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
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself.... Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“Do but consider this small dust, here running in the glass,
By atoms moved.
Could you believe that this the body was
Of one that loved?
And in his mistress’ flame playing like a fly,
Turned to cinders by her eye?
Yes, and in death as life unblest,
To have’t expressed,
Even ashes of lovers find no rest.”
—Ben Jonson (1572–1637)
“What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary.”
—Frantz Fanon (1925–1961)