The Truth About Ritual and Grief, According to Research

Ritual. When you read that word, what image comes to mind first? Maybe a religious ceremony. Maybe a wedding, a baptism, or a funeral. Maybe a graduation or a military ceremony. That doesn't mean small, everyday rituals don't exist—they do, all the time. But when people hear "ritual and grief," they usually picture something:

• Public
• Communal
• Fixed or consistent
• Religious

Rituals like that matter. They can be an important part of grief and mourning—honestly, an important part of life in general. Sitting shiva, attending a funeral, holding a memorial service, even running an annual charity 5k in someone's name: these rituals do real work, including (but not limited to):

• Bringing together the people who loved and cared about the person who died.
• Giving you a sense of purpose, control, and distraction in the days right after a death.
• Offering spiritual connection and comfort.
• Creating ties across generations and to ancestors.
• Giving you ongoing time and space to come together and remember.

Here's the catch: as valuable as those rituals are, they aren't always what you want or need in a given moment. There are plenty of reasons why—feeling overwhelmed grieving alongside others, feeling shut out by formal traditions, or simply feeling worn down by the idea of planning anything at all.

When a ritual doesn't give you what you expected, it's easy to feel like you're grieving "wrong." You think you should have felt comforted at the funeral, but you didn't. You think you should have felt held up by the friends and family grieving beside you, but you just felt alone. Here's something worth knowing: those traditional, public, communal rituals aren't the only meaningful ones in grief—not even close. That's good news for every griever, especially anyone who has never warmed to public or traditional ritual. So stay with us for a few thoughts on ritual, even if you don't see yourself as a "ritual person."

What the research found

A few years ago, researchers at an institution you've probably heard of—Harvard University—set out to learn more about ritual. Michael Norton and Francesca Gino studied grieving people to see how ritual shaped their experience of loss. Going in, they expected to focus on public rituals and how those affected people coping with a death. What they found instead surprised them. When they surveyed grievers, most did not point to public or communal rituals as the ones that mattered most. Instead:

• Only 10 percent of the rituals people named as meaningful were public.
• Only 5 percent were religious.
• Only 5 percent were performed with other people.

In other words: roughly 90 percent were private, 95 percent were secular, and 95 percent were done alone. In Norton and Gino's own words, most of the meaningful rituals people described "were private, “everyday” rituals that were unique to an individual – as opposed to publicly performed, commonly-utilized rituals."

Researchers let participants define "ritual" for themselves, and the examples ranged widely. Some were expected, like lighting a candle on the anniversary of a death. Others were far more specific and personal, like the participant who said, "I washed his car every week as he used to do," or another who said, "in these fifteen years, I have been going to hairdressers to cut my hair every first Saturday of the month as we used to do together." Descriptions of funerals and memorials appeared far less often than these small, private habits.

Why this matters

Research doesn't always feel useful, especially early in grief—it can feel almost insulting to picture researchers studying grievers from a distance, like lab subjects. But every so often, something genuinely useful does come out of academia, and this is one of those times. This study can be a real relief: those quirky, personal grief rituals you've kept private, maybe because you thought they were a little odd, are completely normal and healthy. You can read the original study here. A few takeaways from that work and the follow-up research are worth holding onto:

Both public and private rituals help. Norton and Gino found that ritual gives people a sense of control in a situation—death—that offers none. Neither type is better than the other. Notice what actually works for you. Sometimes a public ritual is exactly right; other times, it's something you do entirely on your own.

A ritual doesn't need to be permanent. Sometimes doing something just once brings a real sense of comfort and control. As a griever, you might repeat a ritual, let it go, or change it as time passes. All of that is normal, and all of it can help.

Rituals that look sad from the outside can still bring comfort. So the next time someone treats your ritual like a downer (picture Toby in This Is Us), take comfort in knowing that Norton and Gino's follow-up research found people who practiced ritual reported more comfort than those who didn't.

Ritual can occasionally cause problems. If you live with obsessive-compulsive disorder, Norton and Gino note that ritual can carry some risk. If a ritual starts to feel more like a compulsion than a comfort—if it's hard to stop, or it's interfering with your life—talk with a mental health professional about keeping it in check.

Making room for your own rituals

Readers were once asked to share their own personal grief rituals, and the range of answers said a lot about how individual this kind of ritual really is. One griever described never turning down a slice of coconut cake—wherever it showed up, a restaurant, a coffee shop, if it was on the menu, they ordered it, because coconut cake brought back a father, a family, a childhood, even though they hadn't much liked coconut cake as a kid. That's the kind of small, private ritual that can happen almost anywhere.

Whatever shape they take, these personal rituals can become a quiet tribute to the person you lost—a private thread connecting you to them in the middle of an ordinary day.