Music and grief: why we need songs to say goodbye

There's a scene that repeats itself in different ways all over the world. A group of people gathers around someone who is no longer there. Sometimes there are flowers. Sometimes smoke. Sometimes silence. Sometimes food, drums, photographs, prayers, tears, or stories. And at some point—before, during, or after the farewell—a song appears.

It could be a hymn everyone knows. A melody that person listened to every day. A corrido. A bolero. A march. A religious song. An instrumental piece. A recording played from a phone. A lone voice in a room.

And something strange happens.

For three or four minutes, absence seems to take on a form.

The person who died is no longer physically there, but a part of them reappears: an afternoon, a conversation, a way of dancing, a phrase, a car trip, a kitchen, a perfume, a house.

Music opens a door.

Therefore, this article starts with a seemingly simple question:

The answer touches on memory, the body, psychology, ritual, and one of the oldest functions of music: to accompany us when everyday language is no longer enough.

Before the playlist, there was the mourning song.

Long before Spotify, before the playlists titled Funeral Songs or choosing a recording for a ceremony, human societies had already found a relationship between death and sound.

Historical and ethnographic records show funeral chants, laments, percussion, musical processions, and vocal farewell formulas in very different cultures.

In some communities, mourning is expressed through song.

In others, the shouting is done ritually.

In others, it is touched.

And in many cases, everything happens at the same time.

In pre-Hispanic Mexico, for example, songs for the dead occupied a central place in certain Nahua ceremonies. Researcher Patrick Johansson has studied the miccacuicatl, The term is related to funeral chants and the ceremonial apparatus of the funeral rites themselves. There were different forms, including lamentations and chants linked to the condition of orphanhood.

You can delve deeper into this in the UNAM study published by Studies of Nahuatl Culture: “Miccacuicatl: pre-Hispanic Nahua funeral chants”.

In northwestern Mexico, there are also records of songs related to funeral rituals among Yuman peoples. Ethnomusicological studies describe, for example, Cucapá funeral traditions in which singing is part of the ceremonial protocol.

He National Institute of Indigenous Peoples It has also documented the enormous diversity of relationships between music, dance, death and collective memory that continue to live on in different towns in Mexico.

Outside of Mexico we also find Sicilian laments, African vocal traditions, Asian funeral chants, funerals accompanied by bands in New Orleans, community anthems, chanted prayers and hundreds of other variations.

Music changes radically.

The underlying human need seems surprisingly persistent.

A song can become a person

It's probably happened to you.

A song you haven't heard in ten years starts playing, and before you know it, you're somewhere else.

You don't just remember the song.

Do you remember? who were you when you listened to it.

Maybe you'll go back to the back seat of a car. To a party. To your grandparents' house. To a relationship that ended. To someone you no longer speak to. To a city where you once lived.

Musical memory has an extraordinary ability to activate autobiographical memories.

Scientific literature even uses the term music-evoked autobiographical memoriesAutobiographical memories evoked by music. A systematic review published on this phenomenon It points out that memories triggered by music may exhibit particular cognitive characteristics compared to other types of memory cues.

Other experiments have found that familiar songs are especially powerful in producing rich and detailed autobiographical memories.

That completely changes our relationship with a song after a loss.

Because a piece of music ceases to be simply a composition.

It becomes a file.

A kind of compressed capsule where people, conversations, and places are stored.

The bond doesn't disappear suddenly.

For much of the 20th century, a relatively simple view of grief circulated: to continue with life, one would somehow have to gradually detach oneself from the bond with the one who died.

Contemporary research offers a much more complex picture.

The concept of grief appears in studies. continuing bonds, or continued links: ways in which a relationship can continue internally after death.

Remembering conversations. Maintaining certain customs. Thinking about what that person would have thought. Using one of their belongings. Visiting a place. Telling their stories.

Or listen to his song.

A systematic review published in Death Studies He found that these bonds are a complex phenomenon: they can be related to comfort, identity, memory and also, in certain circumstances, to difficult experiences.

The important idea is that human grief rarely consists simply of erasing a relationship.

