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Mourn and Move On

(image: Two hands in black and white cupping the bloom of a deep red rose)

I had tentatively started a post on the Roman months of May and June being filled with rose festivals and how the adornment of roses and violets marked both life and death in the Roman world during the months of May through mid-July. I was mentally filling this essay with how we could all stop to honor our Beloved Dead in the summer with roses and all the historical bits I could yank out of my tumbling, sometimes foggy mind.

And then on June 12^th, while I drank my coffee, the news filtered in that there had been a mass shooting in Orlando.

Today is the third (and final) day of my official mourning for my heart-friend and partner-in-arts Sparky T. Rabbit. For three days now I have neither bathed, washed my hair, nor shaved. I've worn the same dirty clothes every day. (Fortunately, the nature of my work permits this.) I look (and probably smell) terrible. It's a kind of shared death, a time In Between.

I learn something new every time I encounter these old, ancestral customs, usually by way of seeing the deep wisdom embedded in them. In this case, the sheer physical and psychological discomfort of this disruption to normal life is strong incentive to move through deep mourning and into what comes next.

Sparky, I know that guys with beards always made your heart beat faster.

But come Sundown tonight, I'm shaving.

My familiar died last year.

But this article is not about him: the death of pets, even the best-loved, is in my opinion a matter for private, not public, mourning.

But the death of a household member occasioned some serious thought on the matter of the rituals with which we meet such an event in the home. As a community, we've been strong on public ritual and weak on household observance, and in this we differ greatly from the ancestors, who held both to be of equal necessity. The last death in my household had occurred almost 10 years previously, and at the time I pretty much winged it. But since then my thinking has matured (or so I like to tell myself), and so when Gremlin died I followed Ceisiwr Serith's advice: when confronted with a new situation, consult ancestral precedent.