An article on Salon this morning discusses the dearth of historical fiction about Queen Victoria, despite her fascinating life. There is one fiction about her life that’s managed to persist, however — that she slept with her dead husband, her beloved Prince Albert. While there isn’t much to back up this claim of historical gossip, Victoria did mourn for Albert for the rest of her life, engaging in some elaborate Victorian mourning rituals.

The Victorians took mourning seriously. For a rundown, check out the always fantastic Victoriana.com. Partly, it seems, these customs were a burden — funeral and mourning customs were expensive, and the poor couldn’t even afford to buy outfits of black crape, instead dyeing the few garments they owned. Society judged you on how you comported yourself after the death of a spouse or family member. Even if you had an unhappy marriage and were happy to be free of its bonds, you still were expected to uphold the outer semblance of grief.

But partly, these rituals and symbols were a way of acknowledging to the world your state of sadness and your respect for the dead. You had loved and then lost a spouse or a parent or a child. And when someone else saw you in a social situation, sad-eyed in your black veil, he or she would know how much of an effort daily life was for you and perhaps extend the hand of compassion.

Meghan O’Rourke wrote a great series in Slate earlier this year about the process of grieving. In it, she says:

Many Americans don’t mourn in public anymore—we don’t wear black, we don’t beat our chests and wail. We may—I have done it—weep and rail privately, in the middle of the night. But we don’t have the rituals of public mourning around which the individual experience of grief were once constellated.

And in the weeks since my mother died, I have felt acutely the lack of these rituals. I was not prepared for how hard I would find it to re-enter the slipstream of contemporary life, our world of constant connectivity and immediacy, so ill-suited to reflection. I envy my Jewish friends the ritual of saying kaddish—a ritual that seems perfectly conceived, with its built-in support group and its ceremonious designation of time each day devoted to remembering the lost person.

O’Rourke goes on to explore what it means to her to grieve in a series of installments that I highly recommend reading, but it’s an interesting question for all of us: How do you grieve in a culture that doesn’t have any ceremonies for it? If you dressed all in black for a year starting today, people would probably say that you were making an unseemly show of your grief (or maybe that you’d gone goth).

It’s common after a great loss for a person to feel surprised or disgusted that the world keeps turning, that life goes on despite the fact that his or her world has completely shattered. You may have lost the love of your life, but the mail will keep coming, you’ll still need to go out and buy milk, and the electric company won’t be too sorrowful over your loss to remind you that your bill is overdue.

Harper’s offered another piece of advice to its 1886 readers (also from Victoriana.com):

Still less should mourning prevent one from taking proper recreation: the more the heart aches, the more should one try to gain cheerfulness and composure, to hear music, to see faces which one loves: this is a duty, not merely a wise and sensible rule.

Just for fun, a trailer for “The Young Victoria,” starring the very wonderful Emily Blunt (and is that the music from “Love Actually” that I hear?):