Words that Never Leave You: “We cry and mourn for forty days. And then on the forty-first day, the sun rises again.”
Part Forty-Five in an ongoing series from Hollie's book "Words That Never Leave You: Fifty Pearls of Wisdom and Reflection from Survivors Across the World."
A Pashtun Afghan friend, Abdul, once sat with me on the concrete floor of his wooden home in Kandahar after the passing of his beloved grandmother. It pained me to see an Afghan man, so gentle in his demeanor, with a voice that resembled a sing-song bird. Abdul unfolded his hands and explained his tribe’s mourning ritual each time a loved one passed.
“We cry and mourn for forty days,” he said softly. “And then on the forty-first day, the sun rises again.”
For those forty days, the family avoids social gatherings and only wears black. Elders come and go from the humble living room, expressing their grief, and the women from the neighborhood pass by with bags of sugar and wheat as a token of their condolences. The Afghan family chants and wails, their sobs echoing down the lonely dirt path outside. For forty days, life stops.
But then, the time to grieve comes to a definitive end. And life goes on. Life must go on. The sense of structure has given me a great sense of acceptance and healing in my own approach to death – of feeling all the things we must feel, all the while knowing that the dark curtain on our lives inevitably must lift again.
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