After I Lost My Son, I Realized I Needed to Stop Looking for Closure

By Liz Jensen

Four years ago, I got the news that every parent dreads.

Without warning, my healthy 25-year-old son, Raphaël — a wildlife biologist and an environmental activist — had collapsed and died, probably from a rare heart disorder nobody knew he had. The trauma catapulted me into a place of almost hallucinatory madness: a territory so tormenting, debilitating and bleak that I couldn’t imagine how I’d survive it, let alone find joy in the life that remained.

Catastrophes are radicalizing and transformative. You no longer see your life in the same way afterward. But must grief diminish you, or can it do the opposite?

The question was vital because my devastation as a newly bereaved mother felt mirrored by the pain and anxiety of millions of people struggling to process the consequences of global heating and the obliteration of precious ecosystems.

Both forms of grief were rooted in love. Both required courage, resilience and compassion. And the emotional arc of both, I came to believe, could create the strength and purpose needed to navigate an increasingly unstable future.

In the field of death and dying, one of the most enduring and influential figures is the Swiss American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who in the 1960s came up with the five stages of death: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. She’d been studying the emotional arcs of terminally ill patients, but later she and her colleague David Kessler repurposed the stages to apply to the grief of the bereaved, and the five-stage model became deeply embedded in Western culture.

In a 2007 paper, the Nobel Prize-winning climate scientist Steven Running applied those stages to the climate crisis, characterizing denial as the belief that the climate emergency isn’t happening or that humans aren’t the root cause. The anger stage kicks in when you realize your worldview or lifestyle will have to change substantially. Then you bargain by downplaying the scale of the crisis or by putting all your faith in technological fixes. The depression stage manifests when you feel overwhelmed by the extent of the crisis and realize that governments and corporations are not only spinning their wheels but also often actively exacerbating the damage. Acceptance entails recognizing that the scale of the challenge is irrefutable and then looking for solutions, because “doing nothing given our present knowledge is unconscionable,” Mr. Running wrote.

After tragedy struck Mr. Kessler, he altered his own analysis of bereavement. As an author and public speaker who had spent his career supporting the bereaved, he felt he knew grief well. But the unexpected death of his 21-year-old son changed everything. Suddenly, like countless other bereaved parents, he faced the existential question raised in the adage that the two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why. And he came to believe that acceptance isn’t the end of the grieving process; it’s only the beginning of a new, sixth stage of grief, defined not by finding closure but by finding meaning.

This stage made a lot more sense to me than any of the others did. There was no meaning in Raphaël’s death. But I could find purpose, meaning and fulfillment in what I did and made happen in its wake.

The year before Raphaël died, I co-founded the literary activist group Writers Rebel to put literature in the service of life on Earth. But after we lost him, I stepped back: I couldn’t face the video calls. Then, in those early months of grieving, I began to meet other bereaved parents, take daily swims in the freezing Danish winter sea, reconnect with the natural world and read books about consciousness that led me to abandon my rational, secular view of it. And one day, I remembered what Raphaël said when I belittled my ability to effect change: “Do what you can, where you are, with what you’ve got.”

What, I began to wonder, could be more meaningful than honoring my son’s memory and the world I love by being active rather than crying on the couch?

Seven months after Raphaël’s death, I stood in the freezing Copenhagen wind with a group of writers and made a speech about why literature must address the climate crisis with the urgency it deserves. I was raw and nervous, but I sensed his presence. When I quoted him — “I won’t stand aside and watch the world burn” — a huge cheer went up, and I felt an inner shift.

Yes, my son was dead. And yes, the planet’s life support systems were weakening. But it wasn’t too late for the planet.

I rejoined my weekly Zooms and helped organize a tribute to Earth’s most critically endangered species. Later, the notes I’d been writing to myself as therapy began morphing into a memoir. And yes, it all felt meaningful.

Mine was just one of many paths from grief to fulfillment. For those feeling paralyzed by climate grief, just doing something new or doing something familiar more mindfully can germinate what the eco-philosopher Joanna Macy calls active hope: not the amorphous hope of wishing on a star but the practical hope of rolling up your sleeves and getting to it. Intentions are fine, but the meaning lies in the doing — be it cheering up a friend, energizing voters, transforming a patch of urban scrub into a garden, joining a citizens’ movement, switching to a plant-based diet, ditching a bad habit or taking time to observe a creature in the wild.

Just a few months before the electrical signals in Raphaël’s heart were catastrophically disrupted, I found a passage in his notebook that showed he had a premonition that he would die young but that his sense of purpose would stay vividly alive.

“I’ll not be dead until my dream is, I’ll not fade away until my vision does, I’ll not be gone until all my hopes are,” he wrote.

It took his death for me to understand why I was born. It can’t take a civilizational collapse for humanity to understand why we belong here.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

April 13, 2024April 12, 2024

How (Not) To Grieve

— I was taught not to cry at death. And it fucked me up.

Mitchell S. Jackson in Los Angeles, March 9, 2024

By Mitchell S. Jackson

The homie Kev was kind, smiled easy, and spoke so soft sometimes I had to lean in to hear him. The homie Kev was cock-diesel and fearless on the football field. The homie Kev took the rap for me without a blink when my grandmother caught me packaging bunk weed in my bedroom.

The fall after we graduated, my homie Kevan Hai Miller was found shot to death on an apartment doorstep. What I remember is feeling my response should be governed by my manhood, that I’d be weak if I wept, whether someone saw my eyes leak or not. I’d had practice in not grieving. Going into my senior year, our fireplug point guard had beef with my cousin—not my blood, but our mothers were super close—and shot him. My cousin, amen, lived. And yet we might’ve been more worried about losing our PG for the season than the gravity of such serious violence. We were teenage boys, most of us Black, considering extreme harms, but almost no one was dramatic about it. While grieving forreal forreal would’ve been seen as Hamletian histrionics, fear lay beneath our forged stoicism: Which side of the fray were we on? Were we, too, in peril? Did the circumstances demand our swift vengeance?

