Category Archives: Old age

Retirement, seniority, death, funerals, remembrances

Grandma’s Indian Food

Nationality: United States
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Language: English

Text: “Whenever I visit my grandma’s house in Seattle, she always makes a plethora of my favorite Indian foods. She will begin cooking several hours before we even arrive as the dough has to be made by hand. She makes traditional north Indian foods such as aloo sabzi (broken potatoes), raita (yogurt sauce), gulab jamun (syrup dough balls), and pooris (a ball of fried dough used as a vessel for everything else). Despite how she is feeling or when we get there, she always has food waiting.”


Context: This ritual was shared by the informant, D, during a discussion about family and food traditions. D emphasized how her grandmother in Seattle consistently prepares traditional Indian dishes whenever they visit. D shared how even when her grandma isn’t feeling her best, she always cooks, making the experience a meaningful act of love and care. 

Analysis: This is a food-centered ritual that reflects themes of hospitay and cultural continuity. By cooking traditional Indian food, especially labor-intensive dishes like pooris, D’s grandmother is both expressing her love and maintaining the family’s cultural identity. Given that she will prepare the food regardless of circumstances, this ritual turns food into a symbolic gesture of love that further strengthens familial bonds. This example shows how culinary traditions can help both deepen familial relationships and also preserve heritage. 

Jewish Funeral/Death/Graveyard Rituals/Traditions

Nationality: Israeli-American
Age: 17
Occupation: High School Student
Residence: Bellevue, Washington
Language: English

Text:

Jewish funerals don’t use coffins and instead the body is just buried in the ground. The purpose of this is to return the body to the ground where it came from. Gravestones are lying down on the ground over the body. The ten commandments on two stones are placed where the head of the person would be. The graves all face Jerusalem. There is a lit candle at the back of the grave that symbolizes their soul. For seven days after the death (called the shiva), the entire family sits in the house of the deceased. They don’t work and don’t cook but just share stories of the person. The door is meant to always be open so that neighbors can come in to bring food and hear stories. The full mourning period is thirty days where there are other restrictions such as not shaving.

For graveyards, you always have to exit in a different way than how you entered, otherwise the spirits will follow you out. When someone visits a grave, they find a rock to leave as a gift to the deceased.

Context:

The informant is from an Orthodox Jewish family. They heard a lot of these traditions/rituals from their parents and the community around them or from visiting the graves of their family members. The Informant said they haven’t experienced a shiva before but that they regret missing it for their recently deceased grandmother. The informant likes the concept of the shiva because it is a celebration of life and remembering a person rather than being sad. They also like the graveyard ritual of leaving a different way than how you entered because it is fun, not because they believe in ghosts. The informant said that as a kid, they would paint rocks to gift to their deceased family members as a way to commemorate the things they remembered about the person.

Analysis:

The placement of gravestones on top of the body could be interpreted as them keeping the person in the ground. As the culture also is afraid of spirits following a person out of a graveyard then it is not impossible that there could also be a fear of someone rising out of the ground. Putting the person in the ground without a coffin and pointing them towards Jerusalem likely both have religious significance. A person might not be able to rest in Jewish culture unless they have no barrier between them and the Earth. Jerusalem is the promised land to Jewish people so pointing them towards the most significant place within the religion might be to help the spirit back to there in death.

The shiva is a community building event. By creating an expectation for a family to not work or cook, it forces neighbors to come by and support them. Leaving the door open means that everyone is welcome. Community has to come together in times of mourning and it makes it impossible for someone to grieve alone or for someone to die without community remembrance. The shiva is also a time for celebration rather than just sadness. Remembering a person by talking about stories and good memories helps people to feel a sense of resolution rather than tragedy. The seven day period blocks out specific time that is meant for mourning/celebration, giving the community time to process rather than forcing people to move on without working through their emotions. The longer thirty day mourning period likely acts as a reminder of who has been lost and honoring their death through daily actions. The informant felt like they had missed out on part of the mourning process because they missed a shiva, showing its importance for the processing of emotions in family members of the deceased.

Leaving a rock on the grave of someone deceased acts as a way to leave them a gift as well as a way to keep them in your mind. The visitor is meant to find the rock as they go to visit a person’s grave so they have to think about the person and what they might want. The informant mentioned how they found this to be a fun tradition, especially as a child, as it was a way to engage with death through memory and love rather than grief.

Leaving the graveyard in a different way than how you entered is an example of apotropaic magic as well as a prohibitive action. Entering and exiting the same way could bring on something bad but by changing something when you exit, you protect yourself from harm. Death is a scary concept so many people would want to protect themselves from harm while leaving a place that is full of it.

