Maybe they did it deliberately. There may have been religious teachings about heaven, hell, reincarnation, resurrection, spirits, ancestors, or what happens to the soul after the body dies. Maybe there were funerals where adults carefully explained what was happening, or maybe death was something the adults avoided discussing as much as possible.
A lot of the teaching wasn’t deliberate at all.
We watched what happened when someone died. We noticed whether children were included or sent somewhere else. We learned whether people cried openly or disappeared into bathrooms to do it privately. We heard adults say someone had “passed away,” “gone home,” “crossed over,” “gone to heaven,” “joined the ancestors,” or simply “died.” We noticed whether the dead person’s name kept being spoken afterward or gradually vanished from conversation.
Before we were old enough to examine any of it, we were learning the rules.
Death is frightening. Death is peaceful. Death is sacred. Death is punishment. Death is natural. Death is unfair. The dead are gone. The dead are watching. Grief should be private. Grief should be public. Funerals should be solemn. Funerals should be celebrations. You shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. You should tell the truth about the dead. You should let go. You should never forget.
Then eventually we’re old enough to discover that not only do people disagree about virtually all of these things, most of us have been carrying assumptions we didn’t consciously choose.
I think that’s worth examining.
Not because we need to emerge with one correct philosophy of death by the end of October. For the love of all things holy, unholy, and everything in between, we do not need to turn mortality into another research project with a final exam. I’m interested in something much simpler: noticing which of our beliefs about death and grief are actually ours.
We Learn How to Grieve by Watching Other People
Families have cultures just as surely as countries and communities do. Some families talk about absolutely everything. Others can maintain a forty-year feud without anyone ever explaining what started it. Grief enters those existing cultures rather than arriving in some emotionally neutral environment.
If a family already values stoicism, grief may be treated as something to manage privately. If emotional expression is normal, mourning may be loud and communal. If the family has strong religious beliefs, death may immediately be interpreted through those beliefs. If nobody knows how to talk about uncomfortable feelings, everyone may become very interested in casseroles.
None of those patterns necessarily tells us what an individual person needs.
They tell us what that group learned to do.
That’s an important distinction because inherited grief practices can feel like universal rules when they’re really cultural habits. Someone who needs to talk may grow up believing they’re grieving incorrectly because their family handles pain silently. Someone who needs privacy may feel pressured to perform emotion because everyone around them expects visible mourning. A person whose beliefs have changed may discover that the religious language they grew up with no longer comforts them, even though everybody else assumes it should.
Sometimes the hardest part isn’t the grief itself. It’s the feeling that we’re failing to grieve the way we’re supposed to.
I don’t think there is one way we’re supposed to.
Our Language Carries Beliefs We May Not Share
The language around death fascinates me because it reveals so much about what a culture is trying to do with something difficult to comprehend.
We have created an impressive number of ways to avoid saying that somebody died.
Some of that language is beautiful. Some of it expresses genuine spiritual belief. Some of it exists because saying the word dead feels too harsh when the loss is fresh. There is nothing inherently wrong with euphemism when it serves the person using it.
But language can also quietly import assumptions.
Saying someone is “in a better place” assumes something about where they are now and, sometimes unintentionally, something about the life they left. Saying “everything happens for a reason” assumes a universe organized around meaningful causation. Saying “God needed another angel” introduces an entire theology into someone else’s grief. Saying “at least they’re no longer suffering” may be true and still be the last thing a grieving person needs to hear.
Even the secular language of grief carries assumptions. “Moving on” suggests departure. “Closure” suggests something can be completed. “Getting back to normal” assumes there is a previous normal waiting to be restored.
I’ve become much more interested in moving forward, because forward has room for luggage.
The words we use aren’t trivial. They shape the story we’re telling ourselves about what grief is supposed to accomplish.
Spiritual Belief Does Not Eliminate Uncertainty
I have my own spiritual beliefs about death. Being a witch does, in fact, come with some opinions about things.
It doesn’t come with laboratory results.
I think there’s a temptation in spiritual communities to speak about death with more certainty than any of us can actually justify. Different religions and spiritual traditions have developed beautiful, complex understandings of death, afterlife, rebirth, ancestors, spirits, and the continuation—or noncontinuation—of consciousness. Those beliefs can provide profound comfort and meaning.
They are still beliefs.
That distinction doesn’t make them less important to me. It makes me more careful about where I place them.
I can believe something deeply without insisting that another person must understand death through the same framework. I can hold spiritual possibilities without pretending I have personally audited the afterlife and brought back a flowchart.
There is room in spirituality for I don’t know.
In fact, I think “I don’t know” can be an incredibly sacred answer.