To grieve or not to grieve? Often the answer was a mandate: Shake that shit off pronto. We did, however, commemorate the dead homies with ample reminiscing, often while getting faded on weed or liquor. Pouring some of that liquor on a curb. Wearing T-shirts screen-printed with a picture of the deceased. A barbecue or picnic in their honor. A curbside memorial. And for the most brazen: murderous-minded get-back.

None of our rituals amounted to the five stages of grief expressed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in On Death and Dying: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Denial has always felt like a weakness. Why the hell am I denying what happened, the absolute fact of someone’s death? People get killed. People die from cancer or a seizure or a heart attack or Covid, and while it hurts to lose them, it seems irrational if not insane to protest the reality. The same goes for bargaining, which I’ve also been determined to skip. Why bargain against what can’t be undone? Who am I bargaining with, the deity that allowed it? The same goes for depression, for my refusal to allow that a significant loss could leave me down, down, that my despair is natural and maybe even healthy. My grieving has meant speeding to acceptance, even if I know in my deepest and truest place that acceptance is false. My mourning has been bound by what I’ve been nurtured to believe about the intersections of manhood and blackness—by Black manhood—and those beliefs have made it all but impossible to progress through healthy grieving.

A Black man is ever strong. A Black man don’t cry—he damn sure don’t do no public boohooing. A Black man don’t broadcast his feelings. A Black man don’t cower from anything or anyone. A Black man handles it, whatever it may be.

On the flipside of that armored, unflappable, immutable Black manhood is, God forbid, the jacket of a lame or a sucker or a punk or a pussy or a bitch or soft or weak; is, God forbid, the disgrace of being deemed a man who let his emotions get the best of him, or in other words, a man who let his emotions escape outside of him.

A Black man don’t cry—he damn sure don’t do no public boohooing. A Black man don’t broadcast his feelings.

Much of our rubric is cultural. But somebody please show me a part of culture that isn’t also historical.

If epigenetics is real, mightn’t Black grief be shaped by the forbearers of Black Americans having survived the torture of a speculum orum or a dead fellow African coffled to them or a beloved tossed into the Atlantic without a care. Their kin snatched from their outstretched arms and sold to an eternal elsewhere. Their flesh and blood strung from a sturdy branch and beaten or flayed or castrated or set aflame? Their intimates lost to post–Civil War privation or prison cells? Yeah, slavery was ages ago, but if epigenetics is true, how might those traumas have shaped the descendants of the once enslaved?

Not to mention what to make of the collective grief of Black people who witnessed Mike Brown left baking in the street. Eric Garner choked unconscious. George Floyd kneeled into the next life. Tell me, what might those almost inescapable Black traumas do to the genes of Black folks writ large? How might they shape Black men who feel beholden to rigid strictures of manhood?

A case study of three recent personal losses.

November 6, 2022—Fresh off a transatlantic flight, I received a rare call from my sister. “Mitch, Dad passed,” she said. “Dad is gone. Dad is gone.” When I hung up, I watched dreary London lapse past my window and sobbed in silence. That commute wasn’t the only time I wept over my 67-year-old biological father (Wesley Johnson Sr.) dying in his sleep from a seizure, but it was the only time I allowed myself tears without a measure of self-chiding.

July 17, 2023—My beloved Aunt Bonnie had a heart attack and died in her sleep. Just that May, my aunt texted about a dream in which, while she was struggling to write, someone asked her if she knew me. Aunt Bonnie told the person in her dream that she did, and they advised her to have me touch her pen. Aunt Bonnie asked me to bring her pens, “speak a few words over them,” and leave them in her mailbox. The next day, I delivered her a pack of pens and a Moleskine notepad, inscribed, “I pray you take your ambitions all the way!” Aunt Bonnie assured me, “I’m really going to write that memoir this time, nephew.” Months after she died, I returned home from a trip and discovered my cousin had sent me a package with the Moleskine. On its first page, Aunt Bonnie (Bonnie Johnson) had written an account of her dream and of me dropping off the notebook. She ended it, “I will write. I will write. I will write. Nephew, thank you for showing up for the assignment.” Because I was alone, I let myself weep without reserve, the last I lamented her passing without wondering if it had lasted too long.

January 15, 2024—My grandfather passed from complications of pneumonia and Covid. Granddad (I called him Dad) was part of the men I considered my composite pops. He reached 89 years old, and yet his death seemed sudden. This past Christmas I brought Dad chicken and rice and we watched sports. Sure, he moved a little slow from living room to kitchen. Sure, he repeated a couple of questions and responses, but nothing I witnessed suggested he’d be dead in less than a month. And yet, less than a month later, family gathered at his bedside and, while Dad lay brain-dead on a ventilator, said their goodbyes. That same night, I awoke around 2:00 a.m. and, as I’d never done, began cleaning my house. Around 4:00 a.m. I said a teary-eyed prayer for my grandfather (Sam Jackson Jr.), thanked him for being a father to me, wished him heaven-bound, and mourned unbidden for the fact of its privacy.

What’s more doleful, mourning the dead or the living?

My grandfather left his youngest son as an executor of his estate and beneficiary of his retirement account. This is the same uncle who coached me into a track-and-field city champion, who spent umpteen hours helping me work on my hoop skills, who let me stay with him for a few months when my mother was deep in the throes of her addiction. Nonetheless, in the weeks after my granddad passed, the family discovered that my uncle (let’s call him A. J.) withdrew the funds from my granddad’s retirement account and kept most of the money to himself. Kept it regardless to his being but one of my grandfather’s four surviving children. Kept it despite two of his siblings being poor and disabled.

