Key Points
- Grief rituals and traditions
- Grief counselling
- Colonisation & decolonisation of grief
While we all process and express grief in our own ways and our own time, when someone dies, most of us also perform prescribed cultural, religious or ethnic grief rituals along the way. These can be anything from attending funerals and wakes, to reciting private prayers and eating certain foods.
For some people, this can be all that is needed for a healthy bereavement, to be able to accept the loss and move forward. For others, however, these one-size-fits-all and sometimes ancient grief rituals just aren’t enough; and often nor are the common methods of treatment.
In this episode, we ask what to do when mourning traditions fail to satisfy us, how we can create our own personal grief rituals, and if the world-famous five stages of grief model is still relevant.
There’s always opportunities to pause and allow yourself some kind of meaningful connection to those that you’ve lostPaul Martin
Clinical psychologist Dr Paul M. Martin and grief counsellor Rosemary Wanganeen take us on a globe-trotting journey through time, from ancient Aboriginal Australia to the American Civil War, to explore the history of the modern Western funeral and the effects of colonisation on grieving Indigenous people and communities (spoiler alert: they’re not good).
We have to understand pre-1788 to understand post-1788 and why someone like me had no grieving ceremonies to access.Rosemary Wanganeen
Links
Grave Matters is an SBS Audio podcast about death, dying and the people helping us do both better. Find it in your podcast app such as the SBS Audio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or LiSTNR.
Hosts: Anthony Levin and Nadine J. Cohen
Producer: Jeremy Wilmot
Writers: Anthony Levin and Nadine J. Cohen
Art and design: Karina Aslikyan
SBS team: Max Gosford, Joel Supple, Caroline Gates
Guest: Paul Martin, Rosemary Wanganeen
If you'd like to speak to someone, you can reach a counsellor at Beyond Blue at any time, day or night, by calling 1300 22 4636 or visiting www.beyondblue.org.au. Also, Lifeline offers 24/7 crisis support on 13 11 14, and Embrace Multicultural Mental Health supports people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. In an emergency call 000.
Transcript
Content Warning: This episode mentions death, family violence, the stolen generation and other potentially difficult content. Please take care.
Nadine: Anthony Levin, hi.
Anthony: Nadine Jedi Cohen, hi.
Nadine: I've never seen Star Wars.
Anthony: I know this and that's why I chose that guess, but I'm wrong. OK, so OK, big question. How do you grieve when you lose someone, you love?
Nadine: Tears and vodka.
Anthony: Nice. For me, I'm more of an open-mouth, drooling-into-the-pillow kind of guy.
Nadine: I've always thought that about you.
Anthony: Yeah. Well, it's written all over me.
And over thousands of years, cultures and religions around the world have developed rituals to express and process our grief. And research has actually shown that performing rituals is crucial to accepting loss.
But what happens when the one-size-fits-all grief rituals are not in harmony with what we really need to mourn? In today's episode, we ask how can we make grief rituals more personal?
So Nadine, have you found prescriptive cultural grief rituals have helped you in your life?
Nadine: Yes, I have, but I think not always and not all of them.
Being of the Jewish faith culturally means that when someone dies, I do like to honour some prescriptive rituals from our culture and our community, not necessarily our religion, but that as well, and depending on their relationship with faith and with God.
But I definitely remember when my mother died - when someone Jewish dies, the whole community basically shows up at their house with lasagna or, you know, a pasta bake or anything that can be frozen. The whole community comes and they just sit there and it's beautiful but it can be incredibly overwhelming and too much.
Anthony: We should explain to our listeners that this is a part of what we call sitting shiva. Shiva means seven in Hebrew, and it refers to the seven days of mourning immediately after someone dies.
And so, as part of that process, people come to your home and sort of participate in the grief with you, really.
Nadine: Yeah, and it's lovely but I think, well, that was lovely when my dad died. When my mum died two years later, I couldn't do it again. I just said to my sister, like I just can't spend, you know, because it can be more than seven days. Because we were young and, you know, we lost both our parents, there was a huge element of pity for us. And I was just like, I just can't sit in the house and be pitied fo another month.
So we went to Hawaii.
