Death
See also: Mourning dressThe dead are honored with a funeral and often a reception or a wake following. Anyone attending the funeral is expected to wear black or at least sombre or drab-colored clothing. A widow may wear a black veil over her face.
Following the funeral, family and friends now resume their normal clothing. This is a modern innovation. Until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, relatives were expected to wear mourning for periods that varied depending on the closeness of their relation to the deceased. The rules for mourning wear were strict and complicated. They may only have been observed in their entirety by the wealthy with money and time for a course of mourning that started with black clothing, progressed to grey, then violet, and ended with the wearing of colors again. The poor might just wear a black armband over their regular clothing as a sign of mourning.
Mourning bore heaviest on the widow. In many Mediterranean countries, she might wear black for the rest of her life. In England, she wore a cumbersome outfit called widow's weeds: an all-black dress surmounted with a widow's cap trailing a long black veil.
Read more about this topic: Ceremonial Clothing In Western Cultures
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Famous quotes containing the word death:
“Now if thou wouldst, when all have given him over,
From death to life thou mightst him yet recover.”
—Michael Drayton (1563–1631)
“There is something antique, even, in his style of treating his subject, reminding us that Heroes and Demi-gods, Fates and Furies, still exist; the common man is nothing to him, but after death the hero is apotheosized and has a place in heaven, as in the religion of the Greeks.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,—no more. I cannot get it nearer to me.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)