I don’t know exactly what happens after death. I have beliefs. I have experiences I interpret through those beliefs. I have traditions and practices that help me relate to death. I also have unanswered questions.
Those things are not mutually exclusive.
We Also Inherit Fear
Not everything we inherit about death comes wrapped in theology or ritual. Sometimes what gets passed down is fear.
Fear of talking about death because talking about it might somehow invite it.
Fear of wills, advance directives, funeral planning, or end-of-life conversations because preparing feels too much like giving up.
Fear of saying a dead person’s name because it will upset somebody.
Fear of not saying their name because that might mean they’re being forgotten.
Fear of enjoying life after loss because happiness feels disloyal.
Fear of grieving for “too long.”
Fear of grieving for what seems like not long enough.
Fear of discovering that our response to a death is relief.
That last one can be especially complicated when the relationship was difficult or when someone had been suffering for a long time. Human emotional responses do not always organize themselves into socially acceptable categories. Love can exist beside anger. Grief can exist beside relief. Sadness can coexist with the knowledge that a boundary is no longer necessary. We can miss someone and still be honest about the ways they hurt us.
None of that fits neatly into the stories we’re usually given about mourning.
Real relationships rarely do.
Death Does Not Make a Person Simpler
One of the stories I especially want to question is the idea that death requires us to flatten somebody into the nicest possible version of themselves.
I understand where the instinct comes from. Funerals aren’t generally the place to present a comprehensive performance review. Grieving people often want to concentrate on the things they loved.
But remembering someone honestly is different from attacking them.
People remain complicated in memory because they were complicated while they were alive. Someone can have been generous and infuriating, loving and difficult, brilliant and deeply flawed. A person may have given us beautiful things while also leaving wounds we’re still figuring out.
Death doesn’t resolve those contradictions. Sometimes it makes them harder because the relationship can no longer change.
When we insist that the dead must only be spoken about positively, we can accidentally isolate people whose grief contains anger, confusion, trauma, or relief. Suddenly they’re not only grieving; they’re also policing their own memories to make sure the dead person fits the approved narrative.
I don’t think remembrance requires that.
I’d rather remember whole human beings.
Some Stories Deserve to Change
This is the part that interests me most: inherited stories are not necessarily permanent stories.
We can appreciate the ways previous generations approached death while recognizing that some of those approaches don’t serve us. We can keep rituals that bring comfort and change the ones that don’t. We can learn about traditions without assuming every tradition belongs in our own practice. We can inherit religious language and decide we no longer believe it, or rediscover a spiritual practice that previous generations abandoned.
We can also create new rituals because the old ones don’t fit the lives we’re living.
That’s not disrespecting the dead. It’s what living cultures do.
Every tradition we inherited was once something somebody was doing in the present. Someone made the food for the first time. Someone chose the song. Someone decided where people would gather, what would be said, what would be worn, what objects would be kept, and how the dead would be remembered.
We are allowed to participate in that process.
Maybe your remembrance includes an altar. Maybe it’s visiting a cemetery. Maybe it’s cooking someone’s recipe, wearing their jewelry, telling their stories, donating to something they cared about, playing their music, or keeping the ridiculous object nobody else understands.
Maybe it’s none of those things.
The ritual isn’t sacred because somebody else approves of it. It’s sacred because of the relationship between the practice and the meaning we give it.
We Get to Examine the Story
That’s what I keep returning to this week.
We inherit more than stories about the people who died. We inherit stories about death itself: what it means, what we’re supposed to believe about it, how we’re supposed to respond to it, and what grief is supposed to look like afterward.
Some of those stories may fit us beautifully.
Some may need alteration.
Some may have been useful to the people who gave them to us but make no sense in our lives.
Some may have hurt people for generations simply because nobody realized they were allowed to question them.
We don’t have to throw away everything we inherited in order to examine it. We also don’t have to preserve everything in order to honor where it came from.
We can ask where a belief originated. We can learn its cultural or religious context. We can notice whether it comforts us or frightens us, whether it creates room for grief or tries to control it. We can decide whether it’s something we actually believe or simply something we’ve heard so many times that it started sounding like truth.
And after all that examination, we’re still allowed to say, “I don’t know.”
Death is one of the oldest mysteries human beings have tried to understand. I’m suspicious of anyone who claims they’ve wrapped the whole thing up neatly.
Maybe part of honoring the dead is allowing ourselves to remain curious about death.
Maybe part of honoring our ancestors is recognizing that they were trying to understand the same enormous mystery with the knowledge, language, traditions, and beliefs available to them.
Now it’s our turn.
We inherit their stories.
We listen to them.
We learn where they came from.
And then we decide which stories still belong to us. 🔮💜