I don’t have to give anyone anything, he told us. A breach that has plunged me into what might be my profoundest grief. Because it’s a loss not grounded in the irrevocable. Because, given the natural order, I’ve lost my uncle once and will lose him again. Because how do I forgive the seeming unforgivable?

So here I am groping for what, in On Grief and Grieving, Kübler-Ross and David Kessler describe as the sixth stage—(finding) meaning—and meanwhile experiencing the stages I’ve beat back my whole life. The denial. The bargaining. The depression. Unc, not you. How could you? Don’t do this, Unc, please. It ain’t worth it. What do you need, Unc? Aren’t there other means? Unc, what about Dad’s desires? Unc, I don’t want to lose you, but what choice will this leave me? What if, Unc? What if? What if? Uncle, don’t you love us? In any case, I’m okay? I’ll be okay? I’m strong?

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

April 11, 2024April 10, 2024

What we owe trans youth when we grieve them

— How do we mourn people we’ve never met, yet feel inextricably connected to? How do we honour the dead without appropriating their stories?

By Kai Cheng Thom

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It’s an absurd thought that feels almost shamefully naive, but it keeps returning to me as I search for the words to open this piece. It was not supposed to be like this. We are not, in 2024, supposed to be living in a world where young people are losing their lives to transphobia and bigotry. The first time I wrote an essay for a newspaper about a murdered trans youth was over ten years ago, when I was a youth myself, and I suppose a part of me never thought that I’d still be doing it a decade later.

Yet here we are: Still trying to pick up the pieces, to speak about unspeakable losses in a way that feels meaningful. Still trying to answer questions that feel unanswerable: How do we mourn people that we’ve never met, yet feel inextricably connected to? How do we honour the dead without appropriating their stories? All the while, around us, the roar of anti-trans moral panic grows louder and louder, pervading social media and political discourse, building to a fever pitch.

Trans communities have been flooded with deeply disturbing news about violence toward youth and children over the past several weeks. On March 17, a 21-year-old trans man named Alex Franco was shot to death in Utah. A few days earlier, on March 21, the district attorney of Tulsa County had announced that no charges would be filed regarding the death of Indigenous non-binary teenager Nex Benedict, who reportedly died of suicide following a physical altercation during which they were allegedly attacked by three fellow students in a bathroom in their public high school.

In moments like this, I feel the impulse to lean into familiar stories, the instinctive urge to fall back on a world view predicated upon victims, villains, the longing for retribution. This is the only language that this culture has given me to make meaning from the unspeakable. Perfect victims, unforgivable villains, justice in the form of stronger laws and prison sentences. Is this what I am to believe in? Like many trans people, I came so close to being one of the youth who died too young. It’s so personal and so painful. I understand the move toward oversimplification—yet I cannot believe it serves the dream of a more just world for children to live in.

Back in February, the news of Benedict’s death sent shock waves of grief and outrage through queer and trans social networks, following closely on the heels of a trial in the United Kingdom of the murderers of a 16-year-old trans girl named Brianna Ghey. The trial revealed that Ghey’s killers had been shockingly brutal, stabbing her 28 times with a hunting knife after luring her to a meeting in a park. Each one of these horrifying events is in itself a terrible loss, a complex and painful story that deserves its own remembrance. Taken together, they have become inextricable from the larger narrative in which as trans people find ourselves presently entangled: a social panic that exploits us as scapegoats and political pawns—and that ultimately results in real violence against us. Trans people, and especially trans children and youth, have become a wedge issue exploited by populists and profiteers who know that the best way to whip up support from their followers is to give them an enemy to unite against.

Canadian Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre demonstrated this time-honoured strategy when he declared last month that “biological males” (that is, trans women) should be banned from public facilities such as change rooms and washrooms designated for women. So did Oklahoma education superintendent Ryan Walters when he appointed notoriously anti-trans TikTok influencer Chaya Raichik to serve on a media advisory committee for the state school library system—a move that many queer and trans journalists and media commentators have cited in reporting on Nex Benedict’s death, given that Benedict lived in Oklahoma.

Politicians like Poilievre and Walters are undoubtedly aware of what they stand to gain from taking such public stances against trans rights: support from a growing and extremely vocal “gender critical” movement that has taken hold in many conservative and centrist circles. For people like them, the war over trans rights might be strategic or ideological, a series of battles in a larger culture war.

Yet for the families of trans and gender-diverse children, and for trans people themselves, the impact is immense and personal beyond measure. Bombarded with stories of violence, death and loss, surrounded by an inescapable and seemingly incessant debate about trans human rights, we are a population engulfed in collective trauma.

Trans people have been culturally associated with violence, early death and false accusations of sexual perversion since long before Nex Benedict, Alex Franco and Brianna Ghey were born. While it goes without saying that each of these youth was a unique individual with a unique life story, it is impossible for many—perhaps most—trans people today to engage with those stories without immediately connecting them to a litany of other, similar stories of friends and loved ones and community members ripped from us before their time. To remember them is to feel each of their names like a punch in the gut.

It seems that to live as a trans person in 2024, nearly a decade after the so-called “Trans Tipping Point,” still means carrying the weight of a collective trauma that mainstream society does not understand and refuses to perceive. If there is a cultural stereotype that trans communities are overly prone to radical activism and political confrontation, perhaps this is why: We are drowning in the narratives of dead friends and dead children, and it is psychologically and spiritually unbearable. How could we not demand justice?

“It is frighteningly easy to make martyrs out of the dead, to turn them into political symbols when in fact they are people.”

