A Little Mourning Is Enough

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

of the editorial page staff

published by the StarTribune

July 29, 1961

   WHEN the time comes for me to retreat to the far shore, I hope the trip occasions a minimum of lamentation, tears and nose blowing.  I wouldn't care to have them dance around the bier but neither do I want my friends and relatives to feel any obligation to wear long faces or to mourn more than briefly.

   Not that I'm afflicted with premonitions that death is plucking at my sleeve.  I expect to live longer than I should and to tail off into years of senility.  But after the sojourn on earth is finished, I'm certain that gaudy and dramatic obsequies do the departed no more good than do wails from the mourners.

   THERE ARE those, however, who mourn with dedicated and lasting earnestness and who, refusing to respond to the healing balm of time, grow less and less personable and more and more difficult to be around.

   She outlived him a quarter of a century, but my maternal grandmother never got over her husband's death.  She clung to grief as avidly as a shipwrecked sailor clings to a raft and you'd have thought that she and grandpa never were out of each other's sight from their wedding day until his demise.  She was obsessed with the sentimental silliness that she wouldn't be true to her husband, regardless of his time in the cemetery, if she ever again let herself be gay or make eyes at another man.   

   ANYONE in this situation has a right to react as he or she pleases, perhaps, and if grandma elected to wear her widowhood in melancholy martyrdom, complete with sighs audible for half a block, she must have assumed that this was her business.

   Had she lived alone it would have been, despite the bad break she was giving herself.  But she gave an even worse break to those in residence with her and her dolorous, funereal manner frequently caused my father to blow his cork.  She lived until about 80 and under the circumstances lived too long.

   WE REACT more sensibly to death now, but even today there are those like grandma who refuse to stop crying, who retreat into a shell, won't be pulled out, and then wonder why their friends are falling away.  Remarriage?  They reject it as tantamount to infidelity and remain resolute in their determination to remain forever true, death notwithstanding.

   As I see it, remarriage is a tribute to the one who's gone, proof positive that the survivor enjoyed the arrangement so much that he or she didn't want to continue on alone.

   I HAVE a couple of in-laws I'm proud of.  Both lost their spouses within the year and I feared that each would go into permanent decline.  Neither did.  Both are keeping busy, interested and alive.  The sister-in-law never turns down a social engagement.  The brother-in-law has the neighbors in for coffee at the slightest provocation and loves to have folks in for dinner, prepared by him.  He fancies himself as quite a chef--and he is.

   Neither of these persons is having it easy.  To say that they are happy living alone would be ridiculous.  Both confess to loneliness and dark hours.  But life is far more rewarding than it would be if they were burdened by the fixation that the final curtain had dropped, that they had nothing to live for and that it somehow wouldn't be fitting to do anything but cling to the past.

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