How mourning helps us navigate life's losses

Every year, around the last weekend in August, I feel the familiar jolt of melancholy that signals the turning of the wheel. Summer loosens its grip, the evenings draw in, and something shifts. And yet, increasingly, I find myself relieved.

Summer in London has often felt more of an ordeal than a pleasure. Instead, I welcome the crisp cold and sharper, cleaner daylight of October and November, the permission to turn inward, to be less forward-facing, less on show. 

Books by candlelight, blankets, cashmere socks, the crackling flames of a real fire: these are among the pleasures of the darker months.

In fact, I often wish winter would arrive more emphatically, bringing cleansing cold, frost, snow and ice. In recent years, I have consoled myself by watching YouTubers inhabiting Finland's astonishing winter landscapes, until envy and the inevitable what-ifs begin to tumble in. After all, there is only so much idealisation one can stomach.

But not everyone welcomes the changing seasons. A cousin of mine, a true summer devotee, simply grits her teeth and bears it. And in my psychotherapy practice, I encounter many people who dread the approaching darkness, anticipating the return of low mood or seasonal depression.

Of course, there are genuine physiological reasons why reduced daylight affects some people's wellbeing. Yet I wonder whether our seemingly growing resistance to the darker months sometimes adds another layer of suffering.

What happens when we cannot accept the inevitability of nature's cycles, when we demand perpetual summer of ourselves and of life?

Finding meaning in the changing seasons

The ancient words of Ecclesiastes remind us:

To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance.

The passage does not privilege dancing over mourning. Both have their rightful place. Neither is an aberration from the proper business of living; significantly, both are included, and both are implied as necessary.

What has happened to our capacity to give things their due?

To give darkness its due. To give endings their due. To give sorrow, regret and the passage of time their rightful place in our lives.

As autumn deepens and the season of ancient fire festivals approaches, there is, for those willing to attend to it and go beyond the surface commercialism of trick-or-treating and plastic skeletons, a wild mystery in the air.

All Hallows' Eve, followed by All Saints' and All Souls' Days, belongs to a season historically associated with remembrance, death and the mysterious relationship between the living and the dead.

Long before electric light and central heating, fire was both necessity and gathering place. Our ancestors fought for its warmth and illumination, cooked beside it, told their stories around it, and entrusted its flames with offerings of sacrifice, remembrance, and transformation. They certainly knew its power.

A great and recent joy in my life is finally having a real fire to stare into. There is something profoundly moving about surrendering to the orange, golden and deep ruby hues of its crackle and burn, quite unlike the rictus gazes and blue-lit screens through which so much of contemporary life is mediated.

We have become extraordinarily adept at looking outward, into this compelling, perhaps compulsive blue, responding to stimulation while staying occupied. But what of the inward gaze? What of the imagination, the symbolic life, the capacity to sit with mystery and darkness?

Back to the real fire. At times, I like to let the firelight be the only source of illumination and sit watching it go out. Mostly, this brings on an incredible sense of peace.

Sometimes, though, in my work, I wonder whether my invitations to consider these deeper dimensions of experience are too particular and therefore fall on deaf ears. Perhaps such meaning-making is no longer wanted, or no longer readily understood.

And then another part of me protests.

Surely part of the psychotherapist's vocation is to help keep the soul's mysteries alive?

Not to impose meaning where none is felt, nor to romanticise suffering, but to remember that human beings need more than the alleviation of symptoms. We need ways to understand our existence, to participate in its rhythms, and to give form to experiences that cannot always be explained or resolved. We need storytelling, and after all, we told so many of our oldest stories around fires.

And this brings me to mourning.

Understanding the difference between grief and mourning

We tend to associate grief and mourning with bereavement, but they are not quite the same thing.

Grief is our response to loss. It may overwhelm us with sadness, longing, anger, disbelief or numbness. Mourning, by contrast, is the process through which we gradually come into relationship with what has been lost.

Freud described mourning as painful psychological work, through which we gradually confront the reality that the loved object is no longer available to us. In his account, this involves the withdrawal of libido – the psychic energy invested in the person or thing we have lost – a process neither easily nor willingly undertaken. This is tough, muscular psychological work that requires effort and intention.

Yet must mourning necessarily mean relinquishing our attachment to what we have loved? Or might it involve transforming that attachment, finding another way to carry the lost person, experience, or possibility within us?

Perhaps mourning is less the business of forgetting than the art of remembering differently.

I often think of this when visiting Freud's final home in Hampstead, now the Freud Museum. The house feels almost mausoleum-like, with its extraordinary collection of antiquities, its famous couch, and the sense that a life is still palpably present through its possessions.