Anthony: So I didn't actually know that about you, that you left the country promptly after and went to Hawaii.
Nadine: I don't advertise it. It doesn't sound great.
Anthony: No, but I understand. And it's the thing we're gonna talk about in today's episode.
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Anthony: Our first guest today is Dr Paul Martin. He's a clinical psychologist, and he also works as the assistant director of the Centre for Grief Recovery in Chicago.
He actually specialises in individuals who are struggling with loss and grief and is an adjunct faculty member at Northwestern University and the Chicago School of Professional Psychology.
He's also recently published a book called Personal Grief Rituals. Paul Martin, thank you very much for joining us on Grave Matters.
Paul: Well, you're so welcome. It's an absolute pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
Anthony: What was it that drew you to doing grief-related work? How did you come to be a specialist in grief?
Paul: To be honest, I got started doing this work because anytime I was learning about death and grief in my graduate school training, I found that I was very comfortable with it and very curious about it.
Anytime in my training when I was being assigned cases, I found that a lot of my colleagues in training were a bit squeamish about taking on cases of complicated grief. Or somebody had recently lost a loved one, and for whatever reason, I was eager to do it.
And so I then wrote a dissertation about something having to do with loss. And my first job out of graduate school was at a place called the Centre for Grief Recovery. I still work there and the majority of the clients I work with there are coming in for problems having to do with loss, grief and mourning.
Anthony: It's not, I imagine, easy work to do.
And you've actually written a book about it called Personal Grief Rituals. I wonder if we can explore that because it feels like we seem to know what a grief ritual is when we see it. But maybe you can tell us and tell our audience what are they and what, in fact, makes something a ritual.
Paul: Right, so, if you see a man dressed in black scattering ashes into a body of water, or if you just so happen to come upon a family of people hovering around a gravesite, having a meal and lighting incense, you don't need to be a trained psychologist to know that there's something ritualistic going on there, even if you wouldn't use that word, but when we have to define what a ritual is, we may be hard pressed for a clear definition.
There's no real consensus, but anybody who's done any research on this topic tends to highlight one of three things when defining what a ritual is. A ritual is a specific sequence of actions that are carried out in a predetermined order. That's one way to think about what a ritual is. More specifically, rituals are grounded in meaning about those specific sequences of events, and then lastly, I'd say that rituals tend to allow for some kind of symbolic expression of feelings and thoughts about that sequence of events that are being carried out.
Anthony: So I guess that's a useful launching point to talk about how we experience grief rituals and the different ways that people present and process grief.
When my mother died of terminal cancer some years ago, I received a book from my mother-in-law called Yoga for Grief Relief. And I have to say, doing yoga wasn't exactly the first thought that I had at the time. More, in a corner in a ball. But it did kind of serve as a useful reminder that you know, grief isn't just an emotional, spiritual, psychological experience, but it's also a very embodied one.
How do you think Western culture perceives the body of the bereaved person in grief work, thinking about some of the things that you just mentioned around rituals?
Paul: A lot of my bereaved clients feel restless, and it might take a while for them to realise that part of what is aching is that expressing emotions is incredibly helpful. That's an indispensable part of what it means to grieve and what it means to mourn.
But all too often, the bereaved find themselves sitting still and words fail to plumb the depths of what they're feeling. They intuitively sense that they want to do something to, as you said, embody their experience of grief, and that's one of the reasons why I wanted to write the book Personal Grief Rituals.
I found that my clients wanted to move. They wanted to go explore various locations. They wanted to do things with their hands and with their feet to give themselves a more full embodied expression of what it feels like to lose somebody - how they can move their body in a meaningful way, or how they can enact their grief in ways that words can't quite express.
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Nadine: So I've read the grief counsellor and author Lynn Prashant has said we don't get over our losses, we transform our relationship to them, which I personally find quite apt.
Does this resonate with you?
Paul: Well, it's a really interesting question because I think there are a lot of people who do manage to transform their losses and some people certainly struggle to do so. But more specifically, what I want to highlight is that a lot of individuals are going to find something that's healing. And what you're saying and what this thanatologist is saying….
