People have all kinds of feelings about death. There’s thanataphobia, the fear of death. There’s the morbid feeling fascination with death. Cantonese describe Sǐ Bù Míng Mù, the emotion that comes when one approaches death without resolution of one’s concerns.
All these emotions come before death. Mourning is different in that it arrives after death. Of course, it isn’t felt by the dead themselves. Rather, mourning is an emotional experience of those who are left behind after the death of someone else.
Mourning is not as simple as just feeling sad. Anger can be a part of the feeling too, along with despair, confusion, and just plain missing the person who is gone. It’s popular to claim that there is a universal set of stages of grief experienced by people going through mourning, but there’s no evidence to support that assertion. A more grounded perspective suggests that mourning is experienced differently by different people. Mourning, after all, isn’t just a feeling held by the person who is going through it. It’s an emotional process through which people work their way out of an attachment. Mourning is a journey that derives its character from the nature of the relationship that has been lost.
The mourner begins having no clue how to go forward, and stumbles around trying to figure things out. They make mistakes and go in circles, gradually coming to a new way of being that is in some regard a new equilibrium, though some of the pain is likely to remain for quite some time.
Mourning, in a broader sense, isn’t just a reaction to literal physical death. People can also mourn the loss of relationships that have been devastated by other forms of destruction as well. What’s held in common by all mourners is the terrible knowledge that what once was can never be again.