Freud arrived in London in 1938, already seriously ill, having escaped Nazi-occupied Vienna. He died the following year, surrounded by the objects he had collected over a lifetime, many of them belonging to civilisations that had themselves long since disappeared.

I find something profoundly moving in this strange gathering of the living and the dead. The ancient objects, the preserved study, the palpable absence of the man who once inhabited it. A place where the past has not been erased, but has been given a continuing presence.

Perhaps that, too, is a form of mourning.

Mourning the losses that aren't bereavements

And perhaps mourning need not wait for a death.

There are so many losses for which we hold no funerals: friendships that have ended without explanation, identities we have outgrown, possibilities that have quietly disappeared, the childhood we did not have, the life we imagined but never lived.

Some losses are comparatively easy to acknowledge. After a substantial change in my body, I have been joyfully letting go of beautiful clothes that no longer fit my shape or who I am. Having always been something of a sentimental keeper, I am surprised by the freedom I feel as each garment leaves. I thank it, bless it and imagine it beginning a wonderful new life with someone else.

A gift in this unexpected ritual is the real, hands-on experience of folding the clothes I am sending on. It reminds me that sometimes, perhaps often, we don't need to destroy what we have loved to release it.

Naturally, other losses are far less straightforward.

The unlived life, for instance, can haunt us precisely because we cannot always be certain that it is over. How do we mourn a possibility that may still exist? At what point does hope become an obstacle to acceptance, and when might relinquishment amount to a premature surrender?

As ever, there are no simple answers, which, I would argue, is what makes life rich and beautiful, if we are willing to engage with its complexity.

And then there are those sorrowful conundrums that remain unresolved: the friendship whose ending we never understood, the rupture that was never repaired, the words that were never spoken.

How rituals can help us acknowledge loss

Here, perhaps, ritual can offer something that explanation cannot.

To take a small object, perhaps the casing of a hazelnut, and consign it to a real fire, allowing it to break down in the heart of the flames alongside something we can no longer carry in quite the same way.

The gesture does not erase the past. It does not guarantee forgiveness or understanding, and it certainly doesn't provide an explanation. But it gives our intention to release something a form, and our sorrow a place.

We know that fire destroys, but do we always remember that it also transforms? In the alchemical imagination, purification burns away what can no longer remain as it was, so something different may emerge.

Yet what exactly are we asking the flames to take?

Sometimes it is resentment, sometimes an exhausted hope, sometimes our insistence that things should have been otherwise. And sometimes we are not trying to rid ourselves of anything at all, but to honour something before releasing our hold upon it.

Perhaps that is the deeper purpose of mourning: not to cleanse ourselves of sorrow, but to allow sorrow its proper place, so that it need not occupy every room of the inner house.

Learning to live with loss and change

At this time of year, as apples and leaves fall, nature offers us an extraordinary demonstration of relinquishment. Trees do not cling to their leaves through winter, nor do they immediately replace them. There is a necessary interval of apparent emptiness.

What might happen if we allowed ourselves something similar?

If, instead of endlessly pressing forward, we made room to acknowledge our regrets, our disappointments, our dead, our changing identities and the passing of time?

Might some of the suffering we experience arise not only from loss itself, but from our reluctance to recognise and mourn it?

This is not to suggest that depression can be cured by embracing autumn, or that all suffering can be transformed through ritual. But I wonder whether our increasingly impoverished relationship with mourning leaves us less able to accommodate the inevitable losses of being alive.

We are encouraged to move on, reinvent ourselves, remain youthful, positive and productive. Yet perhaps another form of psychological vitality exists, one that includes the capacity to withdraw, remember, grieve, and wait.

In the closing moments of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, the dying replicant Roy Batty recalls the extraordinary sights he has witnessed, knowing that his memories will disappear with him, like tears in rain.

Then, with an almost unbearable simplicity, he says: "Time to die."

Perhaps what makes this moment so moving is not merely the recognition of mortality, but the surrender of the struggle against it. As Ecclesiastes reminds us, there is a time for everything, and even the most extraordinary life must eventually yield to its ending.

Mourning asks us to practise this surrender while we are still living: to recognise what has passed, honour what remains, and loosen our hold on what can no longer be.

The turning of the year offers us this invitation without demanding that we accept it.

And perhaps, as we gather around the fire, we might ask ourselves what deserves to be remembered, what may finally be relinquished, and what still needs time.

We may discover beauty in letting go, and perhaps find further wonder and inspiration in the whorls of holy smoke rising from the flames.

For mourning is not the opposite of living.

It may be one of the ways in which we learn to live more fully, with all that has been, all that has not been, and all that remains possible.