24 March 2024. I came to Moscow with a boyfriend for the first time in a long while. The date of our anniversary fell on an ‘unlucky day’ of mourning for those who died in Crocus City. It has been 40 days since that day, and I am posting a translation of my notes from that time.

…For the first time in years, I experienced for myself what it is like when there is absolutely nothing to do in the Russian capital. You can only go to a restaurant to eat, to a bookshop to buy. That’s it.

While our car was spinning its wheels, we had this conversation.

"People die every day, but we don’t mourn for them," I said, looking only ahead, "I don’t understand the point of this show."

"Terrorism is always about politics and the unexpected," he tried to parry, "And a lot of deaths at once."

"Around the world people are dying now, and a lot, and at once," I persisted, remembering the children in Africa, "If we don’t know about these deaths, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist. And we still don’t grieve for them."

"At least for someone," he replied calmly, "The people who died had nothing to do with anything and died for nothing."

"At times like this I remember the joke about how God gathered people on one plane for 25 years to kill them."

"It sounded as cynical as possible," and he was right.

"I guess," I agreed, "The thing is, I sympathise with death, but I object to the hype. Did you know that the singer Shaman has already released the song ‘Requiem’ to ride on the summons? Does that sound normal to you?"

Then I wondered: Where does the culture of mourning come from?

When did it emerge, what was its original purpose? What are the psychological processes behind this phenomenon? And when did we become those who use death as a newsbreaker?

Usually we do not think about such things: tradition is natural and inviolable for us. And deconstructing it seems pointless. But I wanted to look into it, so I did.

What is ‘mourning’?

In Ozhegov’s dictionary the wording is as follows: ‘A state of grief for the deceased (as well as for some calamity, catastrophe), expressed in wearing special clothes, in the cancellation of entertainment’.

Mourning traditions go back to antiquity and differ from nation to nation, but there are common features:

1. The colour of clothing, different from everyday clothes (black, white in Asian countries, in Egypt such a colour was blue, in the Mesopotamia there were two colours of mourning: for the lower class, the children of the earth, it was scarlet yellow).
2. Grieving as a process of accommodation of loss, necessary to return to a full life.
3. The presence of a variety of taboos associated with death or mourning.
4. The duration of mourning, depending on one’s proximity to the deceased (in most cases, it is assumed that widows should grieve longer than widowers; I believe this is due to the role and responsibilities of men stemming from patriarchal structures).

Madeleine Dietrich, a German and American actress who lived through two world wars and lost her father in one of them, writes in her memoirs: ‘She [mother] always wore black now. I wore a black armband on my left sleeve. This was considered a sign of mourning for all the family members who one by one died at the front. The dresses, coats I wore were dark blue. Grey was also a colour of sadness, but only acceptable after the first few years of mourning. White collars and cuffs were the only deviation. Even the ribbons in the hair were black. Now, during the war, there were no more holidays, and I dreamed not only of peace, but also of brightly coloured ribbons in my loose hair. …Soon after my mum came home, my father died. The black veil of the widow’s hat was already falling over my mother’s face, over her black dress.’

In ancient times mourning was often short, especially public rather than private, but it was also indicative, even more so than in our days. There were cases of self-torture all over the place: cutting of hair, practised among both men and women, mutilation (Slavs treated themselves more gently than Scythians, who pierced their hands with arrows, or Turks, who cut themselves so that the blood mixed with tears). Some nationalities practised ritual suicides and burial of still alive and healthy servants with their dead masters.

As I was preparing this article and searching for the right information in sources, I came across one quote by Marlene Dietrich that stuck with me as well as the previous one: ‘I welcome the custom of wearing a mourning dress. A woman in mourning gets attention just when she needs it.’

Sounds plausible: when a woman is in mourning, she is sympathised with but not seen as a sexual partner. So she gets protection from pestering men and a chance to take a breather before things get back to normal and she returns to her traditional role as mother and homemaker.

This led me to think that traditions that originated at the beginning of time have a connection to the overall context of survival. A legitimate question arises: how exactly does mourning relate to the processes of evolution? The fact that such a tradition exists in all peoples only confirms the fact that the source is deeper than one might think. For example, in ourselves and the way we are organised.

In our reality and time, the process of grieving, as well as its relationship to the spectrum of characteristics and social structures of the same gender has changed a lot. How did it used to be and how did it begin?

There is a view that grieving does not necessarily serve an evolutionary purpose directly. Adherents to this position suggest that mourning is a by-product of an attachment mechanism whose influence on survival is more obvious.

Mammals, unlike amphibians, for example, do not rely on a numbers game strategy where you can lay as many eggs as you like — the more the better — and someone will survive. We raise our children for a long time, until they can stand up for themselves. We have an inherently more complex brain structure, social and emotional connections coming with it. These, through various mechanisms, encourage us to raise offspring in good conscience in order to preserve the future generation, already small in number. It turns out that the effort expended on this, we can’t consider useless on the one hand, but on the other hand, it is related to survival somewhat indirectly — through empathy.

