The Rites of Passage We Are Losing

My sister Donna Hunt Lafreniere

My sister died.

Even writing that sentence feels unreal. Even though she had been sick for far longer than anyone should have to suffer, when I learned she had passed, it still arrived as something I was not prepared for. Maybe we are never prepared. Maybe that is part of the human condition itself. I am the youngest in my family. Our family is complex; we have different fathers. My sister had existed in my life for as long as I have existed in the world. And yet, because of illness — hers and mine — and because of the circumstances of my life over the last five years, I was not able to be in relationship with her in the ways I would have wanted.

That realization has been devastating.

After my accident in Germany during an artist residency, everything changed.

Germany was never meant to be my permanent home. I had the privilege of obtaining a visa and ultimately remaining, but staying was not the original plan. After the accident, recovery became my reality—along with survival and isolation.

Five years later, I am still living inside the consequences of that moment.

Recently, while joking with a friend, I said, “Make sure you pack well when you go away.” Humor has always been one of my ways of softening difficult truths. But beneath the joke was something very real: we never truly know when we are seeing someone for the last time.

That is the unbearable thing about grief. Not only the loss itself, but the realization that there are conversations unfinished, embraces postponed, visits delayed under the assumption that there would always be more time.

But the truth is, many of us are increasingly living in conditions where our most essential human moments—our rituals and rites of passage—are made inaccessible or denied to us.

Being away from the United States while my family mourns and celebrates my sister’s life has forced me to think deeply about rites of passage — the sacred transitions that have historically held human communities together: birth, illness, aging, death, mourning, reconciliation, gathering.

More and more, people are denied participation in these crucial life transitions. The fabric of shared meaning and community is unraveling.

Not because they do not care. Not because they are selfish. But because the systems we live within make it difficult, and sometimes impossible, to show up for one another.

Decisions about whether we can be present for loved ones should not depend on access to healthcare. They should not depend on immigration status, economic precarity, or fear of detention. They should not depend on whether someone can afford a flight, take time off work, or survive without medical coverage.

And yet, this is exactly how many people are living.

For days after my sister’s passing, I carried guilt. Guilt for not being there, for the time lost between us, and for the ways sickness altered our relationship.

But slowly, another truth emerged.

These conditions are not individual failures—they are produced and enforced by larger systems that dictate access, opportunities, and our ability to be present for one another.

These are not isolated misfortunes. They are systemic forces that undermine our ability to maintain the rituals that make us human.

My experience is personal, but it is also painfully common.

We are living in a society where the social fabric has been worn thin. Human interaction is increasingly replaced by technology. Economic instability fractures relationships. Political polarization isolates us from one another. Healthcare systems fail people daily. Food, water, air, and environments become more toxic while more bodies become sick, exhausted, and unsupported.

There are countless forces separating people from one another, often so gradually that we barely notice the rupture occurring until grief exposes it.

In a short memorial text I wrote for my sister shortly after she died, I ended with the sentence: " Time hasn’t been good to us.”

Weeks later, I realize something deeper.

It is not only time.

This world has not been good to us.

We are fragile and resilient bodies trying to survive inside systems that erode the conditions necessary for care, intimacy, healing, and presence. More people are finding themselves isolated from family, aging alone, or unable to care for loved ones or gather meaningfully around life’s transitions.

We are losing the ability to participate in rites of passage because systemic forces—legal, economic, political—separate us from each other, erode our communities, and undermine collective mourning and celebration.

And yet those rites belong to all of us.

Rites of passage are not luxuries, but collective foundations essential to our humanity. Denying them—whether by policy or neglect—strips us of something vital.

I am grateful for my sister and for the life we shared together. I am grateful for her existence. But I also need to say this clearly, for myself and for others carrying similar grief:

These conditions are not solely our fault.

What we are experiencing is the result of a long process of separation — from one another, from community, from care, from slowness, from ritual, and from the understanding that human beings were never meant to survive alone.

And perhaps grief reveals this more clearly than anything else.