Mourning customs and the memorial days

Grief is universal; its organisation is not. What is distinctive here is that the relationship with a dead person does not end with the funeral but continues on a defined calendar for years.

The immediate sequence

A wake, with the body at home in older practice, and neighbours present continuously.

Then a meal after the burial, and further meals on the ninth day and the fortieth. The fortieth day is the point at which the deceased is understood to have departed fully, and it is observed carefully.

Then the anniversary, each year.

Provody

In the week after Easter, families go to the cemetery. Graves are cleaned and repainted, food is laid out, and people sit at the graveside and eat.

The atmosphere is not solemn. It is closer to a family gathering that happens to be held in a cemetery, and children run about. Something is usually left on the grave.

Entire villages empty into their cemeteries on that day, including people who drove several hundred kilometres to be there.

What is being expressed

That the dead remain part of the family and are visited rather than merely remembered. The food left on the grave is the clearest expression of it, and the practice is older than any religious framework now placed around it.

A guest's observation

The scheduling is the humane part. Grief that has appointed days does not have to be carried at full weight every day, and a custom that gives people a date is doing something for them.

A guest's observation is already a heading in this piece; mine runs the same way. That a cemetery is the busiest place in a town on one particular day of the year surprised me when I first saw it — we have days of remembrance too, but the calendar is not this exact. A society knowing when it visits its dead struck me as an orderly thing.