Over the past one-hundred years or so, traditional mourning practices have slowly fallen out of favour in the West. Wearing black for extended periods, keeping the anniversary, or remembering the dead at family celebrations were all intended to help mourners “carry the weight” of their grief by making a place for the dead in individual and community life. This is now being displaced by one that focuses and more on liberating the bereaved from the burden of continued bonds to the deceased. This lecture argues that there is a rarely acknowledged problem with this development, which can have severely detrimental effects on both communities and individual lives.