In the wake of tragedy, it only makes sense to respond by calling for a world in which such things never happen again. Yet there is always something about this impulse that is confusing and complicated, that makes the writer in me falter where my activist self wants to rush forward.

It is frighteningly easy to make martyrs out of the dead, to turn them into political symbols when in fact they are people. This is especially true of children who have died under violent circumstances. Conservatives and transphobes do this all the time, weaponizing the notion of childhood to forward adult agendas—this is in fact a key element of transphobic and homophobic political campaigns where, for example, sex education or queer literature are banned in the name of “protecting kids.”

Queer and trans advocates and writers can do better, by refusing to give in to the temptation to make martyrs of our dead youth—by resisting the temptation to erase the complexities of their lives and deaths in order to serve our political ends. It would be easy for queer and trans advocates to project our own life stories on to young people like Benedict, Franco and Ghey, and understandably so. However, it is essential that we also remember them as individuals with interior lives that most of us can only guess at. They aren’t poster children in the struggle for trans rights. They were and are so much more than that.

Public grieving and public mean-making call for a commitment to complexity, a commitment to honouring the full humanity of those we grieve—even when their stories do not align perfectly with our preferred narratives. For example, there has been much pushback in some parts of the queer community over whether Nex Benedict died by suicide or as a result of injuries sustained in the attack he suffered, which were fuelled by ambiguities in the autopsy report—several head injuries were listed in the document, but according to the report, Benedict’s cause of death was a lethal combination of antidepressants and antihistamines. The truth is important. Yet I must ask: Would it not be equally tragic, equally deserving of a call to justice, either way? Would we mourn a death by suicide any less? Surely not.

Some might argue that Benedict was bullied to suicide, which certainly seems like a distinct and terrible possibility that must be considered. A commitment to complexity means that we cannot be sure of the answer, and I believe that staying in the question is a part of honouring his humanity, because Benedict is worth grieving without having to know for certain why he died. The loss of his life, and everything he could have been, is unbearable regardless.

It is also important to observe how in the surge of justified anger over transphobic violence directed toward children, progressive movements can be inclined to call for accountability and protective measures that are not aligned with progressive principles—and that may actually result in greater harm to trans children and youth overall. In the wake of the sentencing of Brianna Ghey’s killers, for example, the U.K. media has largely chosen to focus on covering her mother’s campaign for greater restrictions on and monitoring of youth social media and cellphone use. As Eli Cugini and Ilya Maude reported for Xtra, such initiatives could potentially be devastating for trans young people living in abusive families.

An even more emotionally fraught, yet extremely important, question is how we are to understand calls for perpetrators of violence against trans youth—who are often youth themselves—to face criminal charges and prison time? Is this the meaning of justice? I cannot believe that this is the case. Writer and Xtra columnist Jude Ellison S. Doyle seems to agree, writing recently in his newsletter: “[J]ustice doesn’t mean blood, and it doesn’t mean vengeance. It means making sure that Nex Benedict’s life matters.”

What does it mean to make the lost life of a child matter? In the first place, it bears saying that it always matters. In the second, it means reflecting deeply on the structural factors that allow such unthinkable things to happen so frequently in the first place—factors like the lack of universal mental healthcare and under-resourced public schools, like a political system built around cronyism and cheap culture war pandering rather than meaningful public participation and the collective good.

A queer view of the world invites us to reach beyond the punitive impulse, to ask ourselves if the call for revenge really serves our intention of breaking the cycle of harm. Does putting people in jail, expanding the power of the criminal court, protect young people from violence? I do not think so, because violence is not an individual problem. It is a systemic one that requires systemic solutions.

We are not supposed to be living in this world. Brianna Ghey and Alex Franco and Nex Benedict were never supposed to die in it. They deserved a better world—and so did all the queer and trans youth who came before them, all the queer and trans youth still alive today, and all those coming next. Let us honour them by building a better one.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

April 5, 2024April 4, 2024

How To Cope With Feelings Of Grief And Loss When A Person With Dementia Is Still Alive

— Caring for somebody comes with many emotions, including grief.

When you’re caring for somebody with dementia, you’re likely to experience many different emotions, including grief. For example, you may experience anticipatory grief at the time of diagnosis, or a series of small losses as the dementia progresses.

While this can be disorientating, it’s completely normal. According to Alzheimer’s Society: “When someone feels a sense of loss even though the person with dementia is still alive, this is known as ‘ambiguous loss’ or ‘living grief’.

“You may feel that the person’s personality has changed so much that they do not seem to be the same person, leading to a sense of grief that can be difficult to process.”

We spoke with Alzheimer’s Society about the grief that often comes hand-in-hand with caring for somebody with dementia.

The grief you may experience when caring for somebody with dementia

These losses can appear in many ways and aren’t always big or dramatic. For example, it could be a mum who was known for her legendary roast dinners not being able to use an oven anymore. Or a dad who was a die-hard football fan – who knew every fact, figure, player, goal and score – no longer caring about the sport at all.

According to Alzheimer’s Society, almost a million people in the UK are living with dementia. This means that there are at least a million versions of this story, leading to ripples of complex emotions running through families. These can include helplessness, guilt, anger, sadness, denial, frustration and even relief.

Both you and the person with dementia may feel a sense of loss as their condition progresses and your relationship changes. This grief may just be for a short time as you experience these changes, or it may be ongoing. They also may go back and forth over time,

You may also find that your relationship dynamic may shift, from both of you supporting one another to one where you take on a much more caring responsibility. Your loved one will likely become more dependent on your support, which could be very difficult for both of you to get used to.

