Grief is Praise

Grief expressed out loud, whether in or out of character, unchoreographed and honest, for someone we have lost, or a country or home we have lost, is in itself the greatest praise we could ever give them. Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.

…

I don’t know why I’m always so surprised, in this day and age, with so many possibilities and choices at their fingertips, how people, who having lived for so many generations, so distant from any semblance of the old wisdoms known to their ancestors about what the living should be doing when someone dies, will so wildly and emotionally defend the unemotional flatness and spiritual vacuum they have come to live in and accept a repressed lack of expression as a normal existence, coming to its defense with more energy than it would actually take to have a tangibly good custom of storytelling, weeping, and active grief, as if such sanity were some backwards barbarity!

One night a little while back I remember how a very Midwestern friend called me the day his old-time mother had passed quietly away. Because he had been on good terms with her, and because his father was already dead, he as the oldest son had been put in charge of the funeral proceedings, as was his family’s custom.

The entire extended family including himself had been raised to be very “stoic” Lutheran Christians, and excepting himself, all of them were still governed by that kind of “minimalist” Northern European ethos.

Nonetheless, my friend, though he loved his people, had over the years become somewhat more adventurous and called himself an “alternative person,” which translated to his relatives as “overly dedicated to diversity”!

He had listened to recordings of my talks on grief and had attended some lectures and conferences, and in keeping with what was taught there regarding the welfare of both the living and the spirit of the deceased, he wanted to make certain he was doing everything possible during that strange trancelike place that happens after someone close dies, to see that his dead mother was well grieved, mourned, and “sent on” in a good way to the “next” world.

He wanted my advice and direction to make sure he wasn’t overlooking anything. She was lying in state in a little mortuary chapel in his hometown and would be buried the following afternoon at the direction of the same Protestant minister who had always been the family’s old-time minister.

“Well,” I replied, feeling that I would probably be too overtly pagan to have any advice of mine remotely embraced by his American-born Scandinavian flatlander relatives as anything proper and real, “if it were me, the first thing I would do would be to feed the soul of the dead and to spiritually notify your mother’s last happy ancestor in the other world to get ready to receive her. The problem, I said, is that all of this generally involves the entire family, as it needs everyone and should be a group effort…