"Mrs. Post would have understood that. She wrote in a world in which mourning was still recognized, allowed, not hidden from view. Philippe Ariès, in a series of lectures he delivered at Johns Hopkins in 1973 and later published as Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, noted that beginning about 1930 there had been in most Western countries and particularly in the United States a revolution in accepted attitudes toward death. "Death", he wrote, "so omnipresent in the past that it was familiar, would be effaced, would disappear. It would become shameful and forbidden." The English social anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, in his 1965 Death, Grief, and Mourning, had described this rejection of public mourning as a result of the increasing pressure of a new "ethical duty to enjoy oneself", a novel "imperative to do nothing which might diminish the enjoyment of others." In both England and the United States, he observed, the contemporary trend was "to treat mourning as morbid self-indulgence, and to give social admiration to the bereaved who hide their grief so fully that no one would guess anything had happened."
One way in which grief gets hidden is that death now occurs largely offstage. In the earlier tradition from which Mrs. Post wrote, the act of dying had not yet been professionalized. It did not typically involve hospitals. Women died in childbirth. Children died of fevers. Cancer was untreatable. Death was up close, at home. The average adult was expected to deal competently, and also sensitively, with its aftermath. "
- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
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I think it is so difficult to deal with loss when not only must we manage our pain but we also feel the social pressure to at least "appear" to be coping. Today, the "move on" attitude means that society expects you to behave as if nothing had happened although your life is altered. When people used to wear morning it meant they did have to fake being "ok" and they didn't have to explain if they were not. It was out in the open. A dear friend of mine has lost her father suddenly this week. Not only was she not able to say goodbye but she also had a very strained relationship with him. Her parens were divorced and she has no siblings, no cousins, no aunts and uncles... She is alone and in denial. I do believe that having family that shares the grief helps to accept the reality of the loss because they provide the safety necessary to let yourself go and feel the pain.
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