The Places Where Grief Teaches Us About Who We Are

And memorialising those who have died is an important social and cultural process.

- Terence Heng

It has been more than a decade since I started my research into Chinese religion and spirituality in Singapore.

From Bukit Brown Cemetery to our annual Hungry Ghost Festival, I have witnessed a great number of rituals, events, processions and spaces dedicated to remembering the dead.

These range from the highly personal, like ancestral tablets at home, to the very public and very performative, like the burning of large paper effigies near Newton Hawker Centre.

Yet despite their sheer variety in size, complexity and visibility, there are multiple shared themes and practices. Belief systems, consumer practices and the afterlife are most immediately apparent, but there is one more subtle commonality, and that is grief.

Grief? That is an odd thing to say, because in modern society we are often socialised into thinking that grief is an emotion, an acute period after the death of a loved one meant to be "gotten over" with. The process of grieving sometimes becomes synonymous with, even focused on, moving on with life.

But grief is far more complex. Scholars have shown that we need to understand grief as more than a phase in and of itself, and part of a longer social and cultural process involving remembrance and memorialising, which reflects who we are and how we have changed as a society.

RELIGION AND THE CHANGING WAYS WE GRIEVE You do not need to be a demographer to know that Singapore's population is ageing. What was once a Malthusian worry about overpopulation has turned into a driving concern about a shrinking population for both state and society, including managing an increasing number of deaths each year.