Expressing Grief

We Scandinavians are not known for our emotive sides. I've seen my Norwegian and Finnish relatives from the Midwest in a bunch of funeral settings now and I'm always struck by how quiet it is. We don't talk. We don't wail loudly. We sit with tightly wrapped bodies and and cry politely. A lot of times I sit there wondering why I don't feel much, why it feels hollow or empty. I feel bad that I don't feel as bad as it seems I should feel.

The people that are loud or messy are generally not in control of themselves. They are the random uncle who has a serious drinking problem and shows up far enough gone that things get sloppy. It's my grandfather with serious dementia who literally can't remember what's happening and sees his own wife and falls to the ground in a cry because the experience was so surprising and sudden and horrible. It feels like we excuse these instances because they are anachronisms, because these people simple don't know or can't do better. But for those of us with sound mind and body I feel an unspoken assumption that this is gaudy. It feels self-indulgent to scream one's grief into the room. It feels weird and awkward and rude somehow. No one has ever said this to me. It just seems like I shouldn't bother anyone. It seems like things are hard enough already and we all know it's a sad time. It seems like one doesn't need to go broadcasting it to the world because it makes it about you. It seems as if unless you are so overcome with grief and emotion that you literally can't control yourself then you ought to and just process that shit internally on your own time.

That's weird, I think. 

Right? 

What is a funeral for but that moment of expressing grief and starting the process of processing? But it really feels rude somehow to get up and make a lot of noise. I remember being at a funeral for B's grandmother, a sweet and flinty woman who I met a few times, and feeling bad for crying. I thought, "Who are you to cry for this person. They aren't crying and they really knew her. Stop making this about you." 

This is possibly, nay probably, some part my own neuroses at work. And still... Why would ANYONE care if I felt sad? Why would I think anyone would judge me for feeling the loss of a person special to my special person? Thinking about it now, I cried more because those people around me - B, his mom, grandfather and sister - who I saw in pain. I cried for them because I could see that they were suffering and I because I loved them I was sad that they were feeling this way.

In this instance, it's not my place to tell people how they should express themselves (though this is sort of my job in the rest of my life). If you don't want to cry, of COURSE, you don't have to. You don't have to feel anything. But I'm betting if I feel this awkwardness about expressing sadness there are others who feel this way too. What is it about our culture that invisibly tells us that we shouldn't express these things publicly? Why do these visible emotions make us so freaked out? Isn't the whole point of a funeral to give us a ritual space to do this in?

I found this video series recently called "Ask a Mortician" and in it she talks about exactly this subject. Ironically, there's an early questions that she reads from a viewer about a co-worker who loses a baby to miscarriage and then says nothing because she doesn't want to say the wrong thing. I have had EXACTLY this experience and did EXACTLY the same thing. It was interesting to hear the advice and think about if I could follow it myself in the real world. 

I went and looked up the "professional mourner" that the video mentions. I also found a bit of video of one of these ceremonies.

As I was watching this with its unabashed theatricality and heightened emotional performativity all I could think of was theater. We go to plays, we watch movies, we read books, we listen to music that are insanely depressing and epic in their description and experience of grief. We love a Romeo and Juliet tragedy and the intentionally overwrought emotions it gives us. Perhaps we crave exactly this kind of weeping and wailing in our lives because it gives us permission to feel intensely in this way. Culturally we are allowed to wallow in the depth of a romantic break up (at least for a little while). There is so much music and pop culture devoted to the intensity of this feeling. Is it possible that having an outlet for an experience so much more intense might also need such a freeing outlet? Might it help us get through the experience by having a moment to really dive in and let out those feelings rather that keeping them tightly held and able to fester?

I love this idea in spirit. I wonder if I would be able to do it in practice....

Things to chew on.