A shared universe › Blog › Why we need rituals to say goodbye · Español
Draw how you feel, sprinkle a pinch of salt on the paper, tear it into pieces and count to ten five times. It sounds like a children’s game, but it was the ritual two Harvard researchers asked a group of people who had just lost something to carry out. What they saw helps explain why, in every culture, we respond to death with gestures.
Michael Norton and Francesca Gino, of Harvard Business School, published several studies in 2014 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General on the rituals we perform after a loss. They began by asking 76 people about an important loss, the death of a loved one or the end of a relationship, and about any ritual that had helped them cope. Almost none were religious or performed in public: they were private habits, invented by each person. One person kept going to the hairdresser on the first Saturday of every month, as they had done with the person they lost; another washed their car every week, as he used to.
Then they asked 247 people to write about a loss. Half were also asked to describe a ritual they had performed at the time. Those who recalled their ritual said they felt less grief than those who only wrote about what they had lost.
Since a death cannot be brought about in a laboratory, for the following experiments they used a small loss: a $200 prize draw among students, in which one person in each group won. Some of those who lost were asked to perform the ritual of the salt and the torn paper; the others were asked simply to draw how they felt. Those who did the ritual said they felt less upset. The authors themselves warn that losing a prize draw is nothing like losing a person. What they were after was whether the gesture, in itself, changed anything.
Two details of the study stand out. The first is that the ritual helped just as much those who believed in rituals as those who did not. The second came from the last experiment: some people were asked to perform the ritual; others were simply told that many people perform one after a loss; others were asked to sit in silence for a while. Grief fell only in those who carried out the ritual with their own hands.
The explanation they propose is that a loss leaves the feeling that life is slipping out of your hands. A ritual does not change what has happened, but it gives back a little control: there is something to do, in an order, with a beginning and an end. In their data, those who performed the ritual felt less helpless, and that explained a good part of the relief.
These are small studies, carried out with online volunteers and students, which measured grief with questionnaires at a single moment. There is also another reason for caution. In 2025, Harvard removed Francesca Gino’s tenure after concluding that she had committed research misconduct in four papers that are not about rituals or grief. She denies it and has taken the case to court. There is no accusation about this study, but Gino took part in collecting its data, that data is not available for other researchers to check, and its results have not been independently confirmed.
Other work points in a similar direction, with nuances. Alexander Burrell and Lucy Selman, of the University of Bristol, reviewed seventeen studies on funerals and the health of families in 2020. On whether attending a funeral helps or not, the results were mixed: some found benefits and others did not. What was repeated in the families’ accounts was something else: the farewell helped when they had been able to shape it in their own way, in a way that made sense to them.
Long before these experiments, the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep published a book in 1909 on the rituals that accompany the great changes of life: being born, becoming an adult, marrying, dying. He saw that almost all of them follow three steps: separating from what was, spending an intermediate time and returning to life with a new place.
In a death, that step is not taken only by the person who goes. Those who stay take it too: they cease to be the daughter, the husband or the friend of someone who was alive, they spend a time in mourning and gradually return to everyone else’s life. That is why rituals are not only for the dead. They say aloud that something has changed, they gather people around the one who is suffering and they open a time in which it is allowed not to be well.
Some deaths were left without a ritual: that of someone who died far away, those of the months of the pandemic when many families could not be with their loved ones or say goodbye as they would have wished, that of someone who found out late or could not go. That missing goodbye weighs for years.
A ritual does not expire. It can be done months or years later and still make sense. Nor does it need to be big: what these studies suggest is that it matters less which gesture you choose than doing it with intention, knowing what it is for and who it is for.
If you would like to create your own, here are some ways many people use. Keep whatever speaks to you:
The rituals that keep you company most tend to have a clear beginning and end, are repeated and are made to your measure. It helps to think beforehand about how you want to spend the dates that hurt, because a gesture prepared in advance helps the day not to take you by surprise. If you do it as a family, each person can contribute something; if you prefer to do it with nobody there, that is fine too.
A ritual helps while it keeps you company. If it turns into an obligation that causes distress, if you fear something bad will happen when you do not do it or if it stops you getting on with your life, it is worth talking to a professional. The same goes if, after a long time, the grief is just as intense and does not let you live. In Spain you can talk to a person at the Teléfono de la Esperanza, 717 003 717, at any time. If you are thinking of ending your life, call 024: it is free and answered 24 hours a day. If you are in another country, call your local emergency number or a helpline there.
A ritual doesn’t have to be solemn. Lighting a “For someone who is gone” star on the same day each week, with a few lines for that person, can be one too.