“I’ll mourn you for 100 days”
or how the Romani process grief
How long does grief last? How long “should” you mourn a loved one who has passed away? And how, exactly, should you mourn them? What should you do? When is it appropriate to “move on”?
These questions have no answer. Or to be more specific, the answer is always personal to the individual dealing with a loss, and it is revealed to them over time. Nobody knows in advance how long they’ll grieve. Nobody knows what grief will feel like. Even if they have already lost someone before.
“Grief is such a lonely thing. There is no-one in it with you — others may grieve for the same soul, but they do not grieve exactly for what you also grieve. No-one has lost precisely what you have lost. Not exactly, never exactly.”
Susan Fletcher
Modern-day societies have abandoned the ancient ways to process grief and make sense of death. We refuse to look at death and do our very best to suppress the tidal waves of grief because they tend to put is in paralysis when the culture around us demands that we keep moving.
We don’t know what to do about grief.
But the Romani do.
