“You should wear dark or somber colored clothes; you should not smile or laugh too much; you should not wear anything ostentatious at the funeral or wake; you must give a befitting burial; you must stay at home for a mourning period; you should not see the dead body of your child nor go for the funeral; Man up you are a man don’t cry.
People sha!
We are used to giving orders and telling others how they ought to live their lives. Because someone did theirs in a particular way doesn’t mean all must toe that line. We look, talk, act, walk, dress and love differently so why can’t we mourn differently.
Why must I be told how to mourn? Who gives anyone the right to tell me how to love and mourn my husband, wife, child, brother, sister, father, mother, friend, mentor etc?
Why should I be told not to cry if and when I want to? To remonstrate and ask God questions, if I want to, why must I be treated as a dead person even though I am living.
What do they know about our lives, our history, what we know the other person would have loved. Do they know what we discussed about death and what to do if it came?
Why must a woman in this day and age sit at home for 40 days, 4 months, 1 year, wear all white or all black just because she lost her husband?
Who will feed her and her children for those days she sits at home, how will her bills be paid. I can assure you those who made the rules wouldn’t do nada.
Why must society tell us when it’s alright to live again , to dance again, to love again, when we have paid the penance for living when our significant other is dead, when it is alright to declare women innocent of their husbands death.
Why must men be told they shouldn’t cry.
I have heard horror stories of how family members use the opportunity of the death of a person to terrorize their loved ones and I must say that I am blessed with lovely in-laws who let me have my way in practically everything I wanted but I know that’s not the case for a vast majority of women. Losing a loved one brings so much pain and it’s unbelievable that people intentionally make the process more hurtful with ridiculous and offensive with cultural demands which makes them relevant in the scheme of things.
For Mr Aisi, I wanted a night of tributes not a wake. You see, I had always wondered why we had those wakes and service of songs where only 3 people would be called to tell us about the deceased from his family, work and neighborhood within the period of 2 minutes each. I had concluded that it was at best a funeral rite to help people process their grief because it really did nothing for the essence of the person that had passed.
Also I wanted music and laughter because I wanted to celebrate (not his death) but his life, appreciate the impact he had on other people besides his family (boy, there were several things he did that I knew nothing about) and leave people with good memories of the man I loved .
I wore nice clothes and jewelry because I was seeing my husband off and I didn’t think the way I dressed was a reflection of how much I loved or didn’t love him.
I told all the groups to which i belonged that I didn’t want sorrowful faces around me but that’s me and I don’t believe anyone or everyone should grieve like I did and that exactly is my point. Our circumstances are different, we process things differently, we have different temperaments, beliefs and philosophies to life so why must our reactions to death be the same.
I have noticed that it is mostly women that are used to uphold these repugnant and offensive cultures, we are the foot soldiers of culture and most often we gleefully carry out our orders without thinking about the individuals in the midst of it all.
As a people we ought to challenge what we know is blatantly wrong, the dead is dead and gone and nothing can hurt them again. If we really loved the dead as we profess It’s the living they have left behind that we must nurture.
There is a reason why the living is not buried with the dead and it’s because they are still alive so let’s not demand that someone die or cease to exist for a while because their loved one (whom we loved also) died.
Life continues, is for living and should be lived.
Tárá this brings a story to mind. You may have heard it or a variation of it.
Young lady is cooking her first family Christmas meal after getting married a few months earlier. She puts the turkey in the roasting pan, but her husband tells her she needed to cut off the drumsticks first. She says, “okay, but why?”. Husband says, “I don’t know, that’s how mum has always done it”. New wife asks mother in law, who said she didn’t know either, but her own mother had always done it that way. They ask mother in law’s mum, and she says, “well, when I cooked my first Christmas turkey, the roasting pan was too small so I had to cut off the drumsticks to make the turkey fit. I meant to get a larger one, but forgot until the next year, so had to do it again…and guess what, I forgot again, and by the third year, I had gotten so attached to it, I couldn’t think of replacing it any longer”.
My point is this, the things we get passed on to us may have been relevant when they were first practised, but no longer may be. Our problem is that we are not discerning enough to question the continued relevance of such practices, and we accept them as binding on us (one of my pet peeves is addressing female legal practitioners in the masculine because, apparently, “there are no ladies at the bar”), but that is a whole other issue.
I commend your valiant efforts to challenge these inane societal expectations with regard to grieving. There are other areas worth looking at, too, where otherwise historically relevant practices have ceased to be quite so relevant.
I wanted to make a tribute at my husband’s Christian wake keep but one of the pastor’s wives made effort to stop me.
But I really wanted to. He was my husband and who best to speak about him but his wife of 18+ years.
I asked for an explanation and it was so that people would not say his death was not painful to me.
My life, in fact our lives had been in suspense for close to three years that he was sick. We prayed and did what we could and making a tribute would mean I was not mournful enough!
Anyway I did. But indeed women are the foot soldiers of some of these unfair practices.