We all die – How we mourn reveals who we are

Their deaths, Gudda Devi’s and Jorge Mario’s, are worlds apart, yet they intersect at mortality’s ruthless edge.

When Gudda Devi, a 43-year-old woman, hopped on her son’s moped in her village in northern India, her face lit up with the prospect of a market trip. But destiny had a savage plan. A truck barrelled into them, sending her head first onto the rough asphalt. Two gaping wounds revealed that her skull was fractured. By the time her son mustered the courage to deliver the devastating news, “Mother is dead,” and her husband rushed to her mangled heap of purple sari and blood in honking traffic, Gudda had lost immense amounts of blood, gushing out in fountains from her nose and mouth. As her husband wheeled her limp body, hospitals, too ill-equipped to treat trauma, denied her admission. After 48 merciless hours, Gudda passed away. Sheathed in white cloth, she was cremated on a pyre with an urn of vermilion powder to symbolise her marital status, as per Hindu death rites.

In contrast, when Jorge, 88, passed away, it sent seismic waves of sorrow. From Lesotho to Ushuaia and primarily Muslim Jakarta, church bells tolled, candles burned, incense fumed, and people wept. Two hundred titans, monarchs, presidents, billionaires, and celebrities, in glossy black suits or pearls and mantilla lace, gathered for his ‘simple funeral’ under Michelangelo’s colossal canopy. Snipers, stealth technology, Swiss guards, fighter jets, and warships were deployed as unassailable steel around a 0.17-square-mile village. As fame and faith intertwined in a shimmering requiem, Jorge was buried by the 2,000-year-old tradition of the Roman Catholic Church. After all, he was Pope Francis, the People’s Pope.

Whether death arrives with dignity or disruption, immerses us in sacraments, or ambushes us in sterile hospitals, one undeniable truth persists: we all die.

But grief is humanity’s oldest ritual. It reveals everything – who we are, what we value, what kind of love we allow ourselves to feel. And yet, we are increasingly told that grief must be treated, shortened, or sanitised. Clinical classifications call it prolonged grief disorder. This is the fiction of modern life: sorrow should be scheduled, we must “move on” in 30 days, six months, or a year. Who decided it’s pathological to search for signs of the dead or talk to them? Is it better to quickly remarry and rush through grief’s stages?

Queen Gandhari mourned the loss of her hundred sons for 36 years during the Mahabharata war. When she lifted food to her mouth, she was reminded of their suffering, the sound of their killer Bhima’s knuckles cracking right before he broke their bones or ripped their chests. Unlike Gandhari, who retreated to the forest in defiance of a cruel world, grieving can offer us personal transformation. It allows us to integrate loss into our redefined identity and love through the experience of absence.

Grief is honoured variously. In West Africa, among the Ashanti or Yoruba, funerals consist of parades. Irish wakes blend merry-making and whiskey-drinking with humorous stories of the departed. Not because death is taken lightly, but because it’s taken seriously. In Ghana, fantasy coffins are shaped like airplanes, shoes, and fish, symbols of the life someone lived, not just the body they left behind. In Sulawesi, Indonesia, the Toraja people don’t bury their dead right away. The bodies stay home for months, sometimes years, and are dressed, spoken to, and touched. Death to them isn’t a rupture; it’s a slow, sacred farewell. In Greenland, the Inuit mourn quietly, not demanding tears or time limits. In Papua New Guinea, mourners cut off their fingers to express sorrow and keep preserved bodies in seated positions within the home.

These traditions don’t fear grief, they give it form, space, and ritual. What unites them is a profound respect for death, a refusal to perceive grief as deviance, and a sense that it’s always incomplete. “Would you,” a Persian king in 5th century BCE asked the Greeks who cremated their dead, “eat the bodies of your deceased fathers?” Then, he asked the Callatiae, a tribe that ate their deceased relatives, “Would you burn your fathers’ bodies?” Both sides were equally horrified.

Customs are king, but they are facing challenges. The disappearance of vultures threatens the 3,000-year-old sky burials practised by the Parsi and Tibetan communities. Newer practices towards greener burials, aquamation, human composting, and medically assisted suicide are evolving. As collective traumas soar – deaths from COVID, climate disasters, and wars – processing collective grief would mean understanding it as a shared experience that strengthens communities.

We should be measured not by how quickly we recover but by how deeply we remember. Gudda’s husband laments not having held her more closely. How we mourn, is the truest mirror of who we are.

(Shaifali Sandhya is an international psychologist, former professor, and writer on culture, cosmopolitanism, and global affairs)