Of Mourning Ritual

Like many of my ilk, I’ve bucked tradition and its rituals. I’m a free spirited intellectual, after all! A philosopher, no less, who’s spent his life studying different ways to make sense of the world. But with my sister’s death, I found there is nothing to think, no way to conceptualize, no way to “process” it (whatever that means). The deafening, maddening silence of death belies thought, leaving only a wake of devastating grief. Stripped of my trusty go-to—thinking—and flooded with such intense emotion, I’ve turned to a different tactic: creating a mourning ritual.

Daniel Coffeen
Reading the Way of Things
6 min readApr 4, 2024

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All Griefed Up with Nowhere to Go

I’m the baby.

It’s funny being a middle class, post-boomer American—me, I’m Gen X — facing the inevitable, uh, challenges of aging. I have casually, yet righteously, cast aside the expectations of old. Like most young Americans of a certain class, I left my home and settled 3000 miles away. Unlike most, I eloped at 26, getting hitched last minute up the street from the apartment my bride-to-be and I were about to begin cohabitating—breaking the tradition of my cohorts by choosing the tradition of not living together before marriage. This is all to say, like those of my ilk, I brush off the stuff of tradition as so much fuddy-duddy nonsense.

And then shit happens. You get divorced. You watch your kid struggle in agonizing pain, a uniquely horrible agony. Then your sister dies, leaving three kids aged 11, 13, and 16; a mother whose heart literally broke. What then?

My grief was debilitating. For six months, I flew back and forth between coasts, helping my sister die on one, tending to my son on the other. Despite near bankruptcy from the ordeal, after she died I couldn’t do anything. Nothing. All my fancy philosophers offered me no respite. What could they say to me that would quiet and calm my heart? And so every day, for hours on end, I’d scream into my pillow—didn’t want to alarm the neighbors. After six months of this, I mustered the self-preservation to find a brilliant old therapist who taught me the beautiful melancholy of death.

Which worked, kind of, for a bit. I’d still get easily emotional. I couldn’t watch anything that had someone sick in it without breaking down before turning it off. I’d still cry hysterically in my shower at least three times a week. Funny that showers have that effect. It’s almost as if the ritual of stripping away society’s clothes to wash away the day was a ritual that, because of my anti-ritual prejudice, I failed to acknowledge as such.

Ten years later, my life remains punctuated by intense grief that overwhelms me, sometimes at inopportune moments. I’ve imagined it as my inability to process this basic, undeniable aspect of life, namely, death. Which it no doubt is. But, then again, what is it to process death? What does that mean? Perhaps I can think about death in general. But how can the death of someone in particular be thought?

Time Does Not Heal All

Sure, I can “process” some aspects of it all (not quite sure what it means, “to process”). As a philosopher, I get that death disrupts sense, that death is in fact presence of the unthinkable amid the mechanics of life. I get the fact that life goes on, that I will continue to lead my life, her kids their lives, and such. And, sure, with time, the persistent, pervasive intensity of the actual dying lessens. But here’s the thing: as Bunk says to Omar, and I paraphrase, death stay death.

As time marches on, her absence only becomes more apparent. A few months after she died, I could still somehow imagine that she was away, that I’d see her when she was back. Then the months became years and the horrifying truth unavoidable: she’s never coming back. Not because we had a falling out or because she decided to live with the chimps but because she’s gone from the world, forever. That’s not something that time heals. On the contrary, time exacerbates my grief, the silence when I call to her a searing shriek that only gets louder as the years pass.

In Search of Grief’s Expression

This intense grief burbles in me, continuously oozing out, sometimes turning into a torrent of tears, an unseemly gush that finds me lying fetal-like, screaming into the abyss. Perhaps the task at hand, the task of being human, is precisely this: to live with the impossible horror of death.

Recently, though, it’s become all too obvious that I don’t have a way to express this intensity other than intermittent weeping breakdowns. All my philosophy, all the books in my little library, offer no respite. Desperate, at times I take to social media, posting pictures of her while sharing my violent devastation. Yes, the kind words of others is a welcome, temporary balm. But, honestly, it feels so uncouth. It’s humiliating—and, in the end, not much of a balm.

Since her death, I noticed that I become particularly overwhelmed on both her birthday and deathday (that should be a thing). Each year, I find myself getting more sensitive, agitated, anxious as these days approach. Usually, and wisely, I take the day off. Some years, I go for a walk in the park and do a kind of walking meditation. Some years, I try my best to ignore the day and just be normal (whatever that is). Some years, the day comes and, honestly, I find I’m not that emotional after all and so carry on as if it were any other day.

This irregularity of expression, these sporadic outbursts, are spastic—a kind of intermittent emotional vomit. It doesn’t feel healthy. It’s like the grief is all these jagged shards of glass that are jostling about in me, breaking through the skin every now and again, leaving my emotional blood everywhere.

What, then, if I had some set way to express my grief differently? What if I put aside a dedicated time to concertedly grieve? And what if I created certain behavioral guideposts akin to the sabbath, some actions that broke everyday routine, that set that day apart? Perhaps rather than all this emotional pain building up and breaking through at seemingly random times, such a day might act to channel this teem.

Ritual as Performative Reckoning of the Unthinkable

Ah, the ocean, the only place I’ve found any peace for my grief. That cosmic infinite makes all my worries fade.

Ritual is peculiar. I get why I’ve shirked it. I mean, why do such and such on such and such a day just because other people have done it? I find ritual devoid of meaning, people performing ceremony as if it were rote, deeply unpleasant.

And yet there is a power in the act of ritual—in marking time, putting aside the everyday to reckon something extraordinary such as, say, death. Or one’s own sickness. A doctor friend of mine argues that the power of placebo lies precisely in its performativity: the act of taking medicine trumping the medicinal content.

While ritual may involve symbols, it itself is not symbolic. On the contrary, ritual is an action, a doing. A doing of what? A doing of the ritual, of course. That is to say, the power of ritual lies precisely in the performance of the ritual, not in what the ritual means (if it must mean anything). The ritual is the “thinking,” is the “processing.”

Perhaps ritual, then, can give grief expression when words and thought do not suffice. Mind you, I am not talking about the rituals of this or that culture. I don’t know any such rituals and, frankly, I don’t care to learn any. It’s the fact—the act—of ritual that interests me.

And so I’ve begun forging the terms of my mourning ritual. No work that day, for sure. No video calls. No work emails. No PowerPoint presentations. I’d say no regular social events but I never do anything social so, well, that’s easy. But break my personal routines, yes. And go to the beach as that is the only place since she died that I’ve felt any sense of peace. Standing before that seething ocean, feeling the wind blow through me, staring at the infinite sky, I know all this—all these lives, these worries and pleasures, all this work and romance—is mercifully insignificant.

Over time, my ritual may become more elaborate, may change its “rules,” may involve others, paraphernalia, magic mushrooms, incantations. Whatever works, whatever feels right. Ritual, then, but not necessarily those we’ve inherited. That part doesn’t matter. What matters, I think, is the act of ritual.

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