Grief and Mourning. Which is it?

An image from my youth, a photo of an Italian woman, Catholic, mid-seventies maybe, a little stooped, dressed in black. She stands alone on a cobbled street in the midday sun.

What a travesty of grief, thought I, who knew nothing of grief, to have your unique, personal sorrow swallowed up by a custom that makes it look like everyone else’s. I didn’t understand that the woman’s mourning clothes were not meant to portray her individual grief but to signal to those around her that she was grieving. Perhaps this custom also reminded others of their common fate, that death is with us always, as much as the cobbled street and the hot Mediterranean sun. They will be that woman one day, and the trappings of grief will both set them apart and assure that they remain part of the human community. 

I still wonder what the woman’s grief was like. Did she feel comforted by being part of an ancient tradition, appreciative that others knew she was grieving? Or was she glad to be rid of her troll of a husband and annoyed at having to mourn him? 

Grief can be called the subjective, personal experience of loss, and mourning the outward expressions of, or guideposts for, observing that loss. I think we’re in short supply of the latter in American life today. This is not to slight rich practices of mourning among some cultural and faith groups, only to suggest that as a society we fall short on them.   

How can we see and be helpful to those who grieve when we have few guideposts to help us do so and so many reasons to keep on in order to keep up? We’re surrounded by grief that’s hard to detect, with many opportunities and demands to miss the few signs of it that are visible to us. 

We may be a bit more sensitized to grief since COVID, as well as to mourning in the knowledge of families unable to conduct the ritual of grief and mourning of burying a loved one. It remains to be seen how much staying power COVID’s impact will have now that it has receded. 

In the early years of my son Jesse’s death I talked with a friend, Ken Thompson, a psychiatrist, about my experience of grief. I quoted the old spiritual: 

You’ve got to walk that lonesome valley 

You’ve got to walk it by yourself

Nobody else can walk it for you

You’ve got to walk it by yourself

“That’s it,” I told him, “you’re alone with your grief. Even if your whole family is grieving, you’re still alone.” 

“Yes,” he said, “but slaves sang that song to each other. And the song has survived because others have sung it since then. And now you know it.” 

I believe you’ve got something there, Ken.