It seems that mourning is a tradition that has grown out of well-established mechanisms that allow us not only to feel, to connect with others, but also, paradoxically, to evolve as members of a species and to continue living.

This is particularly interesting against the backdrop of research that suggests that, in addition to overwhelming emotional pain and grief, grief also harms our physical health. Those who have recently experienced a loss are more likely to become ill, and their risk of dying in the weeks and months following the loss increases.

And here we come to the next turning point…

Do we need mourning?

Surely there must have been easier or better options! Haven’t they? Yes?..

And this question is asked not only by me, but also by scholars who are still discovering new features of the traditions and origins of mourning.

Despite the risks, in the end, it is necessary, because it is our, human, albeit borrowed from other species, way of separation — as harmonious as possible — from the dead. And a mechanism to help come to terms with death. Not only someone else’s, but also one’s own. A person (or creature) in mourning goes step-by-step through all the stages of grieving proposed by Lindemann, who has studied the femenology of acute grief:

• denial;
• indignation, anger;
• regret, despair, depression;
• reconciliation;
• acceptance.

What is often glossed over is that the division into these stages is tentative, like so much in psychological science. It is difficult for me to ignore this fact because I was a counselling psychologist: grieving differs from person to person. What is undeniable is that it also has physiological effects: levels of the stress hormone, cortisol, rise. Many clients experience stress reactions in the form of panic attacks and behave differently from how we usually imagine grieving. Laughter is also a stress coping mechanism, and it’s not that the bereavement survivor is a stale person. By the way, cynicism is a frequent defensive coping strategy. Now you just know it.

When did we learn to grieve?

It’s hard to say for sure, but there is a thread you can pull to find out more.

Many parents (and adults) are familiar with those eerie and ear-splitting screams-protests of babies left alone. There is evidence to suggest that almost all humans are particularly sensitive to these very sounds. It’s inherent in our nature. Increases the baby’s chances of survival.

So, as soon as the parents return, the baby is immediately quiet. But if they are gone for a long time, or if they disappear over the horizon forever, prolonged protest is replaced by withdrawal and despair. Colin Murray Parkes and a colleague noticed similarities between this behaviour and grief. It was hypothesised that screaming is necessary for parents to keep the infant close to them, and that mourning in the event of their loss is necessary to prepare the child for the arrival of new adults.

The pleazure zone in our brain enable us to feel happy when we are together with someone. And sadness when we’re separated from loved ones. Or from society at large. Evolutionary biologists have suggested that the protest phase of grieving lasts long enough for us, in theory, to find a lost loved one, and is moderately fleeting to secede when hope of reunion is lost.

The presence of the tradition of mourning is also found in apes, such as chimpanzees. Recent findings similarly suggest that funeral traditions were present as early as the dawn of our history. Which means we learnt to grieve from our ancestors. If we adhere to the synthetic theory of evolution, the successor to Darwin’s theory, and based on the fact that man descended from the ancient apes of the Old World, of course.

Okay, when did we start skimming from death?

We’ve been sharing and using information about death since the dawn of time. Around the time we were still running around on the plains as monkeys. So, to oversimplify, death has always been an information occasion. And mourning is a logical conclusion, an outcome of the fact that we have accepted, understood and experienced this information.

Another thing is that people, as a species, began to profit from death in any form, to inflate this mourning to a fantastic holiday of death, favourable to many, much later. The world became like this not even with the arrival of mass media, when the news, considered by the majority to be the most important, which, as far as I am concerned, is very controversial, began to grow out of the inevitable news of death from all directions.

When the fact of death began to affect not only the individual, but also the structure of local society, the world as a whole became the world as we know it. When a chief or someone important, valuable to the tribe dies, the matter becomes serious. When many — or all — die, it becomes a tragedy that some people don’t mind taking advantage of.

Things have escalated with the increased availability of information: the advent of the Internet, social media, AI. You can look for culprits right down to the printing press, but it won’t change anything.

Unfortunately, we’ve always been like that. As soon as we get our hands on a new tool, we inevitably find a way to make things worse.

While I am saddened and bewildered at the sight of the do-gooders, somewhere in the world one more person will make a choice not to opt for a sympathetic ethic.

Alas.

✦
My name is Adelyss Sairon. I’m a writer, narrative psychologist and researcher of complex topics.

I run masterminds and creative writing meet-ups, talk about books, film and the phenomena of the creative life. I have a blog on Telegram called The "Wanderer’s Grimoire". I’d love to see you there. It’s in Russian, but it’s automatically translated into English.

When I have a hub site with all the points of presence, the link to it will be here.

P. S. The photo for the article was taken from Unsplash: the author is here.