Anthony: If you're wondering, a thanatologist is someone who studies death grief and loss.
Paul: …this idea that the loss might never get better per se, but it will transform into something that is easier over time.
One of the things I hope to highlight in my book Personal Grief Rituals is this idea that for some bereaved individuals, they do very much want to get beyond the loss as best as they can. It doesn't suffice for them to say that they just want to transform something about the experience. Some people, per their relationship to the deceased, per their unique psychological needs, really do benefit from doing whatever they can do to get beyond their experience of grief and put it behind them as best as they can.
That might be the minority of people but I think it's as good of an example as any of how grief rituals and personal grief rituals need to be catered to what the individual needs. Some people need to transform their experience. Some people need to stick with it for a long time, and some people need to be entirely done with their experience of grief as best as possible.
Anthony: That's really interesting and it it strikes me from your work that there is at the heart of grief and grieving this kind of push-pull tension. Is that a fair kind of observation to make about how we grieve?
Paul: I think so. It's a concept that I write about in my book, and I call it absence and presence, this notion that health is, in my opinion, defined by an ability to constantly oscillate between those two extremes so that the bereaved can acknowledge the blunt reality that a loved one has died, and subsequent to that they can move forward in their life, embracing everything that is new.
But that doesn't mean that they need to completely deprive themselves of what some scholars call continuing bonds. Even if you embrace reality and move forward with your life after a significant loss, there is still room for you to maintain some kind of personally meaningful ongoing connection to the deceased.
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Nadine: So I lost both my parents and my grandmother in a very short amount of time. I was quite young. I was, you know, an adult but I was in my early 20s. I was young and everything that my mum had touched, held, looked at was important to me and the same with my father and my grandmother. You know, objects become so important in that moment of grief.
And, you know, over time maybe your relationship to these objects changes and 10 years later, I was like, I can't stand the sight of these things anymore. Not all of them but a lot of them and my connection to them had kind of faded with time.
Anthony: And I did recently inherit one of those objects.
Nadine: You did. I gave him a mug of my mother’s that I finally decided was too ugly to keep. But Anthony loved it.
Anthony: I liked it.
Paul: Anthony loves it!
Anthony: And I drink tea from it.
Nadine: So someone else benefited.
Anthony: Which is a lovely connection, I have to say. Even though I never got to meet your mother, I thoroughly enjoy drinking tea knowing that it was her mug.
Nadine: Well, and speaking of tea, so the last appliance slash piece of furniture that I had up to a few years ago was my mother's kettle. You know, it was the little kettle that could. It would have been 20 years old and it was still going strong until it kind of wasn't.
And even though my mother wasn't a tea drinker, barely drank coffee, like barely used the kettle, I became so attached to that because it was, you know, it was this last vestige of her, and it was holding on and part of me thought maybe my mother’s trapped in the kettle.
And then giving it away, you know I bought a new kettle. I couldn't change it, and eventually I was like, OK, I want to get rid of it, it's sputtering, it's leaking all over the place. But then how to dispose of it? It was such an issue for me because I thought I can't just throw out this kettle that might be my Mum.
Why do you think people hang on to these objects?
Paul: So it's a really interesting anecdote in and of itself. And it's a really interesting question because it highlights something really nuanced about how one person can hold on to an inanimate object that is symbolic of something having to do with the relationship they had with the deceased.
And they can hold onto it for ultimately good and healthy reasons - it makes them happy to use that mug, there's something about the deceased’s personality that they're reminded of when they use the tea kettle or whatever inanimate object it is that they just so happened to have held on to.
And if that person continues to find something joyful or something beneficial about holding on to that inanimate object? They might have it for 40 years. And if they asked me, should I get rid of this? Have I been holding onto this too long? I would without hesitation say no, there's absolutely no reason why you should get rid of that.
Now, maybe the next client comes in and they bring up something similar, but their story is very different. They're saying that the tea kettle that they're holding onto or the mug that they're holding onto makes them upset every single time they see it. And frankly, when they use it to make a cup of tea, they're reminded of their mother's harsh criticism about the way that she didn't make tea correctly, or she wasn't as good of a cook.