It often consists of learn a new way to have it.

And music can play a profound role in that transformation.

The song as a meeting place

A study specifically dedicated to the everyday use of music during grief found several recurring reasons why people turned to it: to generate connection, to experience a sense of co-presence, to manage emotional states, and to project feelings that were perhaps difficult to express directly.

You can consult the study at PubMed: “Uses and Gratifications of Music in Bereavement”.

This idea of co-presence It is especially powerful.

Because it describes something that many people know perfectly well, even if they have never named it.

You put on a song you used to listen to with someone who died.

You know that person is no longer there.

You don't confuse memory with reality.

But for a few minutes there is a feeling of closeness.

A relationship becomes audible again.

Why do we listen to sad music when we're already sad?

Here another paradox appears.

If a person is going through pain, it would seem logical to try to avoid anything that might intensify it.

But the exact opposite happens.

After a breakup we look that song.

After a death we return to the record we used to listen to together.

In a ceremony, we choose precisely the piece that we know will make everyone cry.

Because?

The so-called "paradox of sad music" has been studied for years by researchers of music and emotion.

A Review of the pleasure derived from sad music It proposes that this can be experienced positively when it occurs in a safe environment, has aesthetic value, and facilitates processes such as emotional regulation, empathy, reflection, or memory.

That means that music can allow us to come into contact with sadness. without the sadness being exactly the same as the situation that produced it.

The song contains the pain within a form.

It has a beginning.

A duration.

A harmony.

A breath.

And an ending.

Something that real mourning often seems to lack.

Musical tears are strange

Crying while listening to music represents one of the most fascinating phenomena of musical perception.

Tears produced by music do not seem to behave exactly the same as all tears associated with everyday suffering.

In a psychophysiological experiment, researchers distinguished between two intense emotional responses to music: chills and tears.

The chills were associated with greater physiological arousal, while the tears caused by certain sad songs appeared alongside slower, deeper breathing and a mixture of sadness and pleasure.

The authors suggested that musical tears may involve some component of emotional regulation or release.

The study can be consulted at Scientific Reports: “Two types of peak emotional responses to music”.

This might explain a fairly well-known experience:

Sometimes we put on a song knowing perfectly well that we're going to cry.

And yet we still put it on.

Perhaps even because We know we're going to cry.

The duel also needs a rhythm

Death produces a temporary break.

There is a before and an after.

A phone call.

A news item.

One last conversation.

An empty chair.

Suddenly something that seemed to continue indefinitely has ended.

Human rituals help to signal that change.

There are wakes, funerals, processions, anniversaries, altars, and ceremonies because we need to make visible a transition that occurs simultaneously in the social world and within ourselves.

Music is extraordinarily useful for this task because it also occurs in time.

A song begins.

Keep it up.

It transforms.

Come back.

And that's it.

For a few minutes we can symbolically traverse a small path.

Perhaps that's why music accompanies thresholds so well.

Births.

Wedding.

Initiations.

Games.

Funeral.

Music organizes time when life changes state.

Not all cultures cry in a minor key

Here it is necessary to dismantle a deeply Western association: mourning does not necessarily mean slow, silent, solemn or "sad" music.

There are funeral traditions where the music can be rhythmic, collective, intense, and even danceable.

One of the best-known examples occurs in certain traditions of New Orleans, where funeral processions linked to brass bands can shift from slow and solemn expressions to more energetic music.

In different regions of Africa, Asia and Latin America we also find celebrations in which percussion, singing and body movement are part of the farewell.

On the Pacific coast of Colombia and Ecuador, for example, there is music linked to death and mourning within a much broader cultural ecosystem. The Smithsonian has documented expressions of this tradition in “The Last Lullaby: Río Mira and Mourning Music of the Afro-Pacific”.

This reveals something fundamental:

Mourning music does not only describe sadness.

It can also express continuity, belonging, celebration, transit, memory, community, identity, or even movement.

A life can end with tears.

You can also say goodbye by singing.

And sometimes it can do both at the same time.

When everyone sings, the pain ceases to be completely private.

