Bring Back the Wailing Women

Bring Back the Wailing Women:

Grief as Sacred Rite of Passage

The morning after my partner died, I woke up to a world as foreign as waking on Mars.

I lay there with my daughter’s still-sleeping body wrapped around me, in a state of absolute shell shock. The only thing I wanted was to crawl into Pete’s arms, to hear him tell me it would be okay, to make the nightmare go away. But people were telling me he was dead. And that I would never have that again.

All I truly knew at that moment was I had to go outside and allow nature to hold me.

I quietly unwrapped my daughter’s legs from mine, tiptoed out of the bedroom, and left her in the peaceful bliss and oblivion of sleep.  I walked outside into the hot Sydney summer, barefoot and barely clad. I stood for a moment feeling the sun on my face trying not to think or feel.  Then purpose grabbed hold of me and I began to take quiet steps away from the house and towards the Bush.

With each step, I felt myself sinking back into cellular memory — into a time when women knew how to grieve, knew what to do with this moment.

I walked into the forest and asked it to receive my shattered soul.

At some point, when I had distanced myself enough from the house, I stopped walking.   My knees buckled. I fell to the ground and found myself pounding the earth. And from within me — from the belly, from the bowels of my very being — a guttural, unnatural sound shattered the early morning air. A cry of distress. A sound of mourning. A sound that connected me, in that moment, to every woman who had ever come before me — the ancient women who tore open their shirts, raked their breasts until blood spilled, showing the world the pain in their heart. 

And I ask you now, many years later:

Where have the wailing women gone?

I did not know it then, but what I did that morning in the Sydney bush was ancient. It was instinctive. It was right.

Across the ancient world, in culture after culture, women were the sacred keepers of sorrow. In Greece, women washed and anointed the body, tore at their hair, and gave voice to grief in sacred lamentation. In Rome, the praeficae — professional wailing women — sang funeral chants in the streets, honoring the dead openly, publicly, without shame. In Ireland, the bean chaointe, the keening women, wove improvised poetry and prayer into a wail so powerful it was believed to release the soul from the body. In Egypt, funerary lamentation has been women’s socially sanctioned expression of grief for millennia. In Yemen, elder women sat in circles, teaching younger women the language of grief — passing down not just the practice, but the understanding that sorrow must be given voice to be survived.

Scholar Margaret Alexiou, in her landmark work The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, traces this tradition from the second millennium BCE to the present, demonstrating that women’s lament was not merely emotional expression but a sophisticated art form — verbal, musical, communal, and sacred. The book of Jeremiah commands it explicitly: “Teach your daughters wailing, and one another lamentation.”

This was not weakness. This was wisdom transmitted across generations.

Then the Church banned the keening. Patriarchal religious structures, in culture after culture, viewed the wailing woman — her power, her voice, her central role in community life — as a threat. The Catholic Church outlawed keening in Ireland, dismissing it as pagan heresy. In early Islam, women’s wailing rituals were prohibited, their public grief reframed as rebellion against God’s judgment. Across the globe, the systematic suppression of feminine grief ritual was not accidental. It was deliberate.

And we have been trying to grieve in silence ever since.

Today, we are given three days of bereavement leave. Then we are expected to return — to work, to productivity, to the performance of normalcy. In the West, grief that extends beyond twelve months has now been formally classified as a medical disorder: Prolonged Grief Disorder. We have traded the wailing women for a diagnosis.

The bereaved are left alone with their sorrow, without ritual, without village, without permission to fall apart.

I know this not only from my own experience, but from six years working as a hospice spiritual counselor,, sitting with the dying and those they leave behind. What I witnessed confirmed what my body already knew on that January morning in the Sydney bush: we have no container for grief anymore. We have stripped death of its sacred dimensions, handed it to medicine, and abandoned the grieving in the wreckage.

This essay is a beginning. It is the seed of what I believe will become a larger body of work — a PhD study, a book, a life’s calling — exploring the anthropology of feminine grief ritual, its systematic suppression across patriarchal religious and cultural structures, and what it would mean for women, and for humanity, to reclaim it.

Grief is not a disorder. It is not a problem to be managed or a condition to be medicated. It is a rite of passage — one of the most ancient and necessary initiations available to a human being. When we grieve well, together, held by community and ritual, we do not merely survive our losses. We are transformed by them.

The wailing women knew this. And somewhere, in the cellular memory of every woman who has ever loved and lost, we know it too.

It is time to bring her back.

Reverend Priestess Catherine Mea Ananda is an ordained interfaith minister, hospice spiritual care professional, and founder of Sofia Institute and the Church of the White Rose, a Hawaiʻi nonprofit honoring the divine feminine. She writes, speaks, and ministers on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi. This essay is an early exploration of research she is developing toward a PhD study on feminine grief ritual, its suppression, and its reclamation.