Everything Needs A Farewell Ritual

We have all suffered loss in our lifetime. Again and again we are forced to say goodbye to people, places and situations to which we have been attached since birth, until we die and say goodbye to life.

We say goodbye to childhood and youth. We say goodbye to parents, brothers, sisters, couples and friends. We have said goodbye to cherished places and moments that we will never forget.

It is fair to say that life is a sequence of endings and beginnings. The truth is that  everything that begins will also end to make way for the new. But we are not always ready to say goodbye.

Throughout history, many societies have created rituals, ceremonies or special events to say goodbye, but modern cultures no longer adhere to these traditions. This only makes it more difficult to say goodbye and to deal with loss.

Farewell Rituals

One of the first things prehistoric man did was to develop funeral rites. Unlike other species, humans value death. Early humans started burying their dead because they understood that death was an important event.

These prehistoric men sought magical explanations for death. They assumed that life doesn’t end there, so they invented ways to say goodbye to the one who died and offer comfort to those left behind.

After this they introduced new rituals, often initiations. The onset of puberty, the beginning of married life, the beginning of the harvest, and so on. But  celebrating the beginning is also to inaugurate the end. All these rituals were maintained. They evolved and adapted to the particularities of each culture, but kept their essence.

Rituals Today

In today’s society  , however, there are fewer and fewer rituals to say goodbye to something that has passed or to welcome something new. You could say that the only ritual that has survived is the funeral ritual.

In the modern world  , a ritual to say goodbye to someone who has died is also the property of the market and not of the people who are grieving. There are prefabricated formulas. The funeral home takes care of everything and the grieving people are passive figures.

And let’s not forget a kind of goodbye that hurts almost as much as death, but is of course not as final… This could be the case with a divorce, leaving your parental home or breaking up a relationship.

What are farewell rituals?

A ritual mainly serves to mark a special event. They mark a situation that is different from normal and deserves a break from our routine to receive it, process it and prepare for change.

Rituals and ceremonies help to give meaning to an event. In a farewell ritual, it is the fact of separating from someone who is loved, either by choice or by their death. A farewell ritual allows us to emphasize the fact that something has happened that will change our lives. We will not be the same after this and we use symbols to facilitate acceptance.

Farewell means looking at the past and the future with a new perspective  and exchanging everything that is customary for something new that we have not yet built. It also means that we are aware of having to accept an agony and process it.

The consequences of a lack of rituals

In today’s society there is not always room for rituals. Often people have to experience the drama of divorce in absolute solitude.  The person will tell themselves that they should just move on and that no one wants to see them cry.

They are encouraged not to grieve, to try to think of something else, to engage in activities that will distract them. And in the end, if their pain doesn’t heal, it’s avoided. Under these circumstances, sadness quickly turns to bitterness. The person in mourning knows that he or she cannot change the facts, but fails to adapt to these changes. This results in depression, anger or problems with others.

It would be ideal to have a ritual for each goodbye. In today’s world, it is likely that everyone has their own ritual for saying goodbye, because in general hardly anyone wants to think about death or a divorce.

Farewell rituals are healing

Performing a farewell ritual is healing.  Allowing yourself to face the loss is the first sign of acceptance. It also helps to tie up the loose ends with the link that is now completed.

You can take a symbolic object and set it on fire as a sign of goodbye. You can write a letter or a poem to say goodbye. You can retrieve the memories of the person who is no longer there and give them a special physical place. All those little rituals help to say goodbye so that we can grieve with more steadfastness.

–Images Courtesy of Catrin Welz-Stein–