The Mourner's Dance
What We Do When People Die
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- $3.99
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- $3.99
Publisher Description
There is no doubt that the death of a loved one has a profound - and unpredictable - effect on the lives of those left behind. Mourning is the price we pay for love. But how does anyone survive those first weeks, months, and even years after a death, and then eventually return to normal life?
When her daughter's fiancé died suddenly, Katherine Ashenburg found herself drawn into the world of mourning customs. Finding little comfort in the stripped-down North American approach, she sought solace, and shaped the core of this much-praised book, by exploring the rich traditions that have sustained mourners in cultures around the world and across centuries. Intertwining anecdotes from past and present with her own story, Ashenburg uncovers the wisdom and creativity embedded in mourning rituals and their value in rebuilding those unravelled by loss. Somehow, as Ashenburg so deftly reveals, we find strength and go on living.
With a new afterword by the author.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When her daughter's fianc died suddenly in early 1998, Canadian journalist Ashenburg was forced to confront contemporary Western culture's ambivalence about mourning especially for the death of a young person. Lacking the rites and rituals that more traditional societies offer, we mourn as best we can; even so, we act in ways that bear close similarities to mourning rites across times and cultures. Into her loving and intimate account of her own family's grief, Ashenburg weaves descriptions of mourning rituals from a broad range of traditions. She explores postmortem treatment of the body; wakes, funeral ceremonies and prayers; burial and cremation; gender roles; and such customs as condolence letters and mourning clothes. Ashenburg's approach is thematic and selective: from reburial of bones in rural Greece to suttee (widow-burning) in India; from the tearing of clothes in Jewish culture to Scarlett O'Hara defiantly dancing in her widow's weeds in Gone with the Wind. Rich in such detail, the book overlookds other relevant subjects: it touches on collective mourning in England for British royalty, for example, but doesn't consider the ways in which entire societies have grieved for victims of the Shoah, the gulag or those in a mass grave. But though its treatment of anthropological themes may be selective, the book eloquently makes the point that mourning is a necessary and transformative experience. Because mourning is both personal and communal, it demands greater societal attention.
