How We Said Goodbye

So, you’ve lost the person you loved, but you’ve also lost the way to send them on. You lost the farewell. — Angela Sumegi

When twenty-one-year-old Revere Osler died at the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917, all his parents could do was bring flowers to his bedroom. His father, the great Canadian clinician Sir William Osler, wanted to go at once to Europe, but there was no point. His only child had been buried immediately. In England, where Osler was a professor of medicine at Oxford, morale was so low in 1917 that memorial services for soldiers were considered unpatriotic. Also bad for morale was the wearing of black, as was the strict, protective schedule of seclusion for the mourner.

To make a distinction that has fallen out of use, the Oslers grieved profoundly, but they could not mourn. Dictionaries define “grieving” as the private feelings of sorrow that a death arouses. “Mourning” describes the...