What We Carry, What We Let Go: Loss and the Rituals of Autumn

On endings, remembrance and the lives we thought we would have

An empty chair looks different when everyone knows who used to sit there. Outside, the pavements fill with leaves and pumpkins appear in windows. Halloween makes a great deal of noise about the dead. Remembering someone is usually quieter. It happens while making tea, hearing a particular expression or reaching for the phone before you remember there is nobody to answer.

Late October gives these private moments some public company. We light candles, tell stories and watch the trees change. The season is full of endings we can see. Our own endings are harder to place, especially when nobody else knows quite what has gone or how to ask about it.

What else disappears

A funeral marks a death. There is a date, a gathering and some acknowledgement that the people left behind are living in a changed world. Losing a job, a relationship or your health rarely comes with such a clear invitation to mourn. You are expected to explain the practical arrangements while still discovering what the loss means.

Imagine handing back a work pass after years of walking through the same door. The pass is a small piece of plastic. Behind it are familiar faces, a place in the day and an answer when someone asks what you do. You miss the unplanned conversations as well as the salary. Finding another job will matter enormously. It will not make those particular years unhappen.

Or imagine cancelling another plan because your body will not cooperate. With long Covid, ME/CFS or another long-term illness, the life you miss includes ordinary things: agreeing to lunch without first working out whether you can manage the journey or knowing you will still have energy tomorrow. You can want treatment and improvement while grieving what has changed. Hope does not require you to give a cheerful account of the present.

Leaving a relationship brings its own contradictions. You are relieved and still look for the car outside the house. Someone congratulates you on the fresh start when you were wondering what to do with the photographs. People can be right to leave and sad about leaving. We do not have to choose one feeling to make the ending respectable.

Why knowing is not the same as feeling

John Bowlby's writing on attachment and loss describes yearning and searching after bereavement. We build lives around particular people. Expecting them to be there becomes part of getting through a day. A fact understood at the funeral does not instantly change all those expectations. You turn to tell them something. Then you remember again.

A century ago, Freud also wrote about the difficulty of knowing that something beautiful will not last. In On Transience, he recalled walking with a poet whose enjoyment of the landscape was spoiled by its impermanence. Freud argued that brevity did not reduce its value. He also admitted that his argument failed to comfort his companions.

That admission makes the essay more useful. A sound explanation is not always a consolation. Telling someone that love was worthwhile does not remove the pain of missing the person they loved. We can understand the point and still wish, with considerable force, that things were otherwise. These older psychoanalytic accounts offer ways to understand that experience, rather than a timetable for how grief should unfold.

Carrying something forward

Trees do not simply throw away everything in their leaves. Before shedding them, deciduous trees recover some of their nutrients, as the Royal Horticultural Society explains. The outward change is striking. Less visible is what the tree keeps.

That offers a gentler image than “letting go” often does. The phrase can sound as though the task is to become less attached, clear the room and move on. After a death, we keep things that cannot be packed into a box: someone's expressions in our speech, their way of cooking or the particular attention they paid to a bird at the window. A habit becomes a small, unannounced inheritance.

Other losses leave things worth keeping too. Skills survive the job. A friendship survives a move. Leaving a relationship teaches you which tenderness you want more of and which treatment you will no longer accept. None of this makes the loss a useful exercise arranged for your benefit. You are allowed to keep what mattered without being grateful that it ended.

Nor do trees tell us how quickly people should recover. Rent still needs paying. Caring continues. Pain interrupts sleep. A seasonal image gives us something to think with, not instructions to live by. For a while, the most helpful thing about bare branches is simply that they are allowed to look bare.

A place for remembrance

This is also the season when different communities make room for the dead. The National Museum of Ireland records Halloween and Samhain customs that included expectations of deceased relatives returning home. In many Christian communities, services around All Souls' Day offer candles, prayers and the reading of names. A name spoken among other people sounds different from one you have been carrying alone.

