I had sung at funerals where no friends or family of the deceased showed up, at services mobbed with slouching mourners wearing coats that drooped to their ankles. Some smelled of rain and perfume. Others stiffly handed out tissues. There were children, some restless, some transfixed. I stood close to heartsick mourners and worried that I would not sustain the enormousness of their spiritual weight. I had always preferred singing at funerals over weddings. To blissed-out couples (and sometimes Bridezillas), I was an ornament, a decoration. I didn’t feel as meaningfully alive as when I beamed all my focus toward soothing the bereaved.
But as I grew older, I better understood how singing empowers us, at least fleetingly, to ease the terror of loss. The more I sang at funerals, the performances reinforced the notion that grief is an energy that wants to move through the body, and in our loss-avoidant culture, we’re prone to fight against it. Singing not only helps allow for this process but it alchemizes what grief can become. Who hasn’t felt a shiver of cosmic belonging when standing among other grievers crooning “Amazing Grace”? While singing, it’s as if that vague, amorphous homesickness we bear ebbs away.
In ancient Greece, funeral singers, who were predominantly women, held a hallowed role. The song leader, or chief mourner, was the medium between the bereaved and the dead, and together the singers eased the deceased’s passage to the underworld. Some song leaders ripped out their hair and beat at their chests to honor grief’s unruly, feral side. Over time, some funeral singers saw their role as supernatural and their songs as spells, able to summon back the dead. Eventually, those believers faded away and funeral singing resembles what it is today.
While I didn’t think of my singing as being like an ancient incantation, something magical took place that surpassed my pop-star pursuits. During funerals, it seemed as if I was holding everyone and their shared pain. I envisioned myself raising their grief into song and watching it transmute into numinous light. It dispersed in glimmers, lived on in bright forms. If one person caught a flash of that hope, I had done my job.
In the psychotherapist Francis Weller’s grief handbook, “The Wild Edge of Sorrow,” he maintains that in ritual mourning, “something inside us shimmers, quickens, and aligns itself with a larger, more vital element.” Just as my singing seemed to transform those who heard it, I was changing. I was taking precious people with me. A mother who lost her college-age son. A friend who lost his partner. A neighbor who lost her father, who had driven me to funeral gigs before I was old enough to drive to them myself.
Later, when I’d encounter my own earth-shattering losses, I would remember many of these grievers, now my companions in sorrow, and think: I saw them cry. I heard them sing. I saw them rediscovering joy. And I knew that I could, too
Coping With Grief and Loss
Living through the loss of a loved one is a universal experience. But the ways in which we experience and deal with the pain can largely differ.
- What Experts Say: Psychotherapists say that grief is not a problem to be solved, but a process to be lived through, in whatever form it may take.
- How to Help: Experiencing a sudden loss can be particularly traumatic. Here are some ways to offer your support to someone grieving.
- A New Diagnosis: Prolonged grief disorder, a new entry in the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual, applies to those who continue to struggle long after a loss.
- The Biology of Grief: Grief isn’t only a psychological experience. It can affect the body too, but much about the effects remains a mystery.
- Comforting Memories: After a person dies, their digital scraps — text messages, emails, playlists and voicemails — are left behind. They can offer solace to their grieving families.
- Grieving the Loss of a Pet: Counseling. Grief-group sessions. The number of resources for coping with a pet’s death has grown in recent years.