How to process these feelings

These feelings of loss and grief may make your caring responsibilities feel more difficult. Alzheimer’s Society said: “It’s important to acknowledge any feelings you have and try not to feel guilty about them. There is no right or wrong way to grieve or cope with loss.”

When you’re supporting somebody with dementia, you may find that your emotions are often interchangeable. You may feel that you’re coping well, but then at other times feel that you’re overwhelmed by grief, or even completely numb. Anger and resentment are also common emotions as people process their frustrations with the difficulties ahead of both themselves and the person with dementia.

While you may feel guilty or shocked for having these feelings, they are a natural and valid response to a very difficult situation.

Caring for a person with dementia can take a huge emotional toll and these feelings can be difficult to cope with, especially if the people around you don’t understand or accept the impact the person’s dementia is having on you.

How to manage your feelings when caring for somebody with dementia

While there is no right or wrong way to feel when dealing with something so difficult, Alzheimer’s Society has offered the following tips for coping:

Find ways to express your feelings and how the situation is affecting you

Some people find it helpful to write a journal or to do creative activities such as art, music, or drama. Others may find that allowing themselves to cry helps them to express their grief.

Consider your own needs, too

Try to make time to do something for yourself each day, such as meeting or calling friends, watching a favourite television show, or taking time to listen to music. Taking some time to relax even for a short time is very important.

Look after your physical and mental health

Try to eat well, get as much rest as you can and do some exercise. If you’re feeling low or anxious, or are very tired or not sleeping, speak to your GP.

Look after any spiritual needs you have

If you regularly go to religious services, try to continue doing so. If you’re not able to go to a place of worship, watching online services, praying or singing at home can be helpful.

Take a break, if you think it will help

If you feel that you need a break to help you cope, you can speak to a social worker or dementia support worker about arranging this. Friends or family may also be able to step in to help.

Focus on the things that you and the person can still do together

There will be lots of changes to adjust to as the person’s dementia progresses. But try to also look for new opportunities to spend time with the person, as well as other interests you have that you enjoy.

Alzheimer’s Society added: “There is no one right way to experience or cope with a loved one’s dementia – emotions experienced are likely to be different for everyone, but whilst almost always difficult and challenging, it’s important to remember that you are not alone.”

Alzheimer’s Society is there for people again and again, through the hardest, most frightening times. If you need support or information, visit alzheimers.org.uk or phone the Dementia Support Line on 0333 150 3456

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

April 1, 2024April 1, 2024

Communing with spirits and coping with death

— Grief food in three cultures

In Mexico, sugar skulls are made to represent the soul of a departed loved one

Rituals around preparing and eating ‘grief food’ bring comfort to mourners – from Russia to Sri Lanka – and connect them to the dead.

By Annie Hariharan

In Mexico, pan de muerto (bread of the dead) is a special sweet bread made annually for the Day of the Dead in early November.

Shaped like a roll and topped with a cross and a nub – meant to symbolise bones and teardrops or hearts – the pan de muerto is both an offering to the deceased and a treat for everyone, explains Kati Hogarth. She grew up in Mexico but now calls Australia home and works in the creative industry. “It’s a bit sweet”, she adds, “to lure the spirits to come and share it with us.”

Pan de Muerte — Pan de Muerto is sweetened ‘to lure the spirits to come and share it with us’ says Kati Hogarth who grew up in Mexico

Food is closely connected to our rituals around death. Whether we are inviting spirits to commune with us or preparing feasts for the grieving, food provides solace, comfort and nourishment – often of the soul – at a time of mourning.

For example, in countries like the US and Australia, friends and neighbours will drop off casseroles or lasagnas, understanding that the bereaved often don’t have time or energy to make food.

Of course, many countries do not turn to a meat-and-cheese carbfest to mark a loved one’s passing. But those acts of cooking and eating – those heartfelt rituals around food – hold significant meaning when it comes to burials, mourning and even the remembrance of ancestors.

Altar — A Mexican altar to departed family members includes sugar skulls made to represent the souls of departed loved ones

Take koliva (also spelled kolyva, koljivo or coliva), a wheat-based dish that makes an appearance at Orthodox Christian funerals – from Greece to Russia – and is served in similar yet slightly different ways.

In Russia, the spelling is different – kutia – but Anastasia Kaissidis, a Russian mother of two who now calls Australia home, explains that it is essentially the same dish.

“It is like porridge but more sticky than watery. We make it with boiled wheat, barley and sometimes rice. Then, we add honey for the sweet taste and dried fruits like sultanas or berries and walnuts,” Kaissidis says. “It is really easy and quick to make. There’s no meat in it and most people would have ingredients like wheat at home.” A meatless dish makes it more affordable as well.

In other places like Greece or Macedonia, sugar is sometimes added as a sweetener, as well as other dried fruits and nuts like pomegranate seeds or walnuts. The dried fruits and nuts not only provide textural and colour contrast but they can be used to decorate the top of the dish in the shape of a cross or initials of the deceased.

Kutia is steeped in the rituals of a Russian Christian Orthodox funeral. The family of the deceased – “usually the women”, Kaissidis says – are responsible for making it for the people who drop by to pay their respects. “After the burial, people will come to the family’s house, so they will prepare food. Traditionally, kutia is the first dish we eat before anything else,” Kaissidis explains. “It will be scooped into small bowls so that everyone can have some. You just need a little taste and after that, you can eat the rest of the food on the table.”

The dish also has a symbolic meaning. “In Christianity, we believe life is eternal and we celebrate resurrection,” Kaissidis explains. “The wheat symbolises new life because it must be buried before it can grow again, else it will just rot. The honey or sugar symbolises that life will be sweet in heaven.”