Or somebody similar might talk about how every time that inanimate object is brought out, it ruins their day. It gives them an illusory sense that they're being haunted by the deceased. Well, the person I talked to an hour before would lead me to recommend holding on to the object. It's not only not doing you any harm, it actually seems to be benefiting you. But that next person would motivate me to start a conversation with them about how it would benefit them to actually get rid of that symbol.
And then we would begin the process of designing a personal grief ritual where I'd be talking with them about the most meaningful and symbolically expressive way to get rid of that inanimate object.
Nadine: I'm reminded of, it's kind of like a bereavement Marie Kondo. Picking up an object until you know - Doesn't it spark joy? If it if it sparks tears, get rid of it.
Anthony: Or not necessarily, though, right? I mean, I suppose it it might depend on the degree.
How many tears? How long do you cry for? I mean, in all seriousness, you know, if if the sight of the object makes you beside yourself with grief, maybe it's an unhealthy trigger. What do you think, Paul? I mean, I'm armchair psychologising over here. You're the expert.
Paul: Oh yeah, I mean there are some things about human behaviour that you don't need advanced training to understand. You're 100% correct.
So since we're talking about coffee and tea mugs, let's just stay with that. One person is going to hold onto the coffee mug, even though their grasp on reality is sound for the most part. I find this to be a really fascinating concept, referred to as linking objects. Some individuals will hold on to inanimate objects and they will relate to that item almost as if it is such a symbolic representation of the deceased that they aren't going to begin mourning the loss of a human relationship as long as they hold on to that symbol.
And so they're perfectly calm and collected until they misplace the object or until somebody accidentally damages it, and then all of a sudden their grief comes forward in full force, which invites us to consider the hypothesis that that object you held on to was preventing you from actually confronting the reality of your loss.
And like you're saying, Anthony, somebody else might realise that the pieces of clothing that they held on to that once belonged to their mother only make them upset every single time they see them, and they're crowding their closet and they are either upset when they see them or they're going to great lengths to avoid encountering them.
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Anthony (VO): In many Western cultures, grief work tends to be a private experience, which can feel pretty lonely. We asked Paul, are there cultures that create a sense of community around grief and permit ongoing engagement with the dead?
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Paul: Right, so there are a couple of cultures that come to mind. One of the first ones that I stumbled upon in my research many years ago was the Obon Festival, still practised in Japan. Which, if I'm correct, is translated as the Festival of Souls.
Part of what's so fascinating about this is that it's practised for approximately three days. Yeah, it's a three-day festival during the autumn equinox and the meaning behind this festival is that the worlds of the living and the dead briefly emerge during this time of the year.
And so it's a very unique and brief opportunity for the living to pause whatever it is they're doing and put aside three days to visit the grave site of their loved ones and invite their souls back into the world of the living. They quite literally walk from the grave site back to their homes.
There is some kind of fire that's lit at the entrance to the home to welcome the soul of their deceased loved ones back. Then there is often some altar that's decorated with pictures of the family and of the deceased.
The family will gather and eat foods that the deceased used to enjoy, and they'll even allow themselves to engage in these illusory conversations with the dead where they will inform them about how the family is doing, what's been going on in the world of the living while they've been gone.
And at the end of that three-day festival, the whole thing plays out in reverse. The living leave the home, walk the same path back to the grave site and then give themselves a little bit of time at the end of the Obon Festival to say goodbye to their loved ones and part ways, all with the understanding that they're going to do this again next year.
I find that to be the epitome of psychological health. Continue to live your life in the world of the living, whatever your cultural beliefs are. But that doesn't mean that you need to rob yourself of the opportunity to occasionally pause.
Whether it's during the Obon Festival during the autumn equinox or during the Mexican tradition of Dia de Los Muertos, there's always an opportunity to pause and allow yourself some kind of meaningful, ongoing connection to those that you've lost.
***
Nadine: One thing I'm really interested in is the hierarchies of public grief on a personal level. And what I mean by that is, if you're grieving a spouse, or perhaps a parent, and definitely a child, you're allowed to grieve pretty much for as long as you want. You know, in terms of community acceptance. No one's going to say to you, “get over it”, or not for a very long time.
