Read on Twitter
This thread is so wise about the importance of ritual, and the distinction between grief and mourning. https://twitter.com/TheRaDR/status/1295489893616025601
Reading about the 1917 Halifax Explosion, something jumped out at me: the city of Halifax commemorated the one-year anniversary of the explosion, and then MEMORY-HOLED IT FOR TWO GENERATIONS!
No memorials, no anniversary remembrances, nothing until the mid-1960s!
No memorials, no anniversary remembrances, nothing until the mid-1960s!
Sometimes the pain of grief is so strong that our temptation is to file it away to be dealt with "later". But there's momentum in the ignoring, and the pain of grief can be so wild and fierce that "later" becomes "never" far too easily. But the pain doesn't go away: it festers.
Ritual, typically but not always tied to religion, provides a container for that pain. For just a moment, in community, we can relax the tense emotional muscles that have been straining to hold that grief at bay. The boundedness of ritual tells us that the story isn't over yet.
We are cruising towards 200,000 COVID deaths, 200,000 individual moments where someone's world (and a big piece of the world of their friends and family) ended in cruel isolation. But those personal devastations perversely hide behind the incomprehensible vastness of that number.
As much as we need a practical accounting of the criminal failures of leadership that got us to this point, we need ritual, a public acknowledgement of the pain of our collective grief. We need to honor the lives lost, and what each of us has lost in the way life has changed.
That we may not get either of those is unspeakably evil, and would compound the damage already done in drastic and unpredictable ways.
