A wave of anxiety and grief swept through the Persian Empire following the decree of annihilation. Even though the royal letters were sealed, the terrible news quickly spread. How the secret became public is a matter of discussion. The mere sight of the royal messengers carrying the sealed books may have been enough to broadcast the danger [רש״י]. Alternatively, the king's own ministers might have leaked the secret to the Jews [צאינה וראינה]. It is also possible that the painful cry Mordechai raised in Shushan simply traveled by word of mouth across the provinces [מלבי״ם, ישע אלהים].
The threat itself carried two distinct aspects. The spoken element consisted of the oral rumors and slander Haman actively spread to incite public hatred against the Jews. The second aspect was the formal law, the actual written command ordering their complete destruction [אבן עזרא, יוסף אבן יחיא, ביאור שטיינזלץ].
In response to this overwhelming threat, a profound period of mourning began. This sorrow was fundamentally different from normal grief in two distinct ways. Usually, sadness over a loss lessens as time passes. Here, however, the grief only intensified day by day as the scheduled date of destruction drew closer. Furthermore, during standard mourning, surviving family members offer comfort to one another. Under this decree, every single person was condemned to death without exception, leaving no one in a position to comfort anyone else [תורה תמימה, ישע אלהים, מנות הלוי].
This was a continuous, prolonged state of grief and repentance. For this reason, the spontaneous act of tearing one's clothes, which typically happens only in the initial shock of hearing bad news, was not the focus of this ongoing sorrow [אור חדש]. Instead, the mourning translated into sustained actions of fasting, crying, and the recitation of formal lamentations [אבן עזרא, עמנואל הרומי]. The six specific forms of grief adopted by the people, which included mourning, fasting, crying, wailing, sackcloth, and ashes, served as a spiritual atonement for the six days the Jews had previously spent enjoying the feast of King Ahasuerus [מנות הלוי].
To facilitate this massive wave of repentance, sackcloth and ashes were physically spread out in the city streets, providing a public space where people could dress in them, sit, and lie down in sorrow [רלב״ג, אבן עזרא, עמנואל הרומי, ביאור שטיינזלץ]. While the primary approach among commentators is that these beds of sackcloth and ashes were used by the general public, a unique perspective suggests that these specific materials were not meant for the masses, but were instead reserved exclusively for the greatest leaders of the generation [מנות הלוי].