In most Western countries, particularly northern ones, recent decades have brought significant changes in dying and mourning. In contrast to what was standard practice in the 1950s, the dying are today informed about their condition, and they discuss it openly with intimates -a form of anticipatory mourning (Armstrong, 1987). Funeral ceremonies have ceased to be rather fixed and uniform events from which children are barred. Only a few of those attending a funeral still wear black clothes; dress has become much less formal, music and speeches much more personal. Undertakers report these changes as being widespread.
1In the second half of the 1960s, the mourning ritual of wearing black mourning attire and black bands fell into abeyance, first in big cities, to disappear completely by the early 1970s. Thus, the principal symptoms of mourning vanished from public life. More and more obituary notices stated 'no visiting', 'the cremation has taken place privately', or words to this effect. Some ten years later, for over fifteen years now, a quest for new rituals -new rites of passage and sacrosanct acts -has emerged. These changes over decades indicate a significant change in the process of mourning, which is not as homogeneous as the word may suggest. It is poised between a highly institutionalized social obligation and a highly individual and personal feeling, respectively a public and a private process. In the 1960s and 1970s, mourning came to be increasingly privatized and individualized; it became less of a formalized social obligation. The traditional pattern of ritual was increasingly experienced as an external constraint, no longer compatible with rising demands for individual authenticity and personal identity in expressing the right feeling with the right words and gestures (Elias, 1985: 26). Thus, at the same time as the feelings connected to 'big moments of life and death' became more personal, more private and less ritualized, both the need and the opportunity to find public recognition of these feelings diminished. Development in this direction stalled and came to an end in the early 1980s, when a quest for new ritual emerged. It was not, however, a return to the tradition of 1 I would like to thank those who work in the undertaking business for their time and information. I also wish to thank the following for their valuable comments: Rineke van Daalen, Richard Kilminster, Michael Schröter, Eric Vermeulen and finally Stephen Mennell, who also corrected my English.