There is a huge difference between crying while listening to a song with headphones and singing that same song with fifty other people.

The first experience can be deeply intimate.

The second one transforms a personal emotion into a collective experience.

When a community sings during a farewell, something simple but radical happens:

Nobody carries the sound entirely on their own.

Someone starts a sentence.

Another person is breathing.

The voices support each other.

Perhaps someone can't sing a word because they start to cry.

The person next to you continues.

And the song doesn't stop.

That detail contains a beautiful metaphor for communal mourning.

When one voice can no longer continue, another sustains it.

The same song can hurt and heal at different times

There are songs that, after a loss, become impossible.

Just listen to the first two seconds to turn off the player.

This also appears in research on music and grief.

A study conducted with caregivers who had lost family members to cancer found that music related to the deceased could offer support and connection, but could also be emotionally difficult. Some pieces were deliberately sought out; others were avoided during certain periods.

You can consult the work at Monash University: “Sound continuing bonds with the deceased”.

This reminds us that music is not a universal medicine whose effect can be predicted from the outside.

A song has a story.

Its meaning depends on who hears it, when they hear it, and what relationship exists behind it.

The same piece that is unbearable today can become one of the most cherished memories years later.

Because we also change as we listen.

The funeral song is never the same again

There's something more.

Rituals do not only use songs that already had meaning.

Also create new musical meanings.

A song might have accompanied an entire childhood without possessing a particularly intense charge.

Then it plays during a funeral.

And she is transformed.

From that moment on, each new listening also contains that room, those flowers, those people, and that day.

Music absorbs context.

It's as if human experiences were being deposited on her in layers.

That's why we never hear the exact same song twice.

The recording can remain identical.

Not us.

What song would you choose to say goodbye to?

The question may seem awkward.

But it also reveals something extraordinarily intimate.

Which song represents a life?

The favorite?

One that has a shared history?

A song whose lyrics say something important?

An instrumental piece?

Was there something the person sang badly but always sang?

Perhaps the perfect choice isn't even the most solemn song.

It could be a cumbia.

A rock song.

A ranchera.

A traditional song.

A symphony.

A children's song.

Something absurd that only five people understand.

Because a powerful musical farewell doesn't need to represent "death".

You need to represent to whom he lived.

Songs also allow us to say what we didn't say.

Royal goodbyes are almost never perfectly sealed.

There are still words left unsaid.

Imagined conversations.

Unanswered questions.

Acknowledgments we never uttered.

Apologies.

Anger.

“"I miss you."”

“"Thank you."”

“"I wish you had known."”

A song can contain those phrases indirectly.

You can lend us words.

Or it can free us from needing them.

Because even a melody without lyrics can say something that we recognize emotionally, even if we don't know how to translate it into a sentence.

That is perhaps one of the great powers of music:

It can be accurate without being literal.

And grief is full of emotions that work exactly like that.

Listening doesn't always mean wanting to stop feeling pain

In our culture there is sometimes an expectation that any emotional tool should serve to "make us feel better".

But a song during mourning can serve another purpose.

It can simply help us to to feel more clearly.

To remember.

To cry.

Thank you.

To accompany.

To acknowledge that something really happened.

To allow an emotion that was trapped to find movement.

This matters because going through a loss is not always about replacing a painful emotion with a pleasant one.

There are times when we want to stay connected for a few more minutes.

And then we pressed play.

The last song

Imagine a room after a ceremony.

People are starting to leave.

Someone is collecting glasses.

The conversations become small.

A song continues to play from a speaker.

That song probably existed long before any of us ever walked into that room.

It will still exist when everyone is gone.

That is also part of their power.

Music seems to belong to time and, at the same time, to outlive it.

We can go back to it.

One week later.

Ten years later.

We can press the same button and hear almost exactly the same sounds.

But something must have changed.

Us.

Perhaps that is one of the deepest reasons why songs accompany our farewells.

Because a person disappears from the present, while music offers us a way to revisit part of what we shared with them.

The song doesn't replace anyone.

But keep something.

A scene.

A feeling.

An inner voice.

A part of the story.