Transnational Mourning

I want to talk about quite a sad aspect of human life: death and pain (yay… happy times…).
This ‘joyous’ subject came to my mind after all the fatalities that took place this past year. 2016 was famously marked by a string of ‘celebrity-deaths’ that touched many of us.

Now, before people start typing Facebook or whatever on the search bar, I just want to ‘reassure’ everyone that it won’t deal with the philosophical questions of death per se, to which I’m sure all of us have a very personal take on.

Instead I want to address my own experience at my grandmother’s funeral this past March in Sri Lanka, the first death in my family I faced as an adult. In the months that followed I had the chance to mentally analyse what I had witnessed in Sri Lanka. I found the way people there deal with loss and pain somehow different from what I’ve seen so far in Milan and London, not only on an individual term but also culturally.

Grief is processed ‘in silence’, privately, with black sunglasses to cover your eyes and mask your pain. Hence I saw in Sri Lanka was simply and utterly… mental, or at least I thought so while I was living it. This was the occasion where I really understood how little I had experienced my Sri Lankan cultural identity.  Everything seemed so strange, quite eccentric in some ways, everything brought to the exaggeration rendering all of what was happening more overwhelming. The wailing was what struck me the most, or actually screaming describes it better. But what I figured out in retrospect was that it was all part of the ritual.

Ritual is the essence in most cultures, but especially in the Sinhalese one it is what drives it, it is culture itself. That said, just imagine how death and funerals are acted out in Sri Lanka.

Let me break it down for you:

-Speaking from a catholic perspective (Buddhist and Hindu traditions in the island are quite similar as well in this respect), when my grandmother was at her deathbed, family and friends gathered around her in her room to pray every morning and afternoon, and recite rosaries every hour (it would usually be 5 or 6 people).

-When she passed away, the embalmers came and took her body: traditionally the ‘dead’ are dressed in their best suits/sarees and ‘displayed’ in the main living room of the house, so that others can come and pay their respect (frankly quite chilling for a funeral-newbie such as myself).

-Usually the funeral takes place on one of the immediate following days. However, due to the high percentage of people living abroad, it’s now common for funerals to be postponed to allow the relatives to come back to Sri Lanka. Generally during these days, it is custom that at least one member of the household stays awake and vigils the ‘corpse’ (we took turns).

-On the day of the funeral, people gathered at our house before the town priest came and the ‘body’ was carried to church. Prayers were recited as usual but it was what followed that shook me to the core. People were crying and wailing in the very anthropological ritualistic sense of the term. My mother and my aunt were crying like I had never seen before. People behind me were encouraging me to do the same. I just felt it was too overwhelming for me. I felt as I was being forced to cry and for that very fact, tears would not come out initially. It all seemed staged for me, like a performance (also due to the fact that a band was playing and accompanying us to the church).
From that night on, family members and the closest friends had to sleep in the living room for 7 days altogether.

-A week later, another lunch/feast was held at the house. Food was first provided to 7 homeless people and then to the rest of the guests (this is called ‘Dhane’) and the latter was repeated a month later.

I could go into more detail, as there are many other actions and gestures that featured in this ritual, but I’ll spare you that.
But what I understand from all of this looking back at it now, is that this type of ritual/performative act helps many cope with the loss of their beloved. The rather staged wailing might be a liberating way of confronting sorrow and acting upon grief, a type of emotional exorcism as my colleague Charusmita pointed out.

On this very matter, an interesting article, “Bhutan’s dark secret to Happiness”, explores how the Himalayan kingdom has become one of the happiest countries in the world exactly by contemplating about death on a daily basis and processing pain through ritual.

“Ritual provides a container for grief, and in Bhutan that container is large and communal. After someone dies, there’s a 49-day mourning period that involves elaborate, carefully orchestrated rituals. (…) It is better than any antidepressant. (…). The Bhutanese might appear detached during this time. They are not. They are grieving through ritual.”

Some months later, I had the chance to talk about this experience with my own PhD supervisor Dr. Roza Tsagarousianou, who is originally from Greece and could relate to this clash of cultures in the act of mourning. We pondered on the ritualistic difference in funerals between the various cultures. In her view humans are becoming more private whereas before it was a communal event, or better a communal grief, as people would generally get over their grief as a collective. She describes it as an “anthropological reminiscent”, a term that struck me deeply. You can still witness it in various other cultures such as in Rajasthan, India, in the custom of Rudaali, where professional mourners are hired at funerals of upper caste families to show that the deceased are deeply missed.

I wonder now what I should consider ‘normal’. In a future event should I behave and grief as a Sri Lankan, be ‘loud’ when dealing with sorrow, or should I remain composed and private in my mourning as I’ve seen in Milan and London? Where does my identity lie in mourning?
In fact, getting back to my ordinary reality in London after the funeral was the hardest bit. I was expected to get on with my life as usual or at least I felt so, but this completely the opposite of how I was expected to behave back in Sri Lanka. The frantic life of London made no space for lamentation and bereavement, and even more so neither did all the assignments I had put on pause. This cultural and reality clash was one of the most unsettling experiences of my life.

I’m not certain the right behaviour in mourning is, probably because there is none.
What I do know is that being completely private, holding back on emotions, putting up a front that shows strength and never a sign of weakness is counter-productive. For the moment being, I truly believe that crying and wailing are more than just okay as vulnerability is key to our times.

 

A poem of Rumi on the matter:

Crying out loud and weeping are great resources.
A nursing mother, all she does
is wait to hear her child.

Just a little beginning whimper
and she’s there.

Cry out. Do not be stolid and silent
with your pain. Lament,
and let the milk of loving flow into you.

The hard rain and the wind
are ways the cloud has
to take care of us.

~ Rumi