The Day of the Dead - a Festival in Mexico

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Stages of Grief

Everyone dies alike, how we grieve is different based upon the location of the world we stand in. Hispanic cultures prepare their young for death from the start. The Day of the Dead is a nation holiday in Mexico, a joyous and sacred time to celebrate and remember their dead. Their death rituals are heavily influenced by Catholic beliefs, and grief is expressed by crying openly, only women to wail and men to be silent with no showing of emotions (Lobra, Youngblut, & Brooten, 2006). In Jewish culture mourning rituals are extensive. After funerals the family enter a seven-day period of intense mourning. They do not bath, shave, comb hair, and wear the same clothes they were wearing when they learned of death or at the funeral. This is followed by a thirty-day bereavement where they do not go to parties, shave and cut their hair, and listen to no music. In the year anniversary they are now no longer in mourning, grieving their loved one (Jewish Mourning Rituals. 2017). Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross had a theory that people went through 5 stages of grief, however some make not experience them all, and go through them in different orders because everyone grieves differently and at different paces (The 5 Stages of Grief & Lost, 2017). Discussion will be on Kubler-Ross theory on the 5 stages if grief and how cultural differences may have on each of the stages.

In the first stages of grief, you would often hear someone say, “they are in denial”. You cannot very well deny the death of a person, yet it means not so literal and more symbolic. In other words, you could hear disbelief, a testament of a person’s broken heart in disbelief that they are dead. Persons can go into emotional shock of a sudden unexpected death of loved one. Another being numbness, in terms that person receives an overload of emotion and becoming numb to feeling their emotions about the death of loved one (Friedman & James, 2008). This can be understood in diverse cultures, loss can come in a form or denial when expressed by “I cannot believe that he is dead”. The shock of sudden death can be felt by all across the world, not in any one culture.

The second stages of grief are anger. Anger is an emotion those may feel when a loved one dies, whether it was unexpected or not. Those that are dying because they are terminally ill, their loved ones may skip anger and find relief from their loved one’s suffrage. Others will hold on to that anger, anger toward doctors, the disease, the person responsible for the death, or God (Friedman et al. 2008). Anger can be an emotion that many cultures feel. Buddhism is one that can be understood to not find anger in death, but beauty to new life after death, new chance to do things more correctly when reborn.

Coming to the third stage of grief is a dual between bargaining and yearning, all depending where you stand in the situation. Those that are terminally ill will often find themselves pleading with god, or higher power for give them one more chance, just one more opportunity to take better care of themselves. Those that have lost loved ones find themselves yearning for their loved ones lost. No matter how much time has passed, a daughter will yearn for her mother, or husband for his wife. Simply missing the company of them in their lives (Friedman et al. 2008). Some cultures celebrate every year like Hispanic and Philippine cultures, the two days a year they are closest to their loved ones. This is a type of yearning for their loved ones and celebrating them and remembering them.

Often grievers may experience symptoms of depression. Depression can cause loss of

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