ABSTRACT
Grief is a reaction to loss; grief is pain and suffering; grief is raw emotion. Mourning is a time when grief is made visible; mourning is the process of coping with loss and giving that loss social expression. Reconstructing the emotional responses of individual members of past societies is a historical conundrum. It is dangerous and misleading to assume that we know what people must have experienced in a given situation, to infer that their grief was the same as ours. Death is a universal, but how the bereaved articulate their sense of loss is not. Mourning, its practices, rituals and processes, is often more accessible than grief. Yet mourning does not necessarily reveal how people feel (see, for example Hockey 2001: 198); public behaviour may not illuminate private loss.
