I am slowly posting the entirety of Grieving Futures: Surviving the Deaths of My Parents, here on Patience & Fortitude for free. General warnings are in place: this book address grief, mourning, self-harm, anger, poverty, and pet death, all in the context of becoming an adult orphan in my twenties. You can still buy the book if you would like (doing so helps support my writing!).
A friend of mine once commented disparagingly on car memorial stickers (where someone puts a tombstone text on the window of their car, e.g. “Sue York, 1943-1994, Loving Wife and Mother”), saying they were tacky and cheap. It is not something I would do but I understand the motivation better than my friend did.
For one thing, even in highly religious environments, there is not much memorializing going on these days. There are religious ceremonies within a certain time frame of the death, usually, but after that the dead person’s life and death become invisible to the world at large. Culturally, outside of specific religions, mourning just is not done anymore, and while I think forcing people to wear all-black for five years or something (unless they are a goth!) is a little much, it is a shame that we do not do anything that counts as mourning. We have not been given options to replace the crutches of mourning traditions, and by crutches I do not mean anything derogatory, but rather akin to the medical necessity of having a form of support after something important has broken.
There is a part of the grieving process that is intensely private, and I am sure there are people who would not want any kind of public acknowledgement of what they are going through. On the whole though, many people want their loss to be recognized at some level, and the car memorial stickers are one modern way of doing that, in practice not that much different than hanging a black wreath on the front door after a death in the household. Back in the day, everyone in town would know whom the wreath was for; these days, we stick the name onto our cars to fight the anonymity of modern death.
The only real ongoing mourning practice we have now is an unofficial one: paperwork — death certificates, hospital bills, legal papers, financial documents ad nauseum. My father, a former pilot with the U.S. Air Force, once said that in the military you could not get off the runway until the weight of the paperwork equaled the weight of the plane. I’ve always remembered that witticism, especially after my parents died and I was neck-deep in papers. Perhaps the equivalent saying is that you cannot bury your dead until the height of the paperwork equals the depth of the grave?
Anyone who has had the role of trustee for a loved one knows the horrors associated with trying to tie up all the loose ends of a person’s life: acquiring copies of the death certificate, closing bank accounts, dealing with outstand credit balances, figuring out insurance coverage and payouts, arranging for the transfer of property/assets to the legal heir(s). And that is if there is no one contesting the will, which with more propertied families is sometimes a huge trauma. Dealing with all of the paperwork that resulted from the deaths of my modestly middle class parents was daunting, and in my mother’s case, with all of her credit card debt, took over a year to finally just end.
By that time, I had grown used to always carrying her death certificate with me. I had it tucked into the day planner that I took everywhere, and I would often find myself turning to that folder to look at the certificate. When my father died it was second nature to add his death certificate to hers in my planner, and I continued carrying the certificates with me for at least the following five years. It was a form of on-going mourning that worked its way into my daily routine and was profoundly comforting. When I felt totally alone and drifting in a big, bright world, I would look at those papers and remember that I did have a history, that my parents had lived and died and loved me.
It remained a private mourning tradition, for I learned quickly that other people, those who had not lost anyone close, found the practice creepy. I kept it my secret, but that did not reduce the importance of having those papers close by. By the time a year had passed from Poppa’s Death Day, I had nothing else to mark me as “in mourning” and certainly nothing publicly visible or recognized as official.
For me this “anonymous mourning” was worsened by the age-group factor, because a mid-twenties-something is not culturally expected to be dealing with these issues. Statistically, many are, as they are with issues such as spouse abuse, drug addiction and all sorts of heavy-weight things. No age group is immune. However the young adult is supposed to be reveling in her glory years, having fun and starting off her life and career and relationships with few burdens. I often wonder how much easier it would have been for me to face up to my defiance and denial demons if I had been given some public avenue for mourning.
But our society works hard to avoid, deny, and cheat death. Mourning is de facto an open acknowledgement of peoples’ deepest fears, and it is uncomfortable for them to even think about it. I know some folks who will detour just to avoid driving past a cemetery. And to think, back in the Victorian era, families used to picnic after church at the graves of loved ones as a form of memorial and mourning! Many people find that idea morbid but personally, I would love to share my life with the dead in such a straightforward, familial way.
For a few months in 1999 I worked on an idea I called the Black Ribbon Project; the red AIDS ribbon was ubiquitous in those years, and other colored-ribbon causes had not been fully born yet. My idea was to champion the wearing of small black ribbons to symbolize mourning. I made up a flier and faxed it around to newspapers but I did not really know what I was doing. I discovered that it is hard to drum up interest in something that is not an actual cause needing money. Ironically, by asking for nothing I insured that my concept would get nothing, including attention. (I still like the idea, as it is a simple and unobtrusive way to be in mourning that does not have any particular religious significance yet carries the gravity of tradition.)
I honestly do not know what other traditions might work these days. There are so many different religious beliefs and customs that a generic mourning tradition is needed, but is already fighting an uphill battle for recognition, not to mention fighting our collective knee-jerk horror at anything to do with our mortality. I wish I had a way to advance the black ribbon campaign again, but the same hurdles are still in place, and at this point the deaths I am mourning are so far distant that it would feel pretentious to mark them visibly.
Yet I firmly believe we are all cheated by not marking grief in a public way. It might not be helpful for everybody, but for those of us who crave that kind of acknowledgement, it can be crucial to our whole mourning process. It is why car sticker memorials came into being in the first place. I often wonder what secret traditions other people have, similar to my own desperate clinging to the paperwork of my parents’ deaths.