Anthony: The statute of limitations is quite long.
Nadine: Yeah. Whereas the loss of a friend or the loss of someone like a colleague, or even a pet. We're not allowed to mourn pets, although that's becoming, I guess, more accepted.
I just want to know your thoughts on the hierarchies and the time frames allotted to certain kinds of grief.
Paul: Right, so it all sort of invites us to think about why is it that some individuals are ultimately failed by cultural grief rituals. Why is it that some individuals participate in what their community or what their culture provides for them and they leave the experience feeling that there's something about the ritual that was provided that didn't quite scratch what itches?
Now, I think what you're asking about is a really blatant example of how this happens, because some people will lose a pet, for example, and there is very little, if any, cultural and collective acknowledgement of such, beyond just a quick text message or somebody saying, hey, I heard your dog died, I'm really sorry to hear.
That person might feel like they need a personal grief ritual because they need to express something that is very personal and meaningful to them about why this loss is significant. And that will be all the more important if there is no collection of people who share that relationship with the pet and understand what that pet meant to them.
***
Nadine: So both Anthony and I grew up in Jewish communities where when someone dies, there are clear, established customs for burying the dead, and mourning rituals. And while they're all helpful on some levels, neither of us felt like we had much agency when burying people.
So we want to know from you does having some kind of direct contact with the body of the deceased help people in the morning process?
Paul: One of the more shocking moments in my initial research into other cultures and how they grieve and how they use rituals to mourn their dead was this discovery that so many cultures have rituals that involve direct contact with the body of the deceased. And as somebody who has spent their entire life in the United States, my immediate reaction to that was one of shock. But the more I looked into it, I started to realise that Western society is actually weird.
A lot of cultures bathe the bodies of their dead. They anoint them with oils. They dress them. They’re the ones that will place them on a funeral pyre and cremate them. They're the ones who get their hands dirty and bury their dead. And the more I started to look into this, I gotta say I found myself almost feeling a sense of jealousy or envy.
Various people around the world have been given cultural experiences that allow them to directly confront the reality of what has happened. They give them ample time to say goodbye, to express their emotions and to take part in meaningful gestures that represent the deceased’s transition away from their earthly body into whatever plane of existence is awaiting them.
I think a lot of people leave a funeral feeling like there was nothing about that that was personal. Everything about that was a little too clean. Basically, I was told where to go, when to show up, and people who didn't know my deceased loved one were the ones who had the most intimate connection with them at the end. They were the ones bathing them. They were the ones dressing them. They were the ones preparing them for whatever method of disposing of the body our culture dictates.
Anthony: We weren't always so disconnected from the body in our culture, and that is actually a fairly recent thing. Could you comment on that?
Paul: Ohh, I'd love to. It's fascinating and you can point to a very specific moment in history. The American Civil War.
The death rate in the Civil War was astronomical and it presented a problem to bereaved family members. How do we transport the bodies of their loved ones so that they can participate in some kind of traditional funeral activity without the body having decayed to the point that it's disturbing to those family members?
The answer was found in funeral directors sliding in and saying, well, we can use various chemicals to embalm the body, to preserve the body for you, so that even if it takes us eight days to transport the body of your loved one to your hometown, the body will still look like the person that you lost. You can still go through the motions of mourning the dead.
OK, that sounds innocent enough. And it sounds, you know, like it's filled with nothing but good intentions. But it began a process in which funeral directors started to interact with the body, and they started to build a business out of preserving the bodies for long transportation.
And then the Civil War ends and funeral directors don't want to let go of this new business that they created. So they started to peddle societal norms that basically say being in contact with the body is rather unbecoming. Frankly, you're being exposed to decay and disease in purification. Why don't you allow us to do this? You don't have to encounter the body of your dead loved ones anymore. We'll do it for you.
It began a long and steady process in which Americans in particular learned to fear the body. They learned to avoid any kind of direct confrontation with the body and with death. And then fast forward to modern times, it's no wonder that the bereaved often take part in cultural grief rituals that feel sanitised. Their hands are too clean.
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Nadine: So having an active role in the morning process is one thing, but what happens when there are certain cultural expectations around how you grieve?
