Some researchers suggest The Plague is where a decline in grief rituals in the West began.
high death toll impeded normal grief rituals and last rites to be given for the dead
ignorance about the cause of death made people hesitant to touch bodies of deceased for fear of contracting the disease.
This was counter to the traditions at the time, in which families
bathed the bodies at home after they passed,
laid them out on the bed,
invited folks over,
held religious ceremonies, and
planned the burial of their loved one with the local priest in the church’s cemetery.
The Decameron is one record of life with The Plague, "its hundred stories,
shared in ten days by ten young people escaping the Plague
in mid-14th-century Florence, it combines sheer entertainment with a meaningful
humanistic message. A tribute to human ingenuity, an epic masterpiece of a rising,
dynamic mercantile society that pursues pleasure while being threatened by sudden extinction,
the Decameron can be read as a transgressive and escapist manual of behavior as well as a breviary
of moral predicaments intended for a secular, unprejudiced reader."
-https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/the_project/about.php
The Victorian Era Made Grief & Death Fashionable
“It was during this time that there was a flourishing of funeral-related businesses including
coffin makers,
embalmers,
gravediggers
It was also during this time that burials
were moved to large parks in the country as
the cities no longer had room to continue burying the dead near their homes.”
The Rise of Science: Families Exchange Priests for Doctors
A Western Obsession with Everlasting Life – And What Happens to Us
When Our Loved Ones Don’t Achieve It
The Most Fascinating Grief Rituals Around the World
The Native American Lakota Grief Ritual & Rites Ceremony