I’ve mentioned in a previous Guyside that my mother died in August. And yesterday, my brother and I were informed that her house — our house — had sold. For me, it’s been an odd experience. It’s a home my grandfather built in the ‘teens and twenties in a small coal-mining town. My mom and her siblings grew up in that house; after getting married, my dad moved in, and my two brothers and I grew up there. Soon, I’ll be flying home (an ironic phrase, now) to do the final paperwork and hand off the house to its new owner.
It’s one more step along the road to a different phase of life; the phase when your parents are gone. I suppose I was lucky to have had a dad until the age of 46 and a mom until 48. There are many people who don’t have that long with their parents. But I’ve been thinking about the power of ritual in the wake of this big stuff happening.
For a long time, I kept a bottle of good single-malt Scotch around that got opened once per year, on my birthday. I’d pour myself a dram (it didn’t last as long as you might think; I have a heavy elbow) and think about the year past and the year to come, and then I’d scribble a little note on the box, noting where I was, who was around at the time, and the circumstances of that particular drink. It was a lovely ritual. And we need those things.
I host a fundraising concert in my city every year. And if you found me backstage before the show begins, you’ll find me… jumping up and down in my tuxedo. Why do I do that? I don’t know where it started. But in my mind, it’s a way to build up the energy that I want to have when I go out onstage. If I didn’t do it? I think I’d still be able to fulfil my role, but it makes me feel better to do it.
And I’m far from the only one. A Scientific American article points to some athletes who take rituals into the realm of superstition. According to the article, baseball player Wade Boggs woke up “woke up at the same time each day, ate chicken before each game, took exactly 117 ground balls in practice, took batting practice at 5:17, and ran sprints at 7:17. (Boggs also wrote the Hebrew word Chai (“living”) in the dirt before each at bat. Boggs was not Jewish.)”
And mourning brings on all sorts of ritual acts. From Hindus cutting their hair to Jewish men growing beards, from silence to loud wailing, we have rituals that in some cases are part of a religious belief, sometimes are cultural, and sometimes all our own. And the Harvard Business School behavioural scientists who wrote in Scientific American about ritual describe an experiment that suggests that a ritual (even one that’s made up on the spot) can mitigate grief.
The power of the ritual, to my mind, isn’t in channelling some external force. It’s in your mind. Part of it is just designating time, space, and energy to the event related to the ritual. I think when we do that, we give our emotions a green light to be expressed. And the introspection that a ritual almost demands is always a good thing.
I’m not a religious man, so I won’t be praying as I walk through the family home for the last time. But I’ll be thinking of the many good and bad things that made up my life there, as well as my the lives of my parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. I’ll try to fix them in my memory, and I’ll thank the house for being there for me for so long, and I’ll hope that the next family to live there finds it a good home. I don’t think the house will be listening and I don’t expect a response. But I want to do it nonetheless.
Do you have rituals that provide meaning in your life? Tell me about them in the comments.
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