In the opening passage of the 1970 bestselling novel Love Story, reads:

 

“What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful. And brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. And the Beatles. And me.” (Segal 1) 

 

That book was on my mother’s night table, adjacent to the bed where she died.  

 

Many years later, my father told me, that my mother was in the middle of reading that book when she died. It was a few weeks before Thanksgiving 1970; she was nine months pregnant when she suddenly died while napping.  

 

When someone dies even at an advanced age, or when the death is anticipated, when relief is finally there for the sick relative or friend, we are still at a loss for what to say.  We have an assortment of generic sympathetic sentiments that we say by rote. We turn to fixed rituals amalgamated from religion and family customs.  The equation or formula for grieving is rituals divided by religious reflection plus time equals salvage.  This equation serves not to repair us but distract our attention from the reality rather than learn to sit with the grief. 

 

The repetition of ancient rituals a repeating of what has been practiced for centuries reminds you not to ask why just follow “wear these clothes”; “eat these foods”, “lit candles at sundown”; “distinctive chant locutions”; “cover your mirrors”, “sit on uncomfortable chairs for seven days”.  Death is the last great unknown, and it frightens most of us.  We do whatever we can to prevent it from happening, and the first thing we do is ignore it. We ignore it until it smacks us in the face.