Since losing Harry, I've found my mind wandering to grief in a way it hasn't in a while. Not just my own grief, but grief through history. People are people, and I don't think that has ever really changed. We feel things the same way they did two hundred years ago. We just had different ways of showing it.
I think about my girls when they grieve. They are like the women in the Bible, mourning and wailing, feeling it to the very core of themselves. I grieve silently. Always have. It is a completely different experience watching them, and I will admit there are days I am genuinely envious of how fully they can let it out. There is something cathartic in that kind of grief that my quiet version doesn't always reach. But that is a rabbit trail for another day.
What it did was take me back to a memory. A good one.
In 2010, I pulled my girls out of public school and started homeschooling. Those years are some of the most wonderful of my life. Learning alongside my kids, watching history come alive for them the way it was coming alive for me. Our first year I decided we were going to learn Louisiana. All of it. We traveled to historic spots all over the state, and the very first trip I took them on was to St. Joseph Plantation in Vacherie, Louisiana, in October.
The historic home was set up that month for the Creole traditions of mourning in the early 1800s. I had no idea then that fifteen years later I would be writing Regency romance set in that same era, or that I would find myself thinking back to that afternoon in Vacherie and wondering: did they do this in England too?
It turns out, they did. Almost exactly.
But before I get to England, let me take you back in time to a home in Louisiana that mourned the loss of a loved one. Because that October afternoon is worth sitting in for a minute.
St. Joseph Plantation hosts a Mourning Tour every October, and when we walked through those doors, the house was dressed in deep mourning exactly as it would have been in the early 1800s. The Creole community of South Louisiana in that era was mostly Roman Catholic, with faith woven deeply into every part of daily life including how they said goodbye. When someone died, the whole house announced it. The whole community knew. Nobody grieved alone, and nobody was expected to.
Closing my eyes, I can remember standing in that house. I see it clearly. The mirrors were covered, every single one of them, draped in black cloth. Our predecessors believed shiny surfaces could trap a spirit, and no one wanted to risk that. Funny how deeply religious people still held onto that superstition. But those black cloths over the mirrors stayed with me for fifteen years, because it was so complete. There was no reflecting yourself in that house while it was grieving. The normal vanity of daily life was suspended.
The clocks were stopped. All of them, at the moment of death, as a mark of respect. For the deceased, time had stopped. The household acknowledged that.
Black fabric hung over the doors on the outside of the house so that anyone passing would know, without being told, that this family was in mourning. There was no pretending. There was no carrying on as if nothing had happened. The grief was public. The house wore it.
And the coffin was in the main hall. Right there in the home, draped in black, where visitors could come and pay their respects. Death happened at home, and it was honored at home, and the community came to you.
I'm not sure I could have done that. Even now the idea of it sits heavy with me. And yet there is something about it that feels more sacred than what we do today. I think maybe they understood something about grief that we have mostly forgotten in the hectic pace of the modern world.
So when grief found me again just a few weeks ago, watching my daughter grieve, I found myself sitting at my computer in the middle of the night, in the quiet, turning things over the way I always do when I am working through something.
My books, my writing, all of it is how I handle my emotions. My novels are my catharsis. They are what heals me. And sitting here tonight I noticed something I had not fully seen before. Every single character I have written, plotted, and planned, in every story, is grieving.
You will see it most clearly in book two, Saving Lady Jane. There is no funeral written in those pages, but the whole book deals with grief. The quiet kind. The kind that sits with you and doesn't make a sound. My kind. I start my first round of edits next month, and tonight I decided to do a little research. And that research took me across the ocean, to the England I have been living in on the page for the past year.
Are you curious what I found?
It turns out, over there, the whole house mourned too. In Regency England, when a death occurred, the mirrors in the household were draped or turned to the wall. Same practice. Different continent. Different culture. Same instinct.
The front door. In England, a badge of death made of black crepe was hung on the front door to announce the loss to the neighborhood. In Louisiana, black fabric and ribbons on the outside of the house told passersby the same thing. The language was different. The message was identical.
The body at home. In Regency England, there were no funeral parlors. The body was kept at home, laid out for mourners to come and pay their respects. This is actually where the term funeral parlor comes from, that best parlor in the house where the deceased lay. In Louisiana, the coffin in the main hall served the same purpose.
The clothing. In Creole Louisiana, women wore solid black for an entire year after the death of a family member. Deaths were frequent enough that many women ended up wearing black for much longer, one loss following another before the first year was even finished. In Regency England the customs followed a similar path. I actually know this one well because I have been researching it for a new series I am planning. In 1812 a woman in mourning would begin in full black, then move to gray, and finally to lavender as the sharpest edge of grief began to soften. The mourning was visible. Everyone around you could read exactly where you were in your grief just by looking at the color you were wearing. It had a language. And that language was worn on the body for everyone to see.
Two cultures, an ocean apart, in the same century, with no way of knowing what the other was doing, and yet doing almost the exact same things.
I find that remarkable. And I find it telling.
What both cultures understood, in ways we have largely set aside, is that grief needs ritual. It needs time. It needs to be seen. The covered mirrors and the stopped clocks and the black on the door were not just superstition or fashion. They were a community saying: something has happened here. We are going to slow down. We are going to let this be real. We are not going to pretend.
My daughter is naturally trying to do that very thing today. She has built a little shelf, a memorial to Harry, the sweet animal who had been with her since she was nine years old. And here is something that stopped me when I thought about it. That was the same year we walked through St. Joseph Plantation. The same summer we went on that field trip, a tiny kitten appeared on our doorstep in July. He chose her. And he stayed for sixteen years.
Her little shelf may not look like black ribbons on a door. But it is the same language. It is her way of saying something happened here. Something worth slowing down for. Something worth honoring.
The funerals of the past were not so different from today in their speed. But the mourning period that followed was another thing entirely. They slowed down. The whole household slowed down. The whole community slowed down with them.
We have mostly lost that. A funeral today, if the family chooses to have one at all, is followed by three days off from work or school, and then back to normal, or whatever normal is supposed to mean when you are still in the middle of something that has no clean ending. No black on the door. No stopped clocks. No visible marker that tells the world you are still in this. Nothing that says: please see us. We are still carrying something heavy and we may need a little patience, a little time, a little empathy.
Now, I will say this, and I say it with a smile. If we still wore black as a marker of grief, I would apparently be in a permanent state of mourning. I wear black every single day. So perhaps that particular tradition and I would get along just fine.
But the rest of it. The ritual. The community. The permission to grieve openly for longer than three days. I think we lost something real when we let that go.
They had a language for grief that the whole neighborhood could read. And I think we could use a little more of that today.
Photo: St. Joseph Plantation, Vacherie, Louisiana, 2010. Our first homeschool field trip. Photo credit: personal family photo via Facebook.
St. Joseph Plantation hosts its annual Mourning Tour every October. If you're in Louisiana or passing through the River Road area, it is one of the most genuinely educational and memorable experiences I have found in this state. Find more information at stjosephplantation.com.