Mourning

Mourning is the outward side of grief: the customs and rituals through which a family and community mark a death, such as receiving visitors or keeping a set period of observance. Its customs vary by faith and culture; in Islam, for example, relatives mourn for three days and a widow for four months and ten days.

Grief and mourning

Grief is what you feel about a death; mourning is what you do about it. Every family and faith mourns differently: the funeral, the wake, wearing black, the forty days, the year’s mind. Some people keep every custom they grew up with, and some shape their own. Neither grief nor mourning has a deadline.

Who sets the customs

No authority issues or sets mourning. It is kept by individuals, families and communities, according to their culture, their faith or their own wishes. That is why two families in the same street may mark a death in very different ways, and both be right.

Mourning in Islam

In the Sunni Islamic tradition, the general mourning period for relatives lasts three days. During that time the family receives visitors, keeps a period of devotion, and may wear simple clothing to mark the loss. A widow keeps a longer period, the iddah, of four lunar months and ten days. Grief is expected to be expressed with dignity: loud wailing, shrieking, beating the chest and tearing clothes are not permitted.

What the law attaches to

Mourning has no legal side. The law attaches money, time off and protections to bereavement, the fact that someone has died, and some of those do have time limits. A family in the first weeks of mourning may find it worth checking what they are entitled to, so that nothing is missed.