Georgi Velkovski, a Macedonian living in Belgium knows this communal dish as koliva. He describes it as a sticky, sweet paste that is a bit bland and not to his taste, “like eating a piece of bread if you squeeze it and chew on it”.

“The family of the deceased would serve it on a plate along with tasting spoons. They would go around and offer koliva to visitors. People would take a spoonful of the dish and place the dirty spoons in a separate cup or container. This way, everyone is sharing the koliva,” he explains.

Anastasia Kaissidis, a Russian mother of two, talks about grief food in Russian Orthodox communities

When people don’t have the space to accommodate mourners in their own

houses, they may go to a cafe or restaurant. “When my grandmother died, there were about 20 close family members attending the funeral and they came from everywhere. Instead of having the meal at home, we pre-ordered food from a cafe, including kutia, because it was easier,” Kaissidis shares.

Although koliva is simple, cheap and filling, neither Kaissidis nor Velkovski will make or eat it outside of funerals – although other people in the Russian or Macedonian community may serve it during religious celebrations or even Christmas.

For Kaissidis, this is a sacred dish that is associated with funerals and not something to make for a casual Saturday brunch. “Sometimes, I make my kids porridge with honey because it is kid-friendly. I suppose it is similar to kutia, just a bit waterier but I wouldn’t call it kutia,” she says with a laugh.

Communal cooking in Sri Lanka

While the Orthodox Christian community communes with one sacred dish after a funeral, in Sri Lankan Buddhist culture, everyone comes together to cook full meals in support of the bereaved family.

When there is a death in the community, particularly in villages with close-knit communities, someone will take charge and start by collecting funds. “People give based on their finances and this collection will be used for the rites,” explains Zinara Rathnayake, a journalist and social media manager from Sri Lanka. On the last day of the ceremony, Sri Lankan Buddhist families typically cremate the bodies of the deceased although some may also choose a burial. This is then followed by a feast or ceremony called Mala Batha which is a meal provided to people who came over to pay their respects to the deceased.

Zinara Rathnayake says a Sri Lankan funeral feast is ‘a feast for the living’ but also, some believe, a ‘feast for the spirit who might still be lingering’

“If there’s enough space in the family’s house, they will cook the meal inside. If not, they will pick a house with a large garden to cook outside with a makeshift fire stove,” Rathnayake explains.

While this is a feast for the living, some people believe it is also a feast for the spirit who might still be lingering; this is a way to feed them before they head off to the other world.

The meal features food that people cook and eat daily – like dahl, dried fish curry, potato dishes, brinjal (aubergine) dishes, leafy green salads and papadums – rather than symbolic, funeral-specific dishes. These dishes are meatless. Meat is often considered “impure” so a vegetarian diet is de facto for periods of mourning.

This will vary from villages and communities, but people instinctively know the role they need to play; they may have done something similar for weddings or festivals. “The men might go off to buy the provisions and others will bring a large pot with utensils. Someone will cook rice, others will chop the vegetables. There is a mutual understanding,” says Ratnayake.

Sri Lanka vegetable curry — Vegetable curry is often served following a funeral in Sri Lanka

Following the Mala Batha, neighbours will continue to support the bereaved family by cooking for them. “The food part is taken care of by the community because the family is not in a state where they can cook,” says Ratnayake. “People will make potato curry or grated coconut sambol, buy large boxes of biscuits, make tea or coffee.” As Ratnayake explains, this is partly because traditionally, there is no concept of freezing and reheating food here; food is eaten on the same day it is cooked.

Offerings to the deceased in Malaysian-Chinese culture

Sometimes, the food that is prepared during funerals is not for the living. Instead, each element of the meal represents the deceased’s journey into the afterlife.

Chin (who asked not to use her real name to protect her family’s feelings) has a Chinese-Buddhist-Taoist background and lives in a country town in Australia. When her mother passed away in Malaysia, she became aware of the numerous rituals she had to fulfil and the symbolic food she had to place by her mother’s altar.

“We had her wake at a funeral centre,” Chin explains, “It was a three-day wake followed by a burial. There was someone at the centre to guide us on rituals and procedures, including what to wear. Most modern Chinese people don’t know what to do for these rituals!”

Malaysia-China funeral feast — Dishes at a funeral in Malaysian-Chinese communities include cooked meats, particularly a boiled chicken placed at the centre of the table and representing the spirit’s flight to the beyond

The standard dishes for Chinese funerals in Malaysia include cooked meats: a roasted pig symbolises eternity and good luck, a boiled chicken represents the spirit’s flight to the beyond and a roast duck symbolises protection for the spirit as it crosses the three rivers (Gold River, Silver River and the Life-Death River) that are synonymous in Chinese-Buddhist belief with giving and supporting life. Everything is served with rice, which represents family and respect.

Among the dishes that Chin prepared for her mother’s funeral was a stir-fry vegetarian dish called Buddha’s Delight, plus her mother’s favourite tea and fruit.

“There had to be five different colours of fruits, so we had green grapes, yellow pears, red apples, white peaches and black Chinese chestnuts,” Chin explains. The idea is to invite the deceased to eat along with the living.

One of the foods that is closely associated with Malaysian-Chinese funerals is pink and yellow steamed buns. These buns also make an appearance during the Hungry Ghost Festival; a month-long period when the Chinese community makes offerings to appease and honour spirits that roam the earth. Like koliva, these soft buns are also made with pantry staples – flour, yeast, sugar, baking powder, and shortening – and steamed, since most Southeast Asian kitchens do not have ovens.

Family members are also encouraged to offer food that the deceased used to enjoy. “On day seven, we laid out the dining table with my mother’s favourite food because symbolically, this is the last meal we are giving to her spirit,” Chin says. The idea is that after this feast, the spirit has to leave our world.

