The use of professional mourning

               In the book I’m reading today, In the Language of Miracles by Raija Hassib, there’s mention of professional mourners. It’s a job I’ve heard of before, but I’ve only nodded towards the intrigues of other times and places. I understand how one might hire others to demonstrate high standing—behold such sorrow at this great loss! I also guess that even if funeral-goers knew the keening and gnashing of teeth was amplified by mercenary wailers, there’d be respect for the effort to broadcast pain.

               But I put the book down to feel it more. Last night, Amelia and I were watching the end of Won’t You Be My Neighbor, a documentary that tuned in deeply to Fred Rogers’ radical slowness and quiet and love, his intent stare and unblinking recognitions of hardship and anxieties of children. In one tender moment, Daniel Striped Tiger is talking to Lady Aberlin, and the tiger softly says, I’ve been wondering if I’m a mistake. Then he timidly sings that he's not like anyone else he knows. She sings back, forcefully: “You’re not a fake. You’re no mistake. You are my friend.” It becomes a duet, where the tiger continues in his anxieties, and Lady Aberlin continues in her reassurance.

               When they stop singing, Lady Aberlin says, “You are just fine, exactly the way you are.”

               The way I look? he asks.

               Yeah, she says.

               The way I talk?

               Yes!

               The way I love?

               And she says, “Especially the way you love.” And that’s when I know I’m crying.

               But I’m not weeping like I am at the end of the movie, when Amelia had joined me. It’s after Mr. Rogers’ funeral. One of the talking heads remembers a time Mr. Rogers had said, Think of someone who helped you along the way, for one minute; I’m gonna time you. And then we hear Mr. Rogers’ own, slow voice and deliberate timbre: “Let’s just take some time to think of those extra special people.” And we see former cast members, sons, sister, aunt, friends looking off, looking down, one at a time, as we hear the rest of Mr. Rogers’ statement—that wherever those people are, you know that deep down, they always want what’s best for you; they’ve always cared for you beyond measure, and encouraged you to be true to the best in you. One by one, we watch the seven or eight people think; we watch them feel. They cry, smile, nod, fill, and finally, they look at us in blessing through the magic of the camera, by which point, I was ugly crying, and embarrassed to be doing so, but Amelia was crying with me, and we were transported together.

               This morning, I was thinking about professional mourners. I was thinking about the onion cellar in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, where people go to cut onions and cry together. Maybe the role of professional mourners isn’t mostly to broadcast status, but to encourage our wary grief. A quote from the book of Jeremiah suggests this to be so: “Consider and call for the mourning women, that they may come; And send for the wailing women, that they may come! Let them make haste and take up a wailing for us, That our eyes may shed tears and our eyelids flow with water” (9: 17–18).

               Sometimes we need help to liberate the churning and bruised humanity within.