Tending to Grief - Learning from our Ancestors

I step into an ancient Neolithic tomb on private farmland in the Irish countryside. The cold stones were shaped more than 5,000 years ago by people who carried their dead here to be honored. I think of the care it took to align the stones and carve intricate geometric patterns with rudimentary tools, no wheel, no iron, just human will and devotion. Imagine the labor of moving these great stones into place, setting them atop high hills scattered across the island.

Beside these stones, I feel a living thread to the ancestors of this land, their distinct and shared stories, their nights by the fire, smoke in their lungs, and their memories of loved ones felt deep in their hearts. They lived close to every part of life’s cycle, including death.

Today, most of us are kept at a distance. The death we witness is often sanitized, and our grief is rarely given permission to cry its full lament to the elements the way it once did. Instead, we bury it in the body's terrain, in our bones, muscles, and tissue.

In Irish tradition, village keeners were once known to wail and sing at funerals, sounding grief so the bereaved could honor their own. This communal tending mattered; it held families through the threshold.

We’ve lost so much in our convenience. We grieve alone, though that was never the intention.

So here, in this passage tomb, I remember the ancestors. May we learn from the old ways as we move through our life passages. May it be with grace, with presence, and together.