Is your reaction even yours?

Hi there,

A friend of mine, who's Albanian, was telling me about a funeral back home, and somewhere in the middle of the story she mentioned, completely casually, that the family had hired women to cry.

I had to stop her in the middle of her story. Hire? Like, actually hire the act of crying out as a gig? Is there a rate?

Apparently yes, or at least there used to be, and in some places there still is. It's called vajtim, women singing the dead person's praises in verse. Where she is from in Albania it starts at sunrise and keeps going until the burial.

She told me the woman they hired at the funeral she went to was the best in the village. “You should have heard her,” she said. Apparently, she was really good at wailing.

And my first reaction was probably the same one you're having right now. Isn't that fake?

Emotions, culture, & customs

The way she explained it, the logic behind the custom wasn’t that the wailing was a replacement of the family's grief, it was how their grief got seen and amplified. She said the alternative (of not have a wailing woman on show) would’ve send shock waves in the community and break with cultural norms. If a family buried someone quietly, people would talk, and not kindly, and nobody wants to be the family that didn't make enough noise.

So the hired wailers are almost like the caterers at a wedding, something expected and part of the protocol for a memorable event. They show up, they know the words, they know when to build and when to wail, and the family, gets to lay their loved one to rest in high honor and dignity.

I've been chewing on that for weeks.

In a way, its as if the emotions we assume everybody shares are shaped a lot more by culture than we'd like to think. And in much of the world, a feeling isn't just something that sits inside you, it's something that happens between people. Which would explain the hired mourners pretty well.

Same moment, different rulebook

I've seen a version of this at weddings, on both sides of the world. In the West, the bride is practically contractually obligated to glow. In the East, I've watched brides sit there with their eyes downcast toward the floor, not a smile in sight, looking like its the worst day of her life, because the expectation is that she's grieving the home she's leaving. In parts of of the East, a bride who doesn't cry at her goodbye gets talked about as brazen.

No matter where I am in the world, nobody in those rooms was confused. Everyone knew exactly what they were watching. I'm the one who didn't, and I couldn't tell you what either bride was actually feeling. I only knew what her face was supposed to be doing, and that turned out to be the same question in both places: what does this moment ask of me, and what does it tell the people watching?

Final Thought

I don't have a major takeaway for you in all this. I just think in a increasingly global world, we're all going to keep bumping into people who grew up with a completely different emotional rulebook, at work, in line, across the dinner table, and that's probably a good thing.

So I guess, if anything, I might say if someone's reaction looks off to you, cold or over the top or weirdly calm, maybe get curious before you decide what it means. They might be doing exactly what love, or respect, or grief looks like where they come from.

And you might just be reading from a different rulebook.

Shakila