Life in the Clearings versus the Bush

by Susanna Moodie

But, then, sackcloth is a most unmanageable material. A handsome figure would be lost, buried, annihilated, in a sackcloth gown; it would be so horribly rough; it would wound the delicate skin of a fine lady; it could not be confined in graceful folds by clasps of jet, and pearl, and ornaments in black and gold. "Sackcloth? Faugh!--away with it. It smells of the knotted scourge and the charnel-house." We, too, say, "Away with it!" True grief has no need of such miserable provocatives to woe.

The barbarians who cut and disfigured their faces for the dead, showed a noble contempt of the world, by destroying those personal attractions which the loss of the beloved had taught them to despise. But who now would have the fortitude and self-denial to imitate such an example? The mourners in crape, and silk, and French merino, would rather die themselves than sacrifice their beauty at the shrine of such a monstrous sorrow.

How often have I heard a knot of gossips exclaim, as some widow of a gentleman in fallen circumstances glided by in her rusty weeds, "What shabby black that woman wears for her husband! I should be ashamed to appear in public in such faded mourning."

And yet, the purchase of that shabby black may have cost the desolate mourner and her orphan children the price of many a necessary meal. Ah, this putting of a poor family into black, and all the funeral trappings for pallbearers and mourners, what a terrible affair it is! what anxious thoughts! what bitter heartaches it costs!

But the usages of society demand the sacrifice, and it must be made. The head of the family has suddenly been removed from his earthly toils, at a most complicated crisis of his affairs, which are so involved that scarcely enough can be collected to pay the expenses of the funeral, and put his family into decent mourning, but every exertion must be made to do this. The money that might, after the funeral was over, have paid the rent of a small house, and secured the widow and her young family from actual want, until she could look around and obtain some situation in which she could earn a living for herself and them, must all be sunk in conforming to a useless custom, upheld by pride and vanity in the name of grief.

"How will the funeral expenses ever be paid?" exclaims the anxious, weeping mother. "When it is all over, and the mourning bought, there will not remain a single copper to find us in bread." The sorrow of obtaining this useless outward show of grief engrosses all the available means of the family, and that is expended upon the dead which might, with careful management, have kept the living from starving. Oh, vanity of vanities! there is no folly on earth that exceeds the vanity of this!

There are many persons who put off their grief when they put on their mourning, and it is a miserable satire on mankind to see these somber-clad beings in festal halls mingling with the gay and happy, their melancholy garments affording a painful contrast to light laughter, and eyes sparkling with pleasure.

Their levity, however, must not be mistaken for hypocrisy. The world is in fault, not they. Their grief is already over,--gone like a cloud from before the sun; but they are forced to wear black for a given time. They are true to their nature, which teaches them that "no grief with man is permanent," that the storms of to-day will not darken the heavens to-morrow. It is complying with a lying custom makes them hypocrites; and, as the world always judges by appearances, it so happens that by adhering to one of its conventional rules, appearances in this instance are against them.

Nay, the very persons who, in the first genuine outburst of natural grief besought them to moderate their sorrow, to dry their tears, and be comforted for the loss they had sustained, are among the first to censure them for following advice so common and useless. Tears are as necessary to the afflicted as showers are to the parched earth, and are the best and sweetest remedy for excessive grief.

To the mourner we would say--Weep on; nature requires your tears. They are sent in mercy by Him who wept at the grave of his friend Lazarus. The man of sorrows himself taught us to weep.