In Mexico, the Indigenous traditions of Día de los Muertos described by UNESCO welcome deceased loved ones through offerings that include flowers and favourite foods. These observances have their own histories and religious meanings. They are not versions of Halloween. Looking at them alongside autumn remembrance invites a simpler observation: people have found many particular ways to keep the dead present in shared life.

You do not need to borrow a ceremony to mark your own loss. Cook the meal someone taught you. Ask a friend to hear a story you are afraid of forgetting. Put an object somewhere you can see it or put it away because seeing it every morning is too painful. Keeping and putting away can both be acts of care.

What a ritual can hold

A ritual gives an ordinary action a particular meaning. A final lunch with a former colleague says that those years counted. A letter you will never send makes room for words that have nowhere else to go. Sometimes the meaning is mixed. You miss a person who also hurt you or welcome an ending whose consequences you resent. A private ritual can tell the truth more freely than a greeting card.

A 2021 scoping review found ritual elements in 22 studies of grief interventions, including writing, symbolic objects and conversations with the deceased. Because the studies largely assessed whole treatments, they could not tell us how much benefit came from the rituals themselves. There is no reason to turn a personal act of remembrance into another thing you must do correctly.

Just One More Thing

Bereavement does not occupy every moment in the same way. Stroebe and Schut's dual process model describes moving between attending to loss and dealing with daily life, with respite from both. Remembering someone and laughing at something absurd belong in the same afternoon. Enjoyment is not evidence that you have stopped caring.

This Halloween, leave room for whatever the season brings up. Light a candle if you want to. Speak a name. Do nothing ceremonial at all. If grief feels unmanageable, ask someone you trust or a professional for support. There is no required transformation waiting on the other side of the weekend. The candle, the pumpkin and the fallen leaves can simply share a windowsill, each telling a different part of the evening.

Research referenced

Wojtkowiak, J., Lind, J. & Smid, G. E. (2021). Ritual in therapy for prolonged grief: A scoping review of ritual elements in evidence-informed grief interventions. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 11, 623835. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2020.623835

Stroebe, M. & Schut, H. (1999). The dual process model of coping with bereavement: Rationale and description. Death Studies, 23(3), 197-224. https://doi.org/10.1080/074811899201046

Psychoanalytic and cultural sources referenced

Bowlby, J. (1980). Attachment and Loss, Volume III: Loss: Sadness and Depression. Basic Books. Attachment theory and observations of mourning. https://sycofx.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/john-bowlby-loss-sadness-and-depression-attachment-and-loss-1982.pdf

Church of England. Special services. All Souls remembrance and services after a funeral. https://www.churchofengland.org/life-events/funerals/after-funeral/special-services

Freud, S. (1916). On Transience. In The Standard Edition, Volume XIV, pp. 305-307. Historical psychoanalytic essay. https://www.lutecium.org/ftp/Freud/pdf/1916_on_transience.pdf

UNESCO. Indigenous festivity dedicated to the dead. Intangible Cultural Heritage entry, Mexico. https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/indigenous-festivity-dedicated-to-the-dead-00054

National Museum of Ireland. Traditions and customs of Halloween / Samhain. Folklife collections. https://source.museum.ie/en-IE/Collections-Research/Folklife-Collections/Folklife-Collections-List-%281%29/Religion-and-Calendar-Customs/Hallowe-en-Samhain

Royal Horticultural Society. Autumn leaf bunting: Why leaves change colour and fall in the autumn. Botanical explanation informing the seasonal metaphor. https://www.rhs.org.uk/education-learning/school-gardening/resources/gardening-club/autumn-leaf-bunting

About the Author

Dr Richard Pomfret is an HCPC-registered Counselling Psychologist and founder of Therapy On The Hill. He works with adults experiencing a range of emotional and psychological difficulties, offering evidence-based therapy in a compassionate and collaborative way. He also has clinical experience working with gamers and families at the NHS National Centre for Gaming Disorders.

Contact

To learn more about therapy or enquire about working together, contact Richard at richard@therapyonthehill.com.