In the predawn hours of July 4, a small, blue house just outside Binghamton, New York, caught fire. James Sitek, chief of the West Colesville Fire Company, was one of the firefighters who responded to the blaze. Shortly after emerging from the building, he went into cardiac arrest. He was pronounced dead at the hospital later that day.The following week, more than 200 people attended Sitek’s funeral. New York Governor Kathy Hochul had ordered American flags on government buildings across the state to be lowered to half-staff in his honor. In Binghamton, the lowered flag was a potent sign of a community in mourning. Elsewhere in the state, though—100 miles to the west or the north or the east—it would likely have elicited only a shrug.Lowering the flag was once a relatively rare symbol of public mourning and respect. But Sitek’s flag lowering was the 21st in the state during the first seven months of this year—beginning with a month-long commemoration of President Jimmy Carter that started just before the new year and continuing with respects paid to, among others, four former members of Congress, two New York State Police officers, and a highway-maintenance supervisor for the state Department of Transportation.[Read: The space between mourning and grief]In the past 15 years, flags in New York have been lowered more than 250 times for a total of more than 850 days of public mourning. That equates to roughly one day a week.New York is not unique. States across the country now lower the flag for all manner of tragedies, as well as an array of annual federal observances, some of which—Peace Officers Memorial Day, for instance—many people do not realize exist.A ritual’s power does not lie in “the ritual itself, but in the meaning that people attach to it,” Nancy Berns, a sociologist at Drake University who studies grief, told me. Far from uniting us in common feeling, the sight of a lowered flag today is more likely to trigger a generalized sense of disquiet: Something bad has happened, just like it always does. Flag lowering has become a largely empty gesture, illegible to the broader public and ultimately ignored.The first widely recognized report of a flag being lowered to mark a death came in 1612, when a Greenlandic Inuit killed the British explorer James Hall with a spear, apparently in retaliation for his countrymen’s kidnapping of several Inuit on an earlier expedition. Hall’s ship, the Heart’s Ease, sailed back to London with the flag “hanging down, in token and sign of the death of Mr. Hall, our general,” a member of the crew wrote.The observance was used sparingly in early American history to mark significant deaths—George Washington’s, in 1799, Andrew Jackson’s, in 1845—or to express public approbation. Flags were brought to half-staff in 1765 to protest the Stamp Act, which imposed a British war tax on the colonists. Eighty-nine years later, Chicago shipowners lowered their flags when their senator opposed spending on key river and harbor projects.Such commemorations were, for the most part, spontaneous and locally initiated as part of broader demonstrations of public sorrow. “Minute guns are firing, and flags are lowered to half-mast on all public buildings and on the shipping,” a New Orleans journalist observed in 1852 after the death of the “Great Compromiser,” Senator Henry Clay. “Business is suspended, and the whole city, without distinction of party, join in the general grief.”Any high marks of universal sorrow were soon overshadowed by the devastation of the Civil War. In both the North and the South, loss was omnipresent, and flags were lowered to honor the dead during many of the remembrances that took place in the years after the war.It was not until 1954 that some uniformity was introduced to the practice. President Dwight Eisenhower, concerned about haphazard displays, established parameters that remain in effect today: 30 days at half-staff following the death of a president; 10 days for a vice president, Supreme Court chief justice, or speaker of the House of Representatives; and so on. He also gave the president discretion to bestow the honor more generally.[Read: Trump just made burning the flag a little easier]President Bill Clinton was the first to accelerate the trend nationally, according to Brandon Rottinghaus, a political scientist at the University of Houston who has studied presidential proclamations. Clinton signed National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day into law, directed that the flag should be lowered each year on Peace Officers Memorial Day, and was generally more liberal in his use of the gesture than his predecessors.Succeeding presidents have surpassed Clinton in frequency of flag lowering, and in some cases put their own imprint on the practice. President Barack Obama often called upon the symbol to recognize those killed in mass shootings. “There was a sense that polarization was rising and one option to lower the temperature was to bring the country together through these moments of reflection,” Rottinghaus told me.President Donald Trump, who has ordered the flag to half-staff seven times during his second term, has also honored victims of mass shootings, including those killed at a school in Minneapolis in August. His use of the gesture in other cases has been more partisan, marking the assassination of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, for example, but not that of Melissa Hortman, a Democratic lawmaker from Minnesota.Governors, though, have contributed the most to the trend over the years. In many states, the laws surrounding flag lowering are vague. In New York, the governor may honor any “public servant who, in the opinion of the local agency concerned, contributed to the community.” Such proclamations can be useful as a political gesture, one that costs a governor nothing to issue.The result is that EMTs, police officers, and highway-crew workers who die on the job now commonly receive the same honor once traditionally bestowed only on the nation’s great statesmen and military heroes.The order to lower the flag comes frequently, but is applied inconsistently. On the day of Sitek’s statewide honor, I drove past 20 public flagpoles—outside town halls, libraries, firehouses, schools, and parks—near my house in Rochester, about 150 miles from Binghamton. Only two of them had lowered their flag.I met a man named Rasheed Hayood walking by one of them. He didn’t know why the flag was at half-staff. But when I told him about Sitek, he said he supported the gesture. “He was doing good out here,” he said. “Those are the people we have to love.” Hayood turned out to be a security guard at a retirement home who often took it upon himself to lower the flag outside when he heard that a member of the military had died.The human impulse to grieve together is irrepressible. We sit shiva. We paint murals and print T-shirts. We dress in special clothes and drive in slow processions to cemeteries that serve as physical gathering places for mourners and the mourned alike. We understand that being a part of a community means that suffering must be shared.[Read: There are no ‘five stages’ of grief]Flag lowering, for the most part, no longer fulfills that purpose. Stacy Otto, a professor at the Illinois State College of Education who has written about public displays of grief, suggested that it can even be a way to evade the weight of that shared grief.“People are uncomfortable with other people dying,” she told me. “When we lower flags to half-staff, we can say we’re doing something and honoring people, but it’s kind of a grief lite. It’s grief with the pain removed.”Reducing the frequency of flag lowering could imbue the gesture with meaning once more. We could also embrace other kinds of public mourning: moments of silence at events; impromptu roadside shrines made of candles, photographs, or other personal mementos; and more lasting gestures such as renaming buildings and planting trees. “Different means of mourning are going to reach different people,” Berns, the sociologist, said.Sitek’s wife, Suzanne, told me that the lowered flags honoring her husband meant a lot to her as a proud American. Their son, Matthew, who is also a volunteer firefighter, said that it “was a very nice and courteous professional gesture” but one that his grief left him little energy to appreciate. More significant, he said, was the way community members rallied around the family in less public ways. When, in the days after his dad’s death, the pump on his mother’s well got knocked out in a storm, a squadron of firefighters showed up to help repair it.The procession taking James Sitek to his final resting place covered 10 miles, and flags were lowered along the way. But other honors spoke more clearly to his life: The white gloves and dress caps on the scores of first responders who attended the funeral. The gleam of carefully polished fire trucks in the July sun. The keening of bagpipes. And, as Sitek’s body was carried from the church, the tolling of the fire bell, indicating the end of his decades-long service.