Paul: In a lot of cultures, females are expected to embody the more emotional and vulnerable components of grief, almost to the point where it is compulsory for women to cry. Even if they aren't feeling sad. Unfortunately, that status quo still exists in a lot of places in the world.
Nadine: Just on that point about the women crying, what women are expected to do. A friend of mine lost her father, maybe four or five years ago. They're Serbian and the funeral was, you know, very different to a lot of things I'd experienced.
Like one of my favourite bits was everyone had to have a shot of Rakija, which is, you know, Serbian alcohol that they make themselves. But two things of interest were that the morning of the funeral, my Serbian friend, the daughter of the deceased, texted my group of friends and said, look, I'm expected to wail and throw myself on the coffin. She was like, if I don't do that, my mother will never hear the end of what an ungrateful daughter I am. So just a heads up, that's what will be happening.
And then later that day again, there was a lunch put on and it was a more extravagant lunch than I'd kind of been to at a wake or after a funeral. And again, she was like, if we don't put on the best spread ever, the community will talk. And it was a wonderful funeral and it was a beautiful time, but it was really interesting, relating that to what you said about performative grief.
Paul: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Cultural grief rituals do an enormous amount of good for the bereaved but I've come to believe that there are inevitably individuals that are participating in those compulsory shows of grief like you're talking about, that people leave the ritual feeling like, I was made to perform this sad expression of grief when in actuality I'm feeling something totally different. That's an example of when cultural grief rituals can unfortunately fail to meet the individual’s unique psychological needs.
Because one of those women may feel like they were given the opportunity to embody exactly what they were feeling, they were feeling sorrowful and despairing and chaotic, and then their culture says, you know, you should do, you should throw yourself on the grave and wail loudly to convey your distress. Well great, that gave them exactly what they needed.
But another person might do that and feel that it's very performative and disingenuous. That is very often the kind of person I find myself sitting with and having a conversation with them about what is it that you actually feel about this loss and how can you and I work to create some expression of what this loss actually feels like to you?
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Nadine (VO): Our next guest was forcibly removed from her culture and left without ways to process her loss. Rosemary Wanganeen is a proud South Australian Aboriginal woman with ancestral links to the Kaurna and Wirangu people.
After years of personal hardship, Rosemary developed a loss and grief model that speaks directly to the impact of colonisation on Aboriginal people. She calls the model Griefology, and she uses it in her practise as a clinical loss and grief counsellor, a facilitator and a public speaker.
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Anthony: Hi, Rosemary, welcome to Grave Matters. Thanks for joining us on the show.
Rosemary: Thank you for having me.
Anthony: I wonder if we can go back to your early childhood, Rosemary. You grew up on the mission at Point Pearce in South Australia, is that right?
Rosemary: That's right, yes.
Anthony: And how much did you know about your Aboriginal heritage growing up?
Rosemary: Probably nothing for the first five years of my life on Point Pierce.
You know, I've got no memories of hearing Mum, Dad, grandparents, aunties or uncles speaking language or allowed to do ceremonies because by the time even my grandmother, when she was born, language was stopped and not allowed to be spoken. Cultural practices weren't allowed to be practiced. So by the time I come along I was very westernised.
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Anthony (VO): Back in the '90s, when Rosemary first began learning about grief, she came across the famous Western model called The Five Stages of Grieving. You've probably heard of them - denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. They were pioneered by American psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler Ross in 1969 to explain the experience of dying.
But for Rosemary, there was something missing.
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Rosemary: When I was doing my research, I called it my intuitive research. So I spent five years healing and grieving for myself. What had happened to me in the stolen generation? What happened to my parents, my family? And I realised that loss and grief was something that I didn’t know anything about until I was going through it, and that began in 1987.
I came out the other end in 1992 and then it was in ‘94 that a pamphlet came through the post around loss and grief from Bereavement Educational Services. So I went off and did the training with them, very basic training. It wasn't an academic or a qualification, it was just learning about this new model of loss and grief that I'd never heard about.
