Good Grief Episode Five: Weddings and Funerals

Blake Kasemeier
Sep 4, 2018 · 12 min read

At the beginning of 2018 I lost my mom to a very brief but brutal fight with lung cancer, she was 57, and no one (no one) saw it coming.

I began journaling my personal experience with grief, and eventually turned those journals into a podcast. The following is a transcript of my fifth episode. I hope this is helpful to you, because it truly has been for me.

From what I’ve learned, this process can be excruciatingly painful alone, but I think if we take the time to share our stories and lend our ears we can walk away with some Good Grief.

This week’s theme? Weddings and Funerals


Sitting alone in a bright event hall in Eagle Rock, California, I watched behind small reservoir of tears as one of my childhood best friends turned the corner in her seamless white wedding dress and took her paces down the aisle. I hadn’t always been a wedding cryer, or much of a cryer at all but in the months after my mom had passed away, I had a lot of work to do in the way of house training my emotions.

To be fair, the decision to attend this wedding was not an easy one to make:

  1. My mom was quite fond of Cathy, the woman getting married, and as recently as a few years back we had all made pizzas and drank wine together at my mom’s house. My mom was extremely happy for her.
  2. This wedding was exactly one week after my mom’s memorial
  3. My mom’s memorial was about five weeks after she’d passed
  4. And about six weeks before that, my mom, fiancé and I were looking at this very same event hall as a potential venue for my own wedding — it was one of the last “normal days” we had with my mom.

I am what you would call an extrovert, one of those freaks who would normally be excited by the prospect of attending a wedding alone but, in the wake of current events — I was small-talk-less, it was all going to be big talk, and nobody wants to big talk with strangers at a wedding (at least not until we’ve had enough to drink).

I could just imagine how the conversations would go:

Nice wedding guest:“Where are you from?”
Me: “Berkeley, but, actually I flew in about a week ago for my mom’s funeral.”

NWG: “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that, it’s great you got the time off work to be with your family though.”
Me: “Actually I got laid off a few days after she passed, and it’s mostly just me and my step dad, and a lot of unbearable idle time but thank you.”

Of course it didn’t go that bad.

Cathy in the upper right, me…in the white tux.

After the service, Cathy’s dad who I hadn’t seen since graduating high school, recognized me as the guy who had worn a platinum white tux to his daughter’s prom and, with the tact and finesse reserved only fathers of brides, discreetly gave me his condolences — there was a weight in his words of unimaginable empathy, perhaps it was just the day, the idea of dying before his own daughter’s wedding — before this incredible joy he was currently in the throws of.

I found my seat at what I had picked up was the cool kids table (thanks Cathy), not knowing anyone outside of recognizing them from social media, I wasn’t much to talk to. That isn’t to say that they didn’t make some valiant attempts to bring me in — I just really was not there. Eventually, someone took pity on me and engaged in a long talk about the evolution of the band the National until they could politely go find something more interesting to do.

At some point, the table cleared and I was alone, not sure for how long, but long enough for Cathy to find me, on the most important day of her life, and ask me to dance. I think Prince was playing, and we were the only two on the dance floor. It was a herculean act of compassion and grace on her part — we did not say much, dancing was plenty. Maybe it seems small, but it was like she was reminding me that as her friend, I had a an identity that was bigger than this tragedy — she gave me perspective, which seems like too small of a word for it, but I guess that’s what you’d call it.

Up until this day, I had been doing what I thought was really good. I hadn’t been ugly crying in public or hiding away in my dark apartment. I’d been functional, I’d even given a speech at my mom’s memorial packed with laughs and I’d gotten through it without so much as a crack in my voice. But this day was the first time that I realized that happiness and sadness are really poor indicators of my mental health or ability to cope with my grief.

See I really wanted to not be sad that day, and what I was discovering was that the way I felt was no longer a choice I could make or control — and while that on the surface may sound like some inspirational quote you’d find on Instagram, it was deeply unsettling to experience at one of your best friend’s weddings.


Weddings in America are a $72-Billion industry, with the average wedding costing north of $33,000 and the average price per guest around $260. That’s about 2.5 Billion weddings each year. In America, weddings and business are inseparable, in fact, weddings as we know them today — large-scale, Disney princess productions -have only existed for the last 200 years, prior to that, up until the early 19th century, they were relatively intimate happenings — more like transactions really — based on the relative economic benefit to be gained by both families they would have a small, mostly legal ceremony in the home of one of the parents, followed by a public announcement at church. The wedding industry is booming and every year the “standard” gets increasingly more elaborate, Bachelor/Bachelorette parties, rehearsal dinners, bespoke desserts, etc.

By contrast the funeral industry in America is in decline (insert pun here about the funeral business dying). As we become a more secular society, the need to have traditional November Rain-style wakes has tapered off dramatically, causing the cost of such events to sky rocket by more than 1300% in the last four decades — The average cost of a funeral in 1960 was $706, today it’s around $10,000. About 42% of people are cremated these days, in 1960 it was about 3.5%.


Our need for ceremony has not changed, but our relationship with mortality certainly has.

My family was not an exception, my mom didn’t have a will or a life insurance policy, we had no idea who to contact about her remains or how to divide up any assets.

If you are ever in this situation here is what will happen -

You will need to get an attorney to draft a will — you might go back and forth a few times depending on your situation, each revision will cost you money, you will need to have the attorney email you the will and ask the nice, but seriously underslept, people at the hospital to let you use their printer — you will feel both guilty and entitled at the same time, it’s ok, they deal with this sort of thing every day.