Mano Po

AGE – 23

Date_of_performance: april 28th 2025

Language: Tagalog, German, Romanian/Filipino 

Nationality: Bisaya

Primary Language: English

Text:

“I heard this from the teachings of my family from generation after generation, This is where I learned it from. Tradition-wise wise we bless the elderly and help others like family members. The point is about having a strong bond with family and blessing them, taking care of the elderly and the young ones, etc. Mano po is a blessing we perform to show respect to our elders. We gently grab the hand of the eldest person and move it to our foreheads. You don’t normally do this to strangers, as they might not want to be perceived as old; this is more so for families of friends, partners, and yourself. “

Analysis:

Translated, the word “mano” means hand in Spanish, while the “Po” is a Filipino honorific. Together, they summarize the ritual performed by Philippinos, which can be traced back to 1493-1898 with a book called “The Philippine Islands.” Other countries have also adopted this ritual, such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei. As Marcel said, it’s tradition to greet someone old with Mano Po, as it’s a great form of respect for someone.

清明节 (Qīngmíng Jié) Tomb Sweeping Day

Title: 清明节 (Qīngmíng Jié)

AGE: 55
Date_of_performance: April 4, 2025
Language: Mandarin Chinese
Nationality: United States (lived in china for 20 years)
Occupation: Employee of the British Council in China
Primary Language: English
Residence: Beijing, China, currently Toronto, Canada

Folklore Explanation:
“Qingming is a public holiday, so everything slows down for the day. You probably remember—we’d get the day off, and if we stayed in the city, you’d notice how quiet it felt in the morning. Most families would head out early to visit the graves of their relatives. You’d see them cleaning the tombstones, pulling weeds, and laying out offerings—usually food, flowers, or incense. Some people burned paper items, like imitation money or little paper houses, as offerings to the ancestors.

But it wasn’t just a solemn day. After the rituals, families would often go on long walks together—some even make a trip of it. A lot of people leave the city and go into the surrounding countryside or small towns where the holiday is more deeply rooted. You could see whole groups picnicking, flying kites, or gathering for a big meal. It’s a day about remembrance, but also about being together as a family. The weather’s usually mild by then, and it kind of marks the real start of spring.”

Analysis:

Qingming Festival is a form of calendar custom and ritual folklore, rooted in ancestral worship practices common in Chinese folk religion, Confucian values, and Taoist and Buddhist influences. It is an example of commemorative folklore, observed at a fixed point in the solar calendar (around April 4–6). The festival’s customs—tomb-sweeping, food offerings, and symbolic paper burning—are passed down intergenerationally, typically through oral tradition and communal practice, rather than through formal education. While deeply spiritual, Qingming is not tied to a single organized religion but reflects a broader cultural reverence for lineage, harmony with nature, and seasonal change. It continues to be transmitted through family practices, media portrayals, school education, and public rituals, maintaining a strong presence in both rural and urban areas of China.

Pagpag – Filipino Funeral Custom

Nationality: Filipino
Age: 51
Occupation: IT Help Desk
Residence: Naperville, IL
Language: Tagalog

Text:

“Pagpag” in Tagalog translates to “Dust off”

“If you go to a wake/funeral, you shouldn’t go straight home. You have to go and stop by somewhere else – for example a coffee shop, mall, or restaurant.”

Context:

The performer didn’t experience this tradition until his Lolo died, and it he never really questioned it, because it was common for his Filipino relatives to eat after any gathering. It was something the people he grew up with just understood. He grew up in the Philippines (rural Luzon) until he was 8, then moved to America where his family still followed this tradition.

“That way you wouldn’t bring death to the household. If there is a ghost that latches on from the funeral home or just death in general, you don’t want it to follow you home. You don’t just go to a place and drive by, you have to stop and spend some time there.” “In the Philippines, there weren’t really places to go before going home. Now whenever we go to a funeral, we do Pag pag.”

Analysis:

Pagpag is rooted in spirital folk belief of liminality: the belief that events such as death and spiritally charged and potentially dangerous. By not going home right away, people seek to disrupt the path of wandering spirits and ensure their household won’t become haunted. This ties into Filipino animism and folk Catholicism which is a blend of indigenous spiritual beleifs and Catholic concepts of afterlife (brought over in the 1500s by Spanish colonizers).

Another great value of Filipinos is community. By avoiding going home right away, this practice also forces community through shared mourning and offers emotional decompression after an emotionally taxing event. Even if it’s not tied to superstition and the fear of vengeful spirits, societies tend to pact together after devastation just to cheer each other up as it’s human nature which has been passed down across generations.