So when I studied that and learned about that, I then merged what I'd gone through in the first five years of my intuitive research with that study from Bereavement Educational Services and then came up with a model called the Seven Phases to Integrating Loss and Grief. So it was integrating what happened to me, which then empowered me to study more about loss and grief.
You know it, it was a great model for its time, but now I come into looking at developing a new model called Griefology because Kubler Ross didn't know - and with the utmost respect - how to incorporate the relationship between ancestral losses and suppressed, unresolved grief and how it's going to compound and complicate their contemporary descendants’ losses and unresolved grief, so that was that's what Griefology is.
Anthony: Can you talk about the historical perspective a little bit?
Rosemary: Yes, so pre-1788, traditional Aboriginal peoples like my ancestors, they had very sacred, structured grieving ceremonies that were able to maintain a deeply spiritual connection to their humanity, to Mother Earth, to Dreaming Totems, to nature because their body kept evolving spiritually when they had that connection. For 60,000+ years.
Then 1788 arrives with all this violence. And my model, Griefology, doesn't shame, blame, demonise or vilify but we have to understand, pre-1788 to understand post-1788 and why somebody like me had no grieving ceremonies to access because it was ceased.
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Anthony: So I want to delve further into why you felt so strongly compelled to develop this model, Griefology.
Rosemary: We need to go back to stolen generation. So I became a part of the stolen generation because Mum had died very suddenly and left eight children. I was nine years old. I experienced every form of violations, and so, you know, between nine and 16, there was violations happening to me as a stolen generation kid.
When I came out of stolen generation, I had nowhere to go to heal or grieve for that, for what had happened to me. And so what I had to do as a child and as an adolescent, all those experiences had to stay trapped inside of me and I just had to bury them.
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Nadine (VO): Unable to break free from a pattern of family violence, Rosemary found herself in an abusive marriage fueled by alcohol. After a volatile incident, she was badly assaulted by her then-husband.
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Rosemary: I called the police and the police took me to the women’s shelter and they were just amazing and really nurtured me through this process. And there was no inkling, nothing that was going to tell me that something was waiting for me in the women's shelter.
I end up having this dream that came from nowhere. Three o’clock in the morning I wake up in tears and I can't recall any details about the the dream. All I know and remember is I was in tears. Intuitively I got out of bed and went to the mirror and said to myself, how the hell did you end up busted up yet again?
So when I’m standing in front of the mirror, this old, ancient grandmother's face came over mine. And she said you gotta find faith and trust in yourself. And I had no idea that I didn't have any faith or trust in myself. I just assumed that I did because, you know, I was doing stuff with my life.
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Nadine: Rosemary credits this experience as the catalyst for her to develop her own model of healing and grieving. One better suited, she says, to the 21st Century and.
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Rosemary: What was stunning about that experience - I recall, I wasn't freaked out about it. I didn't deny it. I didn't question it. I didn't diminish it. Because what was interesting about that old grandmother coming to me in that mirror - I'd never ever had any traditional connection to ancestors. And so I never ever expected anything so powerful like that would ever happen to me. I thought I would have had to have been raised in a traditional setting, being shown how to connect and maintain sustained connection to ancestors. I thought I had to have all of that.
But here I'm acting on my instincts, Anthony, and on reflection, if that can happen to me, not just as an Aboriginal person but as a human, why can't it happen to other human beings?
Anthony: Yes. I mean really, it's a remarkable and mystical experience that you had. How long was your ancient grandmother a presence in your life after that vision?
Rosemary: Ohh gosh, she's never left me. Well, I don't know how this is gonna sound but it’s almost when I need to, when I'm confused, not sure what to do, she comes to me and I talk and ask her and then she comes to me and she downloads, if I could put it that way.
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Nadine (VO): In the period between 1987 and 1991, Rosemary experienced a catharsis, emptying all the grief energy out of her body. By 1992, she had discovered her spirituality and was connecting with other ancestors, namely her Dreaming Totem, Grandfather Crow.
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Rosemary: Grandfather Crow was my real grandfather. Cause I asked, who are you? What? What? What are you? What are you about? And he told me I'm your grandfather, your mother's father, who she never ever met because he died when she was a little girl. And so my intuitive intelligence was getting more and more powerful. And it's like a Telstra Tower, to receive information, you know? But we've all got that, as humans. We've all got this intuitive intelligence that’s an antenna.
