"If there is no expression of grief, it will affect the dead and the living detrimentally.  The dead cannot then go free from their earthly consciousness.  As the deceased takes on spirit essence, he or she may get snagged into thinking of himself or herself still as a person.  Thus, the deceased may begin to intrude into the business of the living in a way that can constitute a serious nuisance.

I remember once looking for an apartment in town where I was a student.  The rental-office lady took me to a nice-looking efficiency apartment on the second floor of a building.  As soon as we entered the place, I was frozen by a dismal sight.  There at the kitchen sink stood a girl in her twenties with a kitchen knife two-thirds into her chest.  She was bleeding profusely with her white robe soaked in blood down to her feet.  It took me a second to realize that she was the ghost of a person who had been dead for quite a while.  My reaction startled the housing person who was showing me the place.  Of course she saw nothing.  She asked if there was something I did not like about the place.  I said yes.  She asked what.  I could not tell her what I saw.  I said it was a vague feeling that I should look   somewhere else.  This is what happens when a dead person is not grieved.  It takes a living person to shed tears on behalf of a dead person for this kind of thing not to happen.  Humans must feel grief and be able to express it sincerely in order to free the dead spirit.

In the village there is an opportunity to grieve daily because there is death almost everyday.  And funeral rituals last long enough to produce a continual opportunity for the expression of grief.  It takes a great deal of involvement within a community for grief to be expressed freely.  It is the presence of the community that validates the expression of grief.  This means that a singular expression of grief is an incomplete expression of grief.  A communal expression of grief has the power to send the deceased to the realm of the ancestors and to heal the hurt produced in the psyches of the living by the death of a loved one.

The ghost I saw in that apartment was perhaps grieved for only a few hours, maybe less, and by a few people only.  Those who came to support the family in grief were probably trying their best to make sure that the members of the family did not shed too many tears.  They were preventing grief from happening rather than encouraging it.  They themselves were without tears, and so the poor deceased girl never went away.  Tears carry the dead home.  Communal grief therefore provides the opportunity to reach that important cathartic peak that grief must logically lead to, as well as serve as an energy that transports the dead home.

Grief is an energy that works at mellowing the mind, heart and body.  An agitated or prolonged expression of grief exhausts the body to the point where rest is needed.  One notices that a baby sometimes cries heavily before going to sleep.  Grief takes us to the top of the hill and then lets us walk back down slowly, peacefully.  It helps relieve the person who is in sorrow and leads him or her toward acceptance of the phenomenon of death, separation and love."