Each of us has to find something to do with the confounding mixture of sadness, pity and anger we carry. The burden will not be lifted by all the public eulogies, however eloquent the words might have been. Grieving isn’t an event, no matter how fitting and solemn, but a process.
Once, we knew how to mourn.
People used to live and die in the same town, often in the house where they were born. In frontier days, Americans made their own coffins. Down to the 20th Century, a lock of hair clipped from the departed would be handed out at a wake. Sometimes it was braided into a remembrance ring.
Death was a part of life.
Today, it is delegated to hospitals and funeral parlors.
In a suburbanized society, we have fewer neighbors to lean on in a time of bereavement. Conversely, we less often help others through that crisis. So we have less experience to call upon–at precisely a moment when those Sept. 11 kamikaze attacks confront us with murderous death on a scale unprecedented in our nation’s history.
Some of us need to learn what our ancestors knew.
“To mourn, you have to understand the reality of death,” notes historian Paul Boyer. “We’re cut off from that. This is a culture of denying death.”
Yet we are fortunate for also living in a multicultural society–in effect, a unique preserve of a rainbow of religious practices developed over centuries to enable survivors to cope with loss. They offer clues to what real grieving is all about. We can draw lessons from them, be we atheists or believers.
“The ancient rabbis weren’t ideologues. They were utter realists,” said Maurice Lamm, author of “The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning.”
Mazher Ahmed, a lay leader in Chicago’s Muslim community, has the same feeling about the founder of his faith. The Prophet Muhammad, Ahmed said, “learned more about human psychology than any psychologist.”
In most religious communities, mourning rituals rest on an assumption that grief is not something to be gotten over in a day, a week or even a month officially set aside for mourning. For Queen Victoria it was an unending experience. After the death of her beloved Prince Albert, the 19th Century English monarch dressed only in mourning black.
Judaism’s mourning rituals recognize that, for some losses, there can be no complete recovery. A Jewish mourner rends his garments. Afterward, the cut is repaired.
“But for a mother or a father, it’s not sewn, only basted,” Lamm said. “Because no one could sew up that wound.”
Judaism divides the period after a loved one’s death by markers–a week, a month, a year–providing specific mourning rituals for each. Sister Marjorie Robinson, a contemplative nun in upstate New York, said the members of her Carmelite community do much the same.
“A month after a person dies, we’ll often have a special mass,” Robinson said. “The whole first year is a time of great mourning.”
It can also be a time of anger–an embittering anger and an anger at our loss directed toward God, should we be believers. Those feelings should not be denied, for all that they might call into question our previous conceptions about life.
“Doubting is not a lack of faith,” Robinson said. “I believe that as long as you’re fighting with God, you’re believing.”
Judaism provides ring rules for that fight. The door of a house of mourning is supposed to be left slightly ajar.
“Because, if you have to knock, when they open the door, you say, `Shalom,’ `Peace,’ which is an attribute of God,” Lamm said. “To a mourner, hearing about God only magnifies anger.”
Recognizing death
To survivors, the toughest thing to grasp is seemingly the most obvious: The simple fact that someone important to them is gone, once and for all.
“When a family comes here, the first thing they need to do isn’t to chat with me,” said Bob Marik, who has operated a funeral parlor on Chicago’s Southwest Side for 30 years. “They need to look at their loved one. Seeing is believing.”
The Romans made that proposition the centerpiece of their mourning rituals for public figures. The ancient historian Polybius left us a poignant description of the Romans’ way of death in the 2nd Century B.C.
“Whenever a distinguished man dies, he is carried, during the course of the funeral, into the Forum, to the public speakers’ platform; the corpse is conspicuous in an upright position,” reports Polybius. “Death seems not to be a private affair for mourners, but a public loss, affecting everyone.”
Judaism, too, recognizes how difficult but how necessary it is for mourners to recognize the finality of death.
“What is the saddest of all possible sounds?” Lamm says. “The thud dirt makes when it hits a casket.”
According to Jewish burial practices, the interment of a loved one is not something to be left to professional gravediggers. Instead, everyone in the funeral party takes a turn, throwing a shovel of dirt into the grave. That way, all get to hear in that thud the finality of death.
Larger context
Yet mourning equally involves putting an individual’s death into some larger context.
Father Michael Kontos, a Greek Orthodox priest in Chicago, said his community speaks not of burying someone but of “sowing” them into the earth, as if they were the seeds of generations to come.
“In the Bible it says: `For unless wheat falls into soil, it cannot grow again,'” Kontos said. “We also make a special mourning dish, kolyva, made of boiled wheat, to which some raisins and pomegranates have been added.”
In mountain villages of Greece, the context of someone’s death is supplied by a ceremony called a miralogu. The women of the community recite an epic poem, of which the decedent’s life is the last verse–and the previous ones, which might take a day and night to sing, connect him to all the previous generations of the community, running back to before even the time of Christianity to the age when the ancient gods were worshiped there.
Rev. Walter Johnson, pastor of Wayman African Methodist Episcopal Church in Chicago, said his church honors a similar practice when a member dies. “I make visitations and talk with the family,” he said, “and try to get them to talk about the family member.”
Improvising rituals
Robinson said when a nun dies, her order sends out a circular letter recounting the nun’s life. She and the other sisters often improvise a ritual, if those they have inherited don’t seem adequate.
The nuns also take special note of public tragedies.
“We might save pieces from the newspaper with the names of people who died in the tragedy,” she said, “and bring them to the altar.”
An earlier generation of Americans knew how to improvise in the face of grief. The death of George Washington in 1799 left the country stunned. He was the Father of his nation, so his offspring didn’t wait for a formal proclamation of a day of mourning. In cities across the nation, citizens simply placed an empty coffin on their shoulders, carrying it through the streets to express their sense of loss.
A group of New York firefighters drew on similar instincts when confronted with death on a scale for which even they were psychologically unprepared.
Picking through the rubble of the World Trade Center, they found the body of Mychal Judge, a Franciscan priest who was the department’s chaplain. He had helped them through previous occasions of grief. So they took him in their arms and carried him to nearby St. Peter’s Church.
They laid his body on the altar.
“The church was there,” said Brother Thomas Cole, who lived in the same friary, “and they figured it was a safe place to put him.”
