doing grief, doing ceremonies

It's commonplace, and perhaps therefore obviously true, that you can't tell the depth or nature of someone's grief from their face; grief happens in different ways.

At present we seem in the middle of a huge wave of books and journalism about grief and how to do it properly (or well, or effectively, or honestly - add your own exhortation.)

I'm really not sure how much help we need to grieve for a loss. Seems to me when it happens, we feel grief. It's not a thing, it's a process, and it fluctuates. We might need help to deal with it, if it is in danger of turning into depression or obsession, but grief is hardly a skill to be honed. "Teach Yourself Grief" would be a useless title! And yet there's a book on my shelf called "About Grief," and I'm told it's very good. I must read it sometime.

The books and essays may help people to help people who are grieving, of course.  I wonder if the welter of advice is a product of our highly individualistic culture, in which common ways of doing the big things in life have fragmented, along with religious beliefs? 

So each of us needs to grieve in our own way. But we'll do that anyway, and I guess always did even when the church had a handle on what people were supposed or expected to feel. Grief was never, I guess, a standard procedure.

I've met, in the course of my work and in my private life, a lot of grieving people, including as it were, myself. I've seen people desolate and crying out with it at a funeral - almost howling with grief; I've seen people apparently completely unmoved. I've learned to avoid comparative views, let alone judgements. I've learned, above all, to ask and to listen.

Is it the job of a funeral to help with grief? Perhaps, up to a point. It's a communal experience and one kind of goodbye, it marks off a phase in coming to terms with a death, it can help us face the impossible fact that someone no longer exists. But it's only a brief ceremony.

Funerals in this country tend to be less demonstrative than in the USA, I understand. I worked briefly with an American who at the time thought she wanted to be a celebrant, and after the first funeral she observed she said that everyone there seemed very repressed and flat. It seemed a fairly typical British crem funeral to me, and we discussed cultural differences. Each of us likes to think our responses are unique, but of course they are also culturally and socially shaped. For example, it's harder not to weep (if you think you shouldn't) when people around you are weeping.

Some funeral radicals think our British reserve at funerals is unhealthy, or unhelpful. Some more reserved people seem to feel it's shameful, letting the side down, to show much sadness at a funeral. "How's she doing?" people ask. "Well," comes the answer, which usually means she's keeping a grip on her feelings and showing little of them. Is this good, or bad? Or simply how she does her grieving?

Perhaps there's a danger here in thinking grief should be expressed or "done" in a particular way; who is any one of us to say how we should or shouldn't express ourselves in public?

We do grief, we do a funeral ceremony, each of us in our own way and each of us alone, and yet with people round us who share, we know, at least some of our feelings. So although the public nature of the event can be a burden for some, it can also be a great help and comfort. We are, after all, social animals.

"No man is an island, entire of itself...never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

Strange paradox - we can't feel the particular nature of another's grief: what is more dismaying than when someone says "I know how you feel." No you don't, despite your good intentions. And yet we can share in another's grief. 

 "If thou wilt weep my fortunes, take my eyes.
I know thee well enough, thy name is Gloucester;
Thou must be patient; we came crying hither"

We aren't all Lear or Gloucester, thank goodness; but shared grief, however it happens, is surely a powerful and helpful thing. I don't know why; why should it help, to have someone else share your pain?

It's part of our common humanity, and despite the pain - perhaps because of the pain - grief is a rich and strange thing.