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A Time to Mourn

In days past, times of mourning when a loved one passed on was taken seriously.    Widows were expected to wear black (sometimes for four years) and not have any social contacts.  Men wore black coats and black arm bands.  Remember how shocked everyone was in Gone With the Wind when Miss Scarlett danced with Rhett Butler when she was supposed to be in mourning?



This photo is from Wikipedia.  It shows Queen Victoria with the five surviving children of her daughter, Princess Alice of the United Kingdom, dressed in mourning clothing for their mother and their sister Princess Marie in early 1879.  We can be assured that those children behaved themselves dressed like that.

Mourning rituals have changed in my lifetime.  It seems that today, no one has time to mourn.  We have to get back to our schedules and jobs and routines without a proper mourning period.  I'm not thinking we should go back to the old ways, but we do need to take time to heal after we have suffered a loss.  When we break our physical bodies, we know that healing takes time, and that is true for our emotional beings as well.  There is a time to mourn.

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