The liturgy that gathered and directed our emotions was familiar and color-coded. For funerals, the priest wore black vestments symbolizing death, just as he wore red for feast days of the martyrs and–on ordinary Sundays–green for the hope that all Christians have of life eternal. The music varied, too. Long before I learned a modern language, I knew by heart the somber Latin funeral hymn ““Dies Irae’’ (““Day of Wrath’’). I knew, too, that the clouds of incense billowing around the body were meant to honor flesh that was soon to turn to dust. By such appeals to the senses we children were inducted into the abstract mystery of death–our own as well as that of others. Sad? Yes. But never morbid. Death is real, the liturgy instructed us. But so is the promise of Resurrection.
Grief demands ritual. To die alone is bad enough, but to grieve without rituals that lift the broken heart is worse. Those whose grief is affirmed within a wider community of faith are fortunate. But not everyone is religious. And even those who claim to be often find God’s dominion harder to acknowledge–especially when a child dies or a young parent is taken from them–than that of death itself. There is, in short, no single way to grieve, any more than there is a uniform ““American way of death.''
Jewish mourning rituals focus more on the bereaved than the body. By custom, Jews bury the dead within 24 hours if possible, without embalming, in a plain wooden coffin. Traditional Jews never put the body on view or have it cremated. ““After the Holocaust, any Jew who opts for cremation is obscene,’’ says Prof. Neil Gillman of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.
Among observant Jews, mourning proceeds in stages and centers on sitting shiva in the home. At death or at the funeral, survivors cut their clothing with a razor–on the left for a parent, on the right for a spouse, child or sibling–to symbolize the tear in life that death has produced. After a ritual healing meal, shiva begins. For the first week, men don’t shave; survivors are not supposed to wash their whole bodies, and the entire family receives visitors while sitting on the floor or on low chairs. ““The idea is to be uncomfortable,’’ says Gillman. ““It’s a statement that you are experiencing pain.’’ Formal mourning may continue for 30 days–and for nearly a year if the deceased is a parent.
Muslims mourn their dead in mosques, never at funeral parlors. The body is washed in a special room (men prepare males, women females) while the family and friends recite suras from the Koran as blessings for the deceased. Within hours of death, the body is buried–just as Dodi Fayed, Princess Diana’s companion, was. In most Islamic traditions, all the male members of the community walk in a procession to the gravesite; women visit later during a 40-day mourning period. A close friend of the deceased climbs into the grave to read final instructions to the dead in preparation for his or her meeting with Allah. Then, according to Islamic belief, the angels who accompany every believer in life enter the grave to question the departed soul on matters of faith and life: ““Who is your Lord? Who is your prophet? What book do you follow?’’ ““If the person was pious,’’ says Abdulaziz Sachedina, professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, ““the grave is broadened and there is room for a garden inside. If the person was not so good in life, the grave becomes a very narrow place.''
Whatever their differences, religious rituals for the dead are always communal events. Feeding the survivors cuts across all traditions, and so does the telling of stories. ““Grief is an isolating emotion,’’ observes James Campbell, professor of philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. ““When we grieve, we want to run away and hide, and that’s not a good way to handle grief.''
But, as funeral directors are the first to notice, an increasing number of Americans confront death with no inherited faith or liturgy for support. As a result, the funeral director has become by default the weaver of instant rituals. One approach is to have the survivors re-create the life story of the deceased. ““I help them write things they never got to say to the person and put them in letters and place them in the casket,’’ says Bruce Conley, a funeral director in Elburn, Ill. Another ritual that some of Conley’s customers like is tucking the body into the casket before the final closing, as a mother does with a child at night. ““When we put the two together,’’ Conley finds, ““when we approach sorrow with celebration, it purges the emotions.''
Even so, the rituals that possess the greatest healing power are those not solely of our own invention. When death is absorbed into a liturgy that affirms transcendent life, something more than grief finds expression. The experience is called communion.
