Death and the Grieving Process
Recently, it seems to have become more difficult for people in Western society to grieve, and to accept death and bereavement. This is probably due to the changing mores concerning death that have occurred during the twentieth century. For example, it is now not always necessary for people to wear black at a funeral or for a minister to give an address in a church. And more elaborate and formal expressions of condolence – such as the wearing of a black armband – are largely no longer observed. Despite the loss of these cultural supports, people who have recently been bereaved are nonetheless expected to cope. Often they are expected to show their grief for only a very short time, despite evidence to suggest that it can take much more than a year for a bereaved person to start to reconstruct their life. This apparent lack of sympathy may be because people tend to confuse grief, which is the period of readjustment that a bereaved person needs in order to respond to death (or, perhaps less coldly expressed, the period during which their love is not able to let go), and mourning, which is the short period of time during which we make a social acknowledgement that the person we love has died. The period of mourning in modern society is relatively short and is more or less over within a few days or weeks of the funeral.
However, where grieving is concerned, the length of time and the intensity of the period are fairly unpredictable. They depend on your personality, how close you were to the person who died, the previous experiences you’ve had of death and the way in which your loved one died. Following the sudden death of my wife Shirin, I was told by a friend of a friend, whose husband had died after eleven months of marriage, that it was six months before she found she was able to start to laugh again at the trivia of everyday life. But she didn’t tell me that it was going to be a year before I would be able to control bursting into tears at any time of day, or in any place, whether cooking a meal for myself, sitting in my car at a set of traffic lights, or working on a text for a lecture. For some, it can take years.