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Anthony (VO): Rosemary told us that during this time of her life, she was doing various grieving activities, which helped her to process everything she was going through.
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Rosemary: There's only five and they are so simple. Between 1987 and the end of 1992, I didn't know that I was doing it intuitively, but when I did my training with Bereavement Educational Services, their three was: talk grief through - so that's, you know, talking to professionals; writing grief through - so you can write to your loved ones who have passed; and third, physically use your body to work off the grief energy out of the physical body.
So I was doing all of those three intuitively before I did the training, and then after the training I thought hmm, there seems to be two more for me that I experienced that Bereavement Educational Services didn't include. They didn't know how to include them cause it wasn't a part of their experience. So I include reading books. So, books fell off the shelf for me and then the the fifth one is consciously reconnecting to ancestors.
***
Nadine: What would be a good death for you, Rosemary?
Rosemary: Dying in my sleep.
Nadine: Yup, that’s the most popular!
Anthony: That’s a common answer!
Nadine: It’s the perfect answer; it's how we all want to go.
***
Nadine: Well, thank you so much Rosemary. We really appreciate it. We really enjoyed talking with you.
Rosemary: It's an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you putting Griefology out there into the world.
***
Nadine: So Lev Dog, what were your thoughts?
Anthony: Well, one part of our conversation with Paul that really resonated with me was this idea that, you know, typical Western funeral experience. It's too clean and you don't really get contact with the body. And I just, that's how I felt even in our culture.
And I'm kind of kind of wanted that. And I think it plays a really important role in helping us to integrate that knowledge that the person has gone. One aspect of my mother's funeral that I found wasn't like that was, in fact, when one of the staff at the cemetery handed me the spade and I had the privilege of putting or placing the first pile of dirt on my mother's coffin.
Nadine: Just to jump in there, that's a ritual that a lot of people don't necessarily know that we do at a Jewish funeral, which is at the grave site, at the end of the service, the family is invited to shovel dirt over the coffin in the grave and then whoever else is there is invited to do the same if they so choose.
Anthony: That's right. And it was the only moment in the ritual where I actually felt like there was a very visceral connection between me, my mother's body, and the broader structure of the experience that shovelling the dirt and listening to the sound it made as it clumped onto the coffin. It's something I will never forget and also as much as it caused an enormous outpouring of sadness, was also something that I'm strangely grateful for.
And so, Nadine, what were your takeaways from Rosemary or from Paul?
Nadine: Rosemary broke my heart. I think about, you know, I lost my mum at 24, and that's relatively young. But I was an adult. And Rosemary was nine and then was ripped from everything she knew. And again, I think about how you and I grew up so deeply connected with our culture, forsake it as both of us have in certain ways.
But yeah, my hear just really breaks for that little girl and her siblings and what happened to them. It's amazing that she's come through it as much as she has.
Anthony: And demonstrated real strength in being able to forge this path and develop this amazing model.
Nadine: Yeah, she's she's incredible.
***
Anthony: So thanks again to Dr Paul Martin and Rosemary Wanganeen. Our next episode is about an eco friendly method of body disposal. We talk to entrepreneur Micah Truman about how human composting is taking the world by soil.
Micah: 65% of people surveyed in the United States said they would prefer a green or would consider a green burial option. That's quite remarkable given that we don't even know what a green burial option is. People want it so bad that they're actually voting for a figment of their imagination.
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If this episode has raised issues for you and you'd like to seek mental health support, you can contact Beyond Blue on 1300 224 636 or visit beyondblue.org.au.
Also, Embrace Multicultural Mental Health supports people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Visit embracementalhealth.org.au for 24/7.
For crisis support, call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or in an emergency, please call 000.
Grave Matters is an SBS podcast, written and hosted by Anthony Levin and Nadine J. Cohen and produced by Jeremy Wilmot. The SBS team is Caroline Gates, Joel Supple and Max Gosford. If you'd like to get in touch, e-mail audio@sbs.com.au.
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