Giving a Voice to Sorrow: Personal Responses to Death and Mourning (review)

Giving a Voice to Sorrow is a collection of narratives that document personal responses to death and how individuals use the coping strategies of story, ritual, and material art to express anguish at the loss of a loved one. Zeitlin and Harlow explain that we are living in a time when no particular religion is dominant. The traditional guidelines that showed us how to face death and grieve are no longer effective and need to be replaced with a flexibility that will allow individuals to mourn.

Chapter 2, "Jesse's Story," focuses on Jesse Shantz, a nineteen-year-old cancer patient from Wellfleet, Cape Cod. Jesse's friends narrated stories concerning his appearance, experiences, relationships, and death; after his death, they expressed their loss through spontaneous creative acts. For example, one individual created "The Cahuna," "a fiery yellow sun carved from a locust tree" (p. 39) that was planted on the shore for everyone to see. Another collected stones on the beach, wrote Jesse's name on them, and gave them to neighbors, who then also began gathering and inscribing "Jesse stones" and offering them as gifts. These instances of creativity satisfied the community's need to mourn a youth who exemplified the virtues and future of the group.

The third chapter, "Storytelling," describes the process by which stories capture the essence of an individual's life. Memories coalesce into coherent narratives in a variety of informal settings, created by people who knew the deceased or observed them at the moment of death. The stories treat such topics as reflections on death, the last act of the deceased, the inability to grieve, dreams of loss, and messages sent to the living as signs of communication beyond death.

Next, "Ritual and Ceremony" deals with the formalized responses individuals exhibit when they mourn the death of loved ones or face their own impending deaths. Some rituals are sanctioned, whereas others are created by survivors. Zeitlin and Harlow show how survivors may modify known traditions, such as the lighting of candles on Friday night for the Jewish Sabbath, to include a family member's death. Private rituals of grief, however, often occur when there is no public acknowledgment of the death or the relationship between the deceased and the survivor (for example, when the deceased is a stillborn child, a married lover, or a homosexual whose family does not recognize a partner's existence). There are also cases when people ritualistically design their own deaths, like the six-year-old child with leukemia, who arranged how she would die in her mother's lap, and an elderly Jew, who passed away during his ninety-fifth birthday party at a senior center, but not before exacting a promise from his friends to observe his birth date for the next five years so he could reach his goal of becoming 100 years old.

The final chapter, "Commemorative Art," discusses material objects created to memorialize the dead. A textile artist explains how she decorated pillows with images from photographs selected by survivors so that at night before sleeping they could be physically close to the deceased. In a similar vein, a South Bronx graffiti crew leader narrates how he developed a business of painting memorial walls in neighborhoods for community members who had died natural or unnatural deaths. In these instances, there is collaboration between the survivor, who supplies the materials/memories of the deceased, and the artist who transforms them into commemorative art.

Zeitlin and Harlow's integration of interviews, analyses, and commentary accurately illustrates how individuals cope with death. They apply the psychological concepts of life review, ego integrity, and stages of death acceptance, along with the work of folklorists Erika Brady and Kelly Taylor on personal mourning and storytelling wakes, to explicate both sanctioned and private rituals of grief. Zeitlin and Harlow have refined a folkloristic approach to death and bereavement within an urbanized society. Their work reveals that...