Mourning and the everyday

My grandmother passed away over the weekend. She had been suffering from Alzheimers for fifteen years, and we have been anticipating her death. But it’s still a shock. My aunt who is my grandma’s only living child decided to have a memorial service in the summer. This works out great for everyone with jobs, school or kids in school, but it leaves us all empty for that ceremony of the funeral service to complete the ritualistic part of the mourning period. I have been grieving the loss of my grandmother for years. The grandma I remember was always independent, passionate and full of life, not the woman I saw at the nursing home. But I am used to completing the funeral ritual then having to deal with the everyday part of mourning. Rosaldo states, “Most anthropological studies of death eliminate emotions by assuming the position of the most detached observer. Such studies usually conflate the ritual process with the process of mourning, equate ritual with the obligatory, and ignore the relation between ritual and everyday life” (7). The funeral or memorial service doesn’t embody the grief that people feel after they lose someone. It’s the outward ritual of mourning, only a part of the process. No one sees the rituals of weeping in homes or family members comforting each other in private. Those actions are the everyday.
-Colleen Murphy