Day in the life of
Professional Mourner – Emily David
It is a tradition in South East Asia that a loud funeral will assist the dead as they travel to the afterlife, so professional mourners are hired to cry and weep loudly throughout the service. The hired mourner will do their service 2-3 hours per service. On a day they visit almost every funeral in their area to do their service and after that, they pay them for their services. The more effective the mourning the more will they pay. However, in most areas, those grievers or mourners are preferred to mourn and cry aloud which indicates that the dead person was of great deeds.
Through this job, the mourners express themselves to them like they understand what they are going through. As we are familiar with the ups and downs of the grieving process and can provide emotional support in a way that even some well-meaning friends and family members cannot. Despite this, it can be discouraging to be in a society that is attached to negativity. Certain people may also monopolize the room with stories of their grief, leaving little room for others for bad-mouthing.
Pros
The things that I have learned and I like during my job are that mourning to your own loss or others prepares us for coming to terms with our mortality, it brings communities and families together so we can help them to mature to accompany them to let go of their pain and grow as people. At that particular time, we often forget that we are providing any service or doing any job without any emotion, we just get involved like this is our own loss, the support that we provide to them gives us amazing satisfaction holding someone at their worst and teaches us empathy and understanding of how much it is necessary to give your shoulder to someone when going through some hardest time of their lives.
I believe it is a privilege in sharing grief, expressing feelings, and in that way allowing others to share their grief and that will help others to know they are not alone in their grief. So these are some aspects that I like and are proud of about my job.
Cons
Too often I have felt guilt while mourning which of course because of the thought of doing this for a source of earning and people don’t think good of us most of the time as sometimes we sense that the attitude and culture of the crowd are very different from one another. Perhaps the group is focused on support rather than the grieving process or there are spiritual activities such as prayer or meditation that some people are uncomfortable with. making us embarrassed with opening up about our feelings. We were indeed doing this to get paid but honestly speaking whenever we found ourselves in such a condition we just put all our energies to accompany the grievers and give them support in their difficult times.
