"We Mourn In Black" - William Shakespeare

In our all-public-all-the-time world, most people's feelings seem to end up on the internet, laid out for everyone to see. When a loved one dies, it's no different. Mourning pours out into the digital world. Facebook profiles of our departed have become places to mourn - statements on how much a loved one is missed, wishing them good holidays. While this may be helpful for some, I have heard from others how jarring it is to see their dearly departed show up in their feed.

Mourning is tricky. It's both deeply personal and public. Death doesn't happen in a vacuum and it effects everything around the mourner. Our lives are increasingly divested of rituals and formalized practices, allowing people to embrace that which is the most appropriate for them, but it can also leave us adrift. How do we mourn?

Different cultures and religions have different customs and they vary wildly. The tradition of plain, black attire began during the Roman Empire and has continued through most of western civilization with some exceptions. Medieval European queens mourned in white, a tradition that several recent royals have maintained. White is also found as the color of mourning in India, though other Asian cultures, such as the Japanese, may wear black.

Religions also have different mandates and suggestions for mourners, from a few days to months. Judaism allows seven days for the truly deep mourning, a period known as Shiva, and then a longer, lesser state of mourning to follow. As someone raised in a religion without dedicated mourning rituals, I have always found the practice to be incredibly considerate.

Queen Victoria in mourning.

The height of ritualistic mourning occurred during the Victorian Era, when Her Majesty, Queen Victoria, led the charge with deep, lifelong mourning after the loss of her beloved Prince Albert. There were prescribed timelines for mourning based on how close the departed was and rules, many rules on how to do it properly. After a period of time, the mourner phased into half-mourning and then eventually could return to life.

While the strict rules on how long to mourn for your cousin seem stifling in an era when not everyone even wears black to a funeral, wouldn't it be nice to be free from thinking about it? To have all the rules and practices laid out for you? To know, with certainty, that people won't expect you to be social, since it would be unseemly, and you can curl up and grieve until you're ready to move on?

I recently read the Huffington Post piece on bringing back mourning clothes. The points made are logical - mourning clothes send a clear signal to the rest of society that you are grieving. You don't have to say it. You don't have to announce to the world that you're in pain and might not be functioning to your highest level. It's presented in your attire and allows others to respond accordingly.

We are an instant gratification culture. Amazon delivers in two days, baby pictures are posted minutes after the child draws first breath, and nearly anything you could want can be purchased on credit without saving for it. It makes sense that we would expect to grieve at the same rate, but grief doesn't work like that. It's too deep, too personal, too life altering to just vanish when society expects you to rebound. Everyone grieves at a different rate and in different ways, but having the social space and distance to grieve would be nice. If dressing in black from head-to-toe signified to those around you that you need that space...how much easier would that be for the mourner?

In response to losing a dear friend, I became first productive, contacting people who didn't know, comforting friends from a distance. After I ran out of things to do, the tears came. Eventually, they stopped, and I felt empty, hollow. Wrung out. In response to prodding, I agreed to go out with friends, be among people, but deciding what to wear proved more than my numb self could manage. So I wore black, which I normally avoid (harsh against a fair complexion). I didn't have to think about it - I was in mourning, it was appropriate. Most friends took it as a sign and were sufficiently distracting, though one particularly crass individual remarked on their personal distaste for the departed. Realizing I was opening myself up to hearing from those who didn't like my dear friend and that it made me a target for their opinion sent me into hiding. I kept my mourning entirely private, confined to my own space, tucking it away every time I had to leave the house. Society told me to move on, so I pretended I had. To this day, I have no truly mourned the loss.

To bring back some formal points of mourning, including a societal understanding of the importance of it, would allow people the time to truly process their loss. I am not for the required times - it's not always appropriate and becomes a show in those cases, but to recognize the donning of black as a sign of grief that all the world understands without having to say it, over and over, would be a good step. This would demand, of course, a societal respect for the needs of others, for understanding the subtle social cues of grief, for us not to judge based on how we mourn, but try to empathize with their personal struggle. Those are hard things, but they are the marks of a lady or a gentleman.

It also requires that black not be the uniform of a New Yorker, but that's another post entirely.