You will need to have the sick person sign it — now this is sort of tricky, because depending on their level of sedation at the time of the signature, the doctor will likely have to test their cognition to see of they are fit to sign:

Because my mom could not talk, her intensivist had her answer the following questions in writing:

Dr: “What year is it?”
Mom: 2018
Dr: “How old are you?”
Mom: “57”
Dr: “Where are we?”
Mom: Glendale.
Dr: “Who is the president?”

To which my mom replied by setting the pen down looking the doctor in the eye and very deliberately nodding her head “No” — she was not going to use the very little energy she had left to write “Donald Trump’s” name.

She passed with flying colors.

After you have the legal stuff squared away, you will need to figure out what the sick person wants to have done to their remains — heads up, this is a hard fucking conversation, honestly it will be harder on you than them.

My mom asked that anything usable be donated to science or medicine, and then she asked to be cremated and turned into a tree.

Next a social worker will come talk to you about what to expect and give you options for the remains — you will not remember anything they say to you as it will be drowned out by your own sadness and shock.

Next a priest will come regardless of your beliefs — you will be very nice to this person, but also harbor a deep resentment for their ability to believe in an afterlife or any kind of divine order in which taking your mom so young and fast is part of god’s plan.

You will tell yourself that these are all simply precautionary measures, and there is still hope, because giving up hope will feel like some kind of awful betrayal. You will toggle between this feeling and a feeling that you need to be realistic about the likely outcome in order to protect yourself.

You will stay in the hospital for the following hours, you will watch as the nurses who loved your mom, and promised her she’d dance at your wedding kiss her head and brake down in front of you. Their vulnerability will make you feel intensely empathetic for all human suffering.

You will hold her hand until the end.

Someone you have never seen before will come and make an official declaration, then you will wait until they take the body — it wont take that long. Your mom’s best friends will take care of much of this for you, and you will be so so immeasurably grateful for them.

You should also ask for many copies of the death certificate — life goes on, there is work to be done.


My mom had two weddings — I attended both.

The first, to my father, took place at Saint Luke’s Episcopal Church in Hot Springs Arkansas in January of 1983 — My mom was about 8-weeks pregnant. The young couple had flown back home from Hollywood for the event and though the circumstances weren’t traditional, the bride and groom were very much in love. According to the Hot Springs Sentinel Record, it was an intimate event, and the couple were very done-up (about 2/3s of the article is about my mom’s wedding dress). My folks tried very hard to bury their southern roots when they moved to California, and they were clearly compensating with their very hip duds.

I don’t think we should call it a shotgun wedding, but the eminent baby bump was definitely a catalyst. The story of my mom and dad’s courtship and eventual divorce is legendary and involves a lot of Talking Heads, cocaine and aquanet. I’ll spare you gory details, but as I understand it, my dad is and always has been cool, classic cool, 49 plymouth driving, leather jacket wearing, lighting a cigarette off your own stubble kind of cool — he was a professional artist and sign painter in his early 20’s living in Hollywood in the 80s.

We’ve always had addiction in our blood and he had a lot to prove, a lot to learn, and a lot to lose, but he wouldn’t fully grasp that until it was too late. The following divorce and custody battle was ugly and drug out for years.

My mom’s second wedding, 20 years later to my step dad, showed her full new age transformation, they were wed on top of a mountain at a meditation center in Ojai California, my mom had mostly correspond with her new husband, a former performance artist and museum curator from New Castle England over the internet, the wedding was officiated by my mom’s friend Steve. I played an acoustic rendition of Love Will Tear Us Apart by Joy Division and performed and original poem (thank god there is little to no footage of that).

They were in their early 40s when they got married and they were like teenagers. My mom was so impressed by him, he was enamored with her. They changed my perception of love and family and age and time. Of course, my mom’s biggest caveat was that he and I get along, that he accept me no matter what. She had no idea how much we’d need each other or how close we’d become when she passed 15 years later.


Robert Frank’s 1950’s era paradigm changing book of photography The Americans is said to be the most honest and unflinching depiction of this country of all time — in its 83 images of the gritty, stark, racially-divided United States — 5 are of funerals or depict scenes of death and mourning, and there are Zero images of weddings. If the book were to be published today, surely that ratio would be reversed. We live in a youth obsessed society, the anti-aging market is worth more than $250B globally. We fetishize purity to shield us from our own fragile, paper thin mortality.

But funerals, funerals are good for you, they are good for you in the way that all hard things are. You likely won’t experience any kind of closure, you will probably leave feeling worse, but you will be surrounded by people experiencing the same acute pain that you are — and that is a rare and sacred thing.

Both my father and step dad were at my mom’s memorial and it was the first time they were in the same place since my college graduation. I have an estranged relationship with my dad (we’re working on it), and growing up my mom and dad were the kind of divorced parents that only talk through lawyers.

Of course, this was all before my step dad’s time and he doesn’t hold anything over my dad. My dad showed up alone — an incredibly brave thing to do surrounded by 200 of my mom’s biggest fans.

He hadn’t had a real conversation with her in 20 years, like most of us, he thought there was going to be more time, that they might make amends, when I called him to tell him she had passed there was so much regret in his voice.

He gave a deeply personal and heartfelt speech about their puppy love, and stayed for hours — giving and getting some hugs.

At one point he and my step dad embraced, my step dad said “thank you for giving her the one thing she wanted most, a son.” to which my Dad replied, “and thank you for giving her what I couldn’t, your love.”

This has been episode five of Good Grief, thank you so much for listening.

I just want to mention that while the strategies for coping with grief that I talk about in this podcast have worked for me, I am not a trained professional — just a guy with a liberal arts degree who spends a lot of time on the internet. If you or someone you know is going through a hard time, please do not hesitate to seek the help of a doctor or clinician.

If you have any questions, comments, feedback or you just want to talk, feel free to reach out on twitter or Instagram @blakeoftoday or just shoot me an email at blakeoftoday@