I've been thinking a lot about Alzarian culture lately, specifically in relation to deaths and mourning.
From what I can tell from Full Circle (I haven't read/listened to any EU stuff so all this comes purely from the show) Alzarians are expected to be pretty emotionally detached in favour of communal good and doing their jobs. I think the best example of this comes from the expectations as to how Login should move on from his daughter, Keara, supposedly dying. The period between her "death" and him moving on (or at least pretending to move on) seems to be incredibly short; I'd say maybe a couple of hours or possibly even less. And yet, this is seen as perfectly normal—good, even. The Deciders explicitly ask him about his daughter's death when giving him the role of Third Decider, and the response that allows him to take on that role is one of indifference: he says she was a disruptive influence and appears completely unbothered. So, mourning on Alzarius is probably expected to be either very, very short and quick, or to be done completely privately.
It could be argued that this is partially due to the Alzarians' focus on community, which Keara (being one of the Outlers) was actively breaking away from and working against, so her death is not a loss to the community, and so she is not mourned as a regular member of the community would be, but I think this is only true to a lesser extent. We don't really have any examples of reactions to deaths of ordinary members of the community, the only ones we really see any response to are Keara's presumed one, Decider Draith's and Varsh's. Now, two of these people are Outlers, but Decider Draith was at the very top of the social hierarchy as First Decider, however his death too is treated with complete apathy. The only thing really mentioned is about promoting the Second Decider and appointing a new Third Decider. This is entirely focused on positions and keeping the society running efficiently, with no regard for Draith's actual life and being. However, this too could be considered atypical because Deciders are isolated from the regular community, as seen by Keara saying that her father becoming a Decider makes her an orphan. This implies that Deciders have to sever all personal connections with individual members of the community so that they can be impartial when making decisions. This means that Draith wouldn't have had regular connections with friends or family, so he wouldn't have had anyone who would have mourned him as anything other than a leader, which is likely to be much more unemotional than mourning someone you know personally.
Therefore, the best example we have of typical Alzarian mourning for a close friend or family member is Adric mourning for Varsh. He is visibly upset by his brother's death and remains fairly somber and withdrawn for the rest of the serial—not that there's all that much left of it after Varsh dies, but I'm working with what I have here. However, he too seems to move on fairly quickly, given that he never brings this up again (in fact, the only time it's even said again that Adric had a brother is when the Doctor mentions him at the start of Time Flight). This again implies that Alzarians are expected to mourn quickly and privately. Interestingly though, we do see one custom from Varsh's death that we don't see on other occasions. When Draith dies, there's no body, the same with Keara's supposed demise. I'd also suspect that, given the focus on community, most Alzarians have very few individual possessions, so it's unlikely that either of them would have had anything of particular importance that they didn't carry around with them. This creates interesting implications about personal belongings such as Adric's Badge for Mathematical Excellence (yes, that did require capitalisation [to me]) and the Outlers' marsh belts. These are used as symbols of status, and seem to be some of the only personal things that these characters have beyond their clothes (and, in the Outlers' cases, knives). When Varsh dies, Keara gives his marsh belt to Adric, saying that Varsh would want him to have it. This suggests a potential mourning custom similar to the division of possessions amongst family and friends that many cultures have on Earth. However, since Alzarians have so few individual belongings it is unlikely for there really to be a similar division. I like to imagine that it's more a case of the person's most important possession going to the person that they loved the most—in this case, Varsh's marsh belt going to Adric. Adric keeps the belt for the entirety of the rest of his time on the show; we even see him clutching onto it in the moments before he dies. So, even though Adric doesn't talk about his brother anymore, he still keeps him close in his own way, and he's obviously thinking about him in his final moments.
You would think, given that his only friends are from three completely different planets, none of which are even in the same universe as his own, that Adric therefore would be mourned in a very un-Alzarian way. However, an important thing to remember is that Alzarius was meant to mirror Gallifrey; indeed Adric himself was meant to mirror a young Doctor. So, the Doctor's way of mourning (which is imposed on Tegan and Nyssa) is very similar to that of an Alzarian. He seems to move on shockingly quickly (at least, shockingly for the show's human audience) and rarely mentions him again. He mourns privately, but doesn't seem completely able to process and actually move on—it feels more like he's just repressing and running away, two of the Doctor's specialties. There's also a similar moment to Adric clutching the marsh belt when Five remembers his companions before he regenerates, with his last word being 'Adric'. Thanks to the cultural similarities between Alzarius and Gallifrey, Adric was actually mourned in a very Alzarian way. This also extends to my theory about possessions. Adric's most important possession is his Badge for Mathematical Excellence (the capitals are important to me, okay?), which does go to the person he loved the most—the Doctor. Of course, it gets smashed when it's used to defeat the Cyber Leader, but I believe that the Doctor would have kept the pieces, so this custom too is preserved.
The Doctor also goes so far as to say that him abruptly moving on from Adric's death is what Adric himself would have wanted—a conclusion he probably drew from his own observations of how Alzarius operated and how Adric mourned. He claims that "[Adric] wouldn't want us to mourn unnecessarily", which he probably mentally justifies by recalling how emotionally repressed Alzarian culture was, as well as Adric's own quiet, private way of grieving. However, I think this is less of an actual reason for the Doctor's behaviour and more of an excuse. The Doctor wants to move on as quickly as possible because he can't properly deal with his emotions without also unlocking a massive load of things that he wants to ignore (including his own feelings towards Adric [Doctor you cannot deny that that was a father-son dynamic] and the way that his treatment of Adric might have assisted in his decision to stay on the freighter). He doesn't actually consider that these Alzarian standards that he's upholding reflect a culture that Adric was desperate to get away from. Yes, Adric also upholds these same standards for grieving, but Adric has never known any other way. When Varsh dies, he's never left Alzarius before—heck, he's probably never left the area around the Starliner. Adric is a fifteen (ish) year old who's just lost the only family he had left, so he's grieving the only way that he actually knows how to. That doesn't mean that that's how he wants to be for the rest of his life; he's just trying to cope. The Doctor fails to acknowledge that Adric simply did not like Alzarius and ran away the first chance he got, so saying that he wouldn't want to be mourned because that was the Alzarian way of doing things is, in my mind at least, an oversimplification at best and downright incorrect at worst.
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