Of This and Other Worlds

We Jews still do it. But it's a progression: you sit shiva, remaining at home, sitting on a low stool, and other people visit and bring food and talk about the dead person for seven days. For a year you attend services and stand to recite Yahrzeit (blessing for the dead which never actually talks about the dead; it's more along the lines of "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord"). (More traditionally and among more observant, you attend services every day anyway; the difference then would just be whether you stand and recite that prayer. A level down in observance, you're likely to attend services more often than you normally would just to say Yahrzeit.) And then every year, you stand again to recite that prayer on the anniversary of the death.

I tend to think i's a very sane and sensible way to grieve and acknowledge grieving, myself. I felt a little more bereft for not being there to shit shiva after a recent family death, probably more than for not being there at the funeral. (But I had managed to visit the person just a couple months before he died, and talk to him a few days before, which were probably more important.)