Sugar, Pan de Muerto and Grief: How Rituals Inform our Understandings of Grief

I was excited when I registered for a seminar on Grief, Death, and Dying during my first semester at WMU. During this class, I got to dive into questions about what grief is, how people who have experienced it write about it raising all kinds of philosophical questions, and how rituals can generally give us a clue about the dimensions of grief. It was the last of these topics that got my attention the most given my personal background as a graduate student from Mexico. Coming from a country whose culture is famous worldwide for our ritual on the Day of the Dead every Nov. 1st and 2nd, I knew how crucial it was to add my perspective, and those of my people, to this seminar. I immediately understood this situation as an opportunity to foster diversity, inclusion, and multiculturalism in the classroom.

As I grew to appreciate that more attention to ritual could be helpful in the study of grief and, recognizing the great diversity of rituals of mourning around the world, I decided that I could draw from some of my own experiences in working through my philosophical ideas. At the end of the semester, this experience culminated into a research project on how the Day of the Dead informs and challenges dominant understandings of grief. It wasn’t until then that I fully understood how important it was to create and celebrate spaces where diversity, inclusion and multiculturalism are all welcomed, especially in academic philosophy.

Here's the abstract:
In this paper, I go over the standard philosophical assumptions made on the question whether grief ends, or if grief ever stops. Many of these questions, as I argue, do not consider rituals so what follows is also an introduction to my approach on how to answer this question by looking at the Day of the Dead. Día de los Muertos is a unique ritual which encourages the celebration of death without limit. This comes with important challenges to the dominant understandings on the duration of grief as the ritual is celebrated annually every November first and second and encourages Latinx people to continue to celebrate and remember their dead ones forever. Lastly, I will analyze an important objection concerning the difference between grief and mourning from the perspective of the Day of the Dead and I also hope to suggest other ways in which we can analyze and think of the duration of grief with new formulations of the question to avoid certain challenges I present here.