Rituals

Rituals help us to say goodbye to the lives we’re leaving behind.

How do we come to terms with loss? Part of saying goodbye involves creating our own rituals for commemorating the life that we no longer have.

Rituals are a vital part of marking transitions and assigning meaning to them. They help to speed up acceptance, and they allow us to integrate our pasts into the new futures awaiting us. Some rituals can involve literally marking change on our bodies. For example, an ex-Nazi chose to cover all his fascist tattoos with religious symbols to signify his conversion. Other people choose to get new piercings or a wild new hairstyle after a divorce.

Communal events are an important form of ritual, providing a way to celebrate happy occasions and landmarks as well as mourn losses. Parties can mark the beginning of an important trajectory like a gender transition or pregnancy. They can also be used to signify an end point, like the completion of a PhD thesis or cancer treatment.

Objects can play an important part in rituals, too. A former prisoner and a veteran shared their stories of keeping their dirty boots in sight at home. The boots symbolized a past they wanted to acknowledge, even though they never wanted to return there. For others, wearing a particular piece of jewelry can help them feel the presence of a place or person they love.

Of course, rituals are especially important when it comes to grief and loss. This was something that Larry, a rabbi, discovered when his first child was stillborn. There were no established rituals of mourning within the synagogue for miscarried and stillborn children, and no way for him and his wife to publicly express their grief. So he set about creating his own rituals, and wrote a thesis advising how rabbis could support community members who were going through the same thing.

Rituals can make visible some of our internal turmoil. They also allow us to be in connection with a broader community of people. Accepting painful emotions and creating our own rituals allows us to start accepting that our lives are changing. As we’ll discover in the next blink, the next stage involves shedding all the parts of our old lives that don’t work for us anymore.