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In a ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ documentary to be shown in the spring, Rio Ferdinand has said that he has yet to ‘grieve properly’ for his wife, who died of cancer in May of 2015. She was 34 years old and the mother of their three children. ‘I’ve not given myself the time to sit down and really flush everything out’ he said. I admire Rio Ferdinand’s honesty, and indeed bravery, in speaking out on this subject. One of the things that is often said about bereavement is that it is personal and private – but of course, what that really seems to mean is that we, as a society, would generally prefer it to be personal and private. Certainly the bereaved often experience acts of acknowledgment and kindness. But when writing about the death of his wife, Julian Barnes referred to a group of his friends as ‘The Silent Ones’ – they thought the best thing to do under the circumstances was not to mention her at all. All too often we are chiefly embarrassed by other’s losses, and don’t know what to say or do in response to their expressions of sadness. The well known nostrum that there are stages to grief can seem permissive, but it can just as well be read as expressing our fervent wish that the bereaved will adjust and move on according to a set timetable, for our sake as much as for theirs. How Britain arrived at a sort of ‘least said, soonest mended’ attitude to death requires a bit of explaining. The Victorians, as we know, did things quite differently – we like to think of them as rather repressed, but they certainly weren’t repressed in their grieving. One explanation for the radical change from then to now points to the First World War as a critical moment – the patterns of mourning and condolence which had prevailed until then, came to seem quite unsustainable, and bad for national morale, in the face of unprecedented loss of life. Whether or not that was a key turning point, somehow we have ended up almost privatizing bereavement, so that on the morning after the funeral, it can sometimes seem to the bereaved that they are being left to get on with it by themselves, as the rest of us, with our ineptitude around death, prefer to keep mum. I often hear at funerals and at memorial services that poetic passage from the book of Ecclesiastes that tells us that ‘to everything there is a season - . . . a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance.’ Of course, a father or mother, left with children to care for, really hasn’t got much time for anything I imagine – so it is perhaps hardly surprising that Rio Ferdinand feels, barely two years on, that he has grieving yet to do. His honesty about his bereavement deserves an honest acknowledgment from the rest of us, that really we ought never to assume that someone else’s mourning is over and done with.