This is an excerpt from a book another bereaved mom read early on, she had recommended it to our group...it was by a grief therapist of many years who had workshops for grief release..here is a bit of his (Francis Weller) book:

It is our unexpressed sorrows, the congested stories of loss that, when left unattended, block our access to the soul. To be able to freely move in and out of the soul’s inner chambers, we must first clear the way. This requires finding mean-ingful ways to speak of sorrow.        

The territory of grief is heavy. Even the word carries weight. Grief comes from the Latin word gravis, meaning heavy, and from which we get the words grave and gravity. We use the term gravitas to speak of a quality in some people who are able to carry the weight of the world with a dignified bearing. And so it is, when we learn to carry our grief with dignity.

Psychologist Robert Romanyshyn speaks of the value of melancholy.   He describes it as …the result of a grief endured, the deep wisdom of the soul which recognizes that life is about loss, and that love tempered by grief, allows one to cherish the ordinary, simple moments of everyday life, even as we know they are passing away. At times grief invites us into a terrain that reduces us to our most naked self. We find it hard to meet the day, to accomplish the smallest of tasks, to tolerate the greetings of others. We feel estranged from the world and only marginally able to navigate the necessities of eating, sleeping, and self-care. Some other presence takes over in times of intense grief and we are humbled, brought to our knees where we live close to the ground, the gravity of sorrow felt deep in our bones. The onset of grief following a significant loss initiates a shift in our daily rhythm.

We enter into what many cultures refer to as a time of living in the ashes.

Among the ancient Scandinavian cultures, for instance, it was a common practice for those dealing with loss to spend their days alongside the fires that were aligned down the center of the longhouse. They would occupy this physical and soul terrain until they felt they had fully moved through the underworld where grief had taken them. Ash speaks to what remains, the barest semblance of what once was. James Hillman wrote, “Ash is the ultimate reduction, the bare soul, the last truth, all else dissolved.” The soul in grief feels reduced, brought to the place where all other thoughts or matters dissipate into ash.

This sacred season in the ashes was the ancient Scandinavian community’s way of acknowledging that one of their people had entered into a parallel world coinciding with the daily life of gathering food, feeding children, and tending fields, but that at the same time, they had been separated from the world by this loss. Little was expected of them during this time, which often lasted a year or longer. The individual’s duty was to mourn,  to live in the ashes of their loss and regard this time as holy. It was a brooding time, a deeply interior period of digesting and metabolizing the bitter tincture of loss. It was a time out of time, an underworld journey to the place of sorrow and emptying. Whoever came back from this sojourn came back changed and deepened by this work in the ashes. And indeed, any who undertake real mourning return with gravitas, wisdom gathered in the darkness. These women and men become the ones who can hold the village in times of great challenge.  

Imagine what this grieving space does for an individual facing loss. It grants a profound permission to enter a place of sorrow, to work with it, explore its contours and textures, to become familiar with the landscape of loss. Contemplating this time dedicated to grief, our minds can quickly respond with the argument that “This is self-indulgent, over-the-top. You could get stuck there,” and on and on. What is true, however, is that these cultural practices were developed over centuries to address what human beings need during these grief-stricken times. There is wisdom in offering a period of time to those who mourn.

According to Jewish custom as well, the bereaved are given a year to tend to their loss. In fact, the tradition of dressing in black or wearing black arm bands for an extended period of time to let others know that you were a person in mourning was wide-spread in our culture until very recently.   When we communally honor this time of living in the ashes, we invite a deepened relationship with death and the underworld of loss. This ongoing connection, in turn, keeps our bond with the living world vital and sustaining: the two states are mirrors of each other, reminders of the great round of life, which must include the reality of death.        

Grieving is also intimately connected with memory and the witnessing of those memories and emotions. Freeman House, in his elegant book, Totem Salmon, shared, “In one ancient language, the word memory derives from a word meaning mindful, in another from a word to describe a witness, in yet another it means, at root, to grieve. To witness mindfully, is to grieve for what has been lost.” That is the intent and purpose of grief.        

Grief both acknowledges what has been lost and also ensures that we don’t forget what must be remembered. There are places around the world where memorials have been built to remind the community of what has happened to the people, places of mourning and memory:

Wounded Knee, the Holocaust Memorial, the Rwandan Genocide Memorial, the Vietnam Memorial are all sites where grief is given concrete form to remind us of our shared loss.

Some grief is not meant to be resolved and set down. Sometimes grief helps us hold what must be carried by a people so that we may never have to endure such pain again.

Weller, Francis (2012-07-11). Entering the Healing Ground: Grief, Ritual and the Soul of the World WisdomBridge Press. Kindle Edition