During this time, Chin and her family were expected to stay in their rooms from 10pm to 2am.

Afterwards, “we threw away the whole banquet because it is [considered] bad luck to eat it”, Chin says. “This is the part I did not like because it’s so wasteful.”

The “bad luck” is a mix of superstition – not wanting to eat something that a spirit has feasted on; and concern about food hygiene – not eating something that has been sitting at room temperature in the tropics.

Chin understands the purpose of rituals, but also finds some of them “ridiculous”.

“I rolled my eyes a lot but we had to ‘do the right thing for the deceased’. When my father passed away, my mother did the same thing for him and it was clear that this is what she wanted too.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

March 27, 2024March 26, 2024

Dogs Feel Grief Too

— Here’s How We Can Help Them

By Melissa Fleur Afshar

“Grief affects our pets just as much as it does us,” Lorna Winter, an expert in dog behavior, tells Newsweek. So when a pup loses their favorite person, how can we help them?

We spoke with two professional dog behaviorists, and a veterinary medical officer, to find out what we can do to help a pet in mourning. It’s common knowledge that dogs can display a wide range of emotions akin to humans, meaning that they can also experience loss.

“Changes in primary caregivers can also be a big shock for them too as it’s a routine change and it’s not what they were used to,” Winter, a director of the UK Dog Behavior Training Charter and co-founder of Zigzag, continued.

Extra Affection

It can be easy to pinpoint when a dog is grieving, with common signs and symptoms including lethargy, loss of appetite and changes in behavior. Winter said that people close to the dog must try to make them feel more comfortable, to support them through the difficult time.

“Touching and cuddling releases oxytocin in a dog, especially when it’s with someone that they know and are bounded with. It feels nice for us too, so snuggle up,” Winter said.

Winter advises people keen to help grieving dogs to set some time aside within their day to connect with the mourning canine, and to make sure they’re having their emotional and physical needs met.

“It will be a tough time for them, so spend time with the dog, meet their needs and pamper them! That might be just petting your dog or laying together on the couch and watching television,” she added.

Animal behaviorist Kaelee Nelson echoed Winter’s advice. The San Diego-based behaviorist told us that a dog’s comfort should always be prioritized when they’re in mourning or emotional pain.

“Spend more time with your pet, making sure to give them extra affection and companionship to help alleviate feelings of loss and loneliness,” Nelson said.

She added that if the dog were to have a particular item that reminds them of the person that has moved or passed away, like a piece of clothing, that it should be left with them for comfort.

Danny Cox is the chief veterinary medical officer of Petzey, an on-demand digital service that connects pet owners with professional veterinarians.

Cox is in agreement with Winter and Nelson on the importance of paying a close eye to mourning pets, and providing them with as much extra attention as they need. He added that it would be a good idea for those keen to help settle their emotions to develop or follow a routine.

“Routines can offer pets stability. It’s important to maintain or establish a routine, and to monitor for signs of depression or anxiety,” Cox told us.

Nelson adds that this can be achieved by walking or feeding a dog at a similar time a day, or at the time they used to do these activities.

“This can provide a sense of security during a confusing time,” Nelson explained.

Keep Them Distracted

All three animal specialists shared that grieving dogs would benefit from having their minds taken off their dark situation. Just like us, dogs enjoy a change of scenery or a new activity in difficult times, and a distraction can definitely lift their spirits.

The easiest way to do this would be through exercise and stimulation, which can look like anything from a walk to an enrichment activity.

“Exercise is a great stress reliever for dogs, so take them on interesting walks to help them feel more relaxed when they are at home,” Winter said.

“Spend time with them, play games with them and teach them some new tricks with positive reinforcement training to help boost their mood and create positive feelings.”

She also suggested involving chews in more pressing times as chewing, despite being a soothing activity for dogs, can also help to release endorphins.

“If they’re social, rope in their doggy friends and let them play together. They’ll feel better to have the comfort of their own species when they’re feeling sad,” Winter added.

Nelson also champions the power of playtime in helping a grieving pet slowly move on. She encourages those keen to help a mourning dog to engage in regular play and exercise with them to help distract them and keep them physically healthy too.

“This can really help to elevate their mood,” she said.

Another thing that the trio can agree on is that pet dogs may act out when going through a difficult time, and that it’s important for new or recurring owners to be patient with them and give them time to adjust to this new reality.

Cox does add that if a behavioral change persists or becomes severe, concerned carers should speak with professional veterinarians for guidance.

Nelson agrees: “If your pet’s behavior changes drastically or they stop eating or drinking, it may be time to consult a veterinarian. They can provide additional advice or prescribe medications to help with anxiety or depression.”

While every pet is unique in breed and temperament and may grieve differently as a result, it’s crucial that those supporting a dog in mourning understand that while the dog’s in mourning, their love and support will absolutely help them process their love lost.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

March 22, 2024March 21, 2024

How Grief Affects Autistic People Differently

— When my grandad died, I didn’t know how to process it. Then I met others who felt the same.

By Marianne Eloise

There is an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that I think about often, still as gut-wrenching today as it was when it first aired. “The Body” follows the immediate aftermath of the death of Buffy’s mother, Joyce: her cold face, her stiff limbs; the crack of her ribs when her daughter attempts CPR. It also follows each character’s individual response to grief, a reminder that there is no right way to process death. I cry every time I watch “The Body”, moved by everyone’s outpouring and quiet devastation. But I perhaps relate most to Anya, an ex-demon who is new to human mortality and feeling, and unable to process what has happened. She seems to be clinical, cold even, when asking if the group will see the body. Buffy’s best friend Willow gets upset by this, believing that Anya isn’t in pain like the rest of them.

Anya loses it in response—her first outburst ever. “I don’t understand how this all happens; how we go through this,” she says. “I mean, I knew her, and then she’s—there’s just a body, and I don’t understand why she just can’t get back in it and not be dead anymore! It’s stupid! It’s mortal and stupid!” It’s the illogical nature of death that has shaken her; that death is constant and permanent, as is the pain and need to go on no matter what. The very fact of being human is unpalatable and beyond comprehension to her—and when my grandad died, I felt exactly the same.

I do not handle grief well. Autistic people, much like ex-demons, are often assumed to have no feelings at all—but the reality is the opposite: We often feel things very deeply, on a cellular level that impacts every aspect of our functioning. Because of this, it can take us a while longer to process things, or even just to express them outwardly. Death and grief are no exception.

When my grandad was dying, just weeks before he was due to walk me down the aisle, I thought I had a handle on it. I dropped everything, avoiding work and most people, so that I could take the time I needed to try and process it. It was futile. Death is illogical, and unfair, and stupidly mortal. I know a person is not their body, but when their body dies, they are no longer here, no longer able to get back into it. My grandad was here, and then he was sick, and then I could no longer call him to talk about the birds in his garden. I couldn’t accept it.

After speaking with a few other autistic people, it seems many have faced a similar struggle when processing the death of loved ones, sometimes grieving long before the death itself, in hopes of better preparing for it. “With my grandad I grieved years before he was even ill, when [it was] just a hypothetical,” Reb, 23, told me. “When I was a kid I imagined what it would be like when he died. I knew it was inevitable and something I couldn’t control, so I tried to prepare for it.” With my grandad, I’d done the same: His death was my greatest fear, and I wrote about it constantly, in hopes it would help lessen the sting when it inevitably happened.

These attempts at preparation for future heartbreak, often at the expense of present joy, make sense to me. I read once that autistic people experience all time simultaneously: the past, future, and present, all wrapped up in the current moment. I can’t let myself enjoy the fact that the people I love are here, because I know one day they won’t be. It’s like an unconscious self-preservation. Sitting at dinner with my grandad before he died, I would hurtle through time, the inevitable pain becoming stronger the closer we got to its reality. I knew, even then, it would destroy me.

Autistic people experience everything in our bodies to an extreme extent—every sound, every smell, every touch. We often get sensory overload, which can lead to meltdowns and burnout. There are ways to mitigate this. My biggest trigger in public is sound, so I often wear earplugs. I can’t tolerate most fabrics, so I wear cotton. But over the months after my grandad died, a sensitivity stronger than anything I’d felt before crept up on me and made it impossible to do anything. I couldn’t go to restaurants, the gym, or even supermarkets without teetering on a full-blown meltdown. I spent most evenings curled up in a ball playing Zelda, but every day, it got worse, until inevitably, I was in my first burnout in years. I’d completely shut down.

I wanted so badly to grieve well, to process healthily, but my body disagreed. “My autism is getting worse,” is how I put it to my husband, but how I would never want anyone to put it to me. I felt angry, and weird, and mean. I didn’t feel like myself, but I did—I felt like the kind of person I fear I am. At some point, I realized that what I was experiencing was grief, that I wasn’t just angry or “wrong” or struggling for no reason, but that my loss had sunk into my bones.

It was only with time, and some recovery, that I realized this. Tess, 26, told me that she experienced a similar shut down while grieving. “Stressful situations like bereavement can disable our usual coping mechanisms,” she says. “I’m upset about losing this person, so now the floodgates have opened because I’m too fragile to block out sounds and feelings from other things. It makes you want to withdraw, and it’s very isolating.”

For many autistic people, these feelings can develop into more extreme difficulties to function. Anwen, 31, shared that when she lost multiple members of her family in 2019, she became a “sensory mess.” “My short term memory was shot. I have issues with that on the best of days, but I started having to make lists of everything, printing out itineraries, texting myself reminders,” she says. She was used to hiding her sensory difficulties, so she was able to seem fine to those around her, but for months, she was so distraught she couldn’t even eat. “All of my texture issues ramped up tenfold and I just ate chips for a year because anything else made me feel sick,” she says.

Grief affects every single person differently, and sometimes even for allistic (non-autistic) people, that might mean a similar, complete cognitive shutdown. But autistic people, particularly women, already spend a lot of time “masking”: concealing any difficulties they may have with existing in a world not built for them. When we experience grief, this urge only compounds. The subconscious need to display grief in a “good,” appropriate way means that we might not express it at all, and if we aren’t dealing with it privately, it’ll sneak up on us through our ability to function, obliterating any and all of our coping mechanisms.

For much of this year, my first without my grandad, I felt very angry. Seeing litter on the ground was enough to send me into a spiral, my preexisting grief coalescing with climate grief and a general distrust of humanity. Someone FaceTiming in a restaurant? Always enraging, but with my increased sensitivity, enough to ruin my entire night, leaving me curled up at home with the screech of the offending iPhone speaker still rattling around in my ears. I couldn’t look at anyone I loved without thinking about death, without thinking, What is the point? They’re going to die. They could die now. Why build these bonds, spend this time together?

As an autistic person, I am prone to forming incredibly deep connections. I know how to love and how to nurture relationships. But to love someone at all is to anticipate grief, and I don’t have the tools to manage the inevitable loss. I’m not confident that I ever will. But speaking to other autistic people for this piece, I finally feel, if not normal, at least not wrong for how I’ve processed my grief. As Tess put it to me, “Autistic people have the most special bond [with each other], because it’s like you spend your whole life thinking you’re so bad at being a goose, and then you find out you’re a duck.” We are all victims of the same mortal rules, but it is a relief to have found other ducks, and to not be alone in how I experience death in life.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!