My thoughts on how America has lost mourning in grief and contorted the word to mean an empty āmoving onā, a broken ritual, and a result of industrialized america.
Grieving was once something that, when it happened, did not just weigh on one person but was felt through an entire community. Loss was shared. The process of mourning and expressing that grief was slow, intentional, and witnessed by neighbors, family, and friends. People were allowed to sit in it, to dwell in the weight of it all for as long as it took. But as America industrialized in the late 1800s and early 1900s, that space for grief began to collapse. Workers were pulled into the flow of factories and mass production, where time was money. weeks of mourning was not feasible when your job, your survival, depended on clocking in. For the working class, grief became something to push down insideā something to hide within and not something to live through. No longer something to mourn.
Mass production didnāt just steal time from us it disconnected people from their communities. Goods, services, even food could now be bought from distant sources rather than sourced locally, breaking those social ties to one another. Neighbors werenāt relied on in the same way, and community ties frayed. But community is what allows grief to feel bearable. Itās a time when everyone comes together, carries the pain collectively, and softens the weight for the person at the center of it. When those bonds were taken, grieving became private, individualized, and lonelier.
The rise of funeral homes and the cremation industry deepened that separation. Death itself became commercialized, handled by professionals rather than by the hands of loved ones and true community. Families were given options like open casket or closed, cremation or a burial, quick memorial or nothing at all. The result? Many people no longer had a gravesite to return to, or the tangible confrontation of seeing the lifeless body of a loved one. Somehow, the industry managed to give ālifeā to death, dressing up bodies to look as lively as possible. distorting what grieving was meant to be and pushing people further away from the reality of loss- in what I believe to be all in an effort to shorten the mourning process and force us into grief alone.
Before industrialization, mourning was not something quick and quiet. It was public and visible. People wore black clothing and mourning jewelry for months, even years, as a silent announcement of their grief. It allowed others to understand: I am in pain. I may not act as I usually do. It invited compassion. These things gave grief its rightful space in daily life, and they reminded the person in grieving that their pain was seen, not hidden away.
Today, grieving has become so internalized and individualized it is pushed into one person and expected to be digested in a few days. A sacred ritual and right of mourning has been broken-stripped down and sold back to us as products. And in that change, we have lost the permission to truly grieve. How can anyone truly āmove onā, or find understanding and meaning within their grief without mourning?
pixelskylines
vaporwave
theartofmadeline
andulkaphoto
dailybridgerton
titsay
