Loosening the Rules for How We Mourn

Who has not been awed by the vast and public mourning for the princess of Wales--the sight of hundreds of thousands of people who never met Diana crying for her in public, surrounded by strangers expressing the same grief?

Perhaps it makes sense that we mourn a public figure in public; the closer we are to the deceased, the more private our mourning becomes. When we lose someone we love, we try to hold firm on the outside and weep when we are alone where no one can see us. Our culture’s way of handling death and mourning is interior and isolating; after this extraordinary week, we might reflect for a moment on why.

The work of mourning--moving from disbelief and sorrow to a sense of resolution--mounts a great challenge to any human being. Personal loss is hard and stubborn; it yields only to time. Meanwhile, public life pushes onward, isolating those with heavy hearts, demanding they act strong even if inside they are crumbling.

I wondered why President Clinton went back to work within days after his mother died. Would the nation have understood if he had taken time to mourn?

I have often wished that people in mourning wore some kind of sign to let us know. Then we might be gentler with them. Listening to clipped news accounts of murders or deaths, I try to imagine how five seconds of communal silence might point to the void left by the loss and leave us all with a bit more dignity.

Americans are just not good at grieving. Our culture is restless, full and loud; and though demographers say we’re aging, the U.S. is still somehow young and remains at odds with the emptiness, silence and eternity of death. Meanwhile, the funeral directors and cemetery managers we hire seem to get in the way of mourning. They assure us that they will handle all “arrangements” behind the scenes. They present us with a menu of products--coffins with velvet or satin lining, gravestones with flat or curved tops--and programmed services that leave little room for personal expression or meaningful invention.

Strict and antiquated rules enforce sameness on the dead. Cemeteries are full of names and dates on marker after marker with no reference to personality, accomplishments or values held dear, nothing for people to contemplate about our lost lives. Some cemeteries do not even allow bouquets of flowers and handwritten notes to be left at graveside because they cause maintenance problems. As the scene in front of Kensington Palace suggested, such a simple practice is one of the most natural ways of expressing loss.

In hiring professionals to handle death for us, we have made ourselves more powerless, as we were in the days when doctors “handled” birth for us and kept everyone at a distance. The result is a widening gap between our experience of death and the culture’s treatment of it; over time this makes loss more difficult to bear.

Across America, there is a small movement brewing to reclaim death care from the professionals who leave us out in the cold. So cold that every year the national cremation rate rises between 1% and 2% and by 2010 is expected to reach 35% to 40%. (In 1996, it was 21.3%.) Of those cremated, only 12% choose to have their ashes buried in a cemetery. Americans are learning to create their own memorial services. Although it often is illegal to do so, people sprinkle the cremated remains of loved ones in meaningful places--a lake, a park, a forest preserve--and establish more personal monuments in back yards, gardens and on the World Wide Web.

Like the Britons who have been forthright in telling the royal family that it seems unfeeling, distant and frightfully old-fashioned, we need to tell the American death care industry that it, too, is out of touch with the needs of the people it serves. Diana, alone, was powerful enough to demystify the monarchy. Her death has given a world of strangers a chance to contribute to grief’s fuller evolution into public consciousness.