After we have followed an artifact that has already passed out of time to its last rest, or taken a final farewell to something that needs to be abandoned, it is important to be allowed time to grieve. And the importance of grief for moving forward in life cannot be underestimated.
But it is also important to remember how the concepts of grief and care go together. In our contemporary consumer society, what we call the outside world has been reduced to something we are expected to consume, rather than care and care. This has created a belief that everything can be replaced, and when something suddenly doesn’t exist anymore, we risk suffering a strong sense of loss.
Taking a ceremonial farewell means a lot in such a situation. Mainly because the irreversible loss is made tangible and possible to speak of. This, in turn, creates room for mourning, and at the far end of the room of grief, a door opens to possibilities that were previously inaccessible.
We all have the ability to grieve and move forward as social beings and world builders. This gives us enormous opportunities, but also a responsibility to take good care of our creations. If we want to avoid our common project slipping through our fingers and becoming something that risks threatening ourselves and other living beings, we must nurture and cultivate it. Constantly and carefully.
As Sweden’s first farewell agency, we have chosen to call ourselves Ars Moriendi, “the art of dying” in Latin. And elsewhere on the website we have written that it is “high time that we as a society begin to practice the art of dying”.
Understanding species extinction and mourning all the natural values and cultures that have been lost due to modern exploitation is necessary, but not enough. To begin practicing the art of dying as a society means that we must now take on the much greater challenge of declaring dead, saying goodbye to, and grieving for the parts of our society, thinking, and culture that have caused and continue to cause the climate and environmental catastrophe we find ourselves in, among other things. And that it’s urgent hardly needs to be pointed out.
The grief and existential anguish that such a declaration of death entails cannot be overstated. Therefore, our common loss needs to be treated with care and concern. Engaged and reverent, we need to ensure that we take equally dignified and final farewells to, for example, the excesses of consumer culture, but also – and perhaps above all – to dysfunctional and in some cases downright destructive social structures, systems, and institutions. On a personal level, we may need to bid farewell to everything from materialistic thinking to convenience and risk aversion. The list can be made very long.
Experiencing these final farewells and all the grief that will come with them will be our society’s first important step towards collectively learning the difficult art of dying.
