Why Do We Cover the Mirrors when Someone Dies?

Come with me into a house where someone has just died.

It's an ordinary house, those types that existed by the thousands across 19th-century England and the American South, and if you'd walked into it an hour after the last breath was drawn, you would have found the family doing something that had nothing to do with the body in the next room and everything to do with the room you were currently standing in. Someone would already be moving through the house with a bedsheet or a length of black crape, draping it over the parlor mirror, over the one in the front hall, over the small round mirror by the washstand upstairs. Walk into a Jewish home during shiva and you'll notice it immediately: every mirror in the house has a sheet over it. Ask, and you'll get an answer, and if you ask the next family sitting shiva down the street, you might get a slightly different one. In a different part of the world, someone might answer that it is because the soul is still in the house, and it doesn't know yet that it's dead, and if it catches its own reflection before it understands what's happened to it, it might not be able to leave.

That was Victorian custom, and it wasn't a minor, half-remembered folk gesture tucked into the margins of a larger ritual. It was standard practice, done alongside stopping every clock in the house and drawing every curtain, a whole choreography built around the idea that a house holding a death was operating on suspended time, and needed to look the part. The mirrors came down first, usually, because the fear attached to them was the most immediate. A soul newly separated from a body was usually thought to be confused, disoriented, capable of becoming permanently trapped in glass the way a fly gets trapped between a window and a screen, present but unable to find its way back out into the world it was supposed to be leaving.

Travel a few thousand miles and several centuries in either direction and you'll find the same gesture, minus the reasoning that produced it in England.

In the Jewish household observing shiva, the mirrors go dark the moment death occurs, not at the funeral, and they stay covered for the full seven days of mourning that follow. Ask why, and you won't hear anything about trapped souls. You'll hear more about vanity, and that this is a week that's supposed to be turned entirely inward, toward grief and prayer and the people who've gathered to sit with you, and about how a house full of mirrors is a house that keeps inviting you to check your own face, which is exactly what a week of formal mourning is designed to interrupt. The gesture is identical to the Victorian one, but the theology couldn’t be any more different.

Travel to a Chinese household in mourning and the mirrors come down again, and again for a different reason still. Here the fear isn't about a soul getting stuck. It's about the living catching an accidental glimpse of the coffin, or of the deceased's own face, reflected back at them from an ordinary piece of household glass, an event considered bad luck at minimum and, in some tellings, a quiet omen that another death in the family isn't far behind. Remember, the Victorian mirror traps the dead inside it. The Chinese mirror threatens to show the living something they were never meant to see. Two very different dangers, solved by exactly the same sheet thrown over exactly the same glass.

Push further east, into Eastern Orthodox and Slavic tradition, and the timeline stretches out even longer. Here the belief holds that a soul sort of hovers near its household for forty full days after death before it finally, completely departs, which means in some of these communities the mirrors don't come down for a week, the way they do during shiva, or for the few days a Victorian household observed. They can stay covered for the entire forty-day span the tradition assigns to a soul's slow, reluctant leave-taking.

What should stop you, reading all four of these traditions side by side, even if you don’t believe any one of the explanations, is the coincidence, if that's even the right word for something that happens this consistently. Jewish households in Eastern Europe, English families draping crape over gilt-framed parlor mirrors, villages in rural China, Orthodox communities counting off forty days, Irish Catholic households, parts of the American South where the custom continues to survive. None of these traditions were borrowing from each other, and none of them had much occasion to compare notes across the distances AND centuries separating them. And yet every one of them arrived, independently, at the identical physical gesture: cover the glass.

There's a version of this story that stops there and treats the coincidence as proof of something genuinely uncanny sitting underneath human grief, some shared intuition about mirrors and thresholds and the thin membrane between the living and the recently dead. I don't think you need the uncanny explanation to find this satisfying, though. I do think the plainer answer is sitting in plain sight in every single one of these traditions. To get there, we need to stop asking what people believed and start asking what covering a mirror actually does to a room.

A house that has just lost someone is alread unmoored. The ordinary machinery of the day like clocks, routines, getting dressed and checking your collar in the hall mirror on the way out the door, all of it suddenly reads as obscene, a continuation of normal life in that house would feel wrong. Stopping the clocks shows that time itself has been suspended. Drawing the curtains announces that the outside world is being held at a distance for now. And covering the mirrors removes the one object in the house guaranteed to keep confronting you with your own face, your own ordinary vanity, at the exact moment that you are, well, ill-equipped to carry it.

Whether you dress that function up as a trapped soul, an omen of bad luck, an act of religious modesty, or a forty-day rite of passage, the mechanism underneath every version does roughly the same work. It gives the people gathered there something concrete to do with their hands in the first unbearable hour, a sheet to find, a mirror to reach, a small physical task standing in for the much larger, much harder task of simply sitting with what's happened. And it tells everyone who walks through the door afterwards, without a single word of explanation needed, that this house is not currently operating on the rules that governed it before.

The mirror itself, of course, is a Lannister and doesn’t concern itself with the opinion of the looker. It just goes on doing what mirrors do, showing back exactly what was standing in front of it, while indifferent to whether a soul was trapped inside the glass or whether a family was simply too raw that week to bear looking at their own reflection. And somehow, independently, in four unconnected corners of the world, the humans there reached the conclusion that glass needs to earn its keep by staying dark for a while.

Writer’s Bio

Charlie Evanovich is a writer and works as an editor at SaPo journal. His work appears in Rust + Moth, Spillway, Moonpark Review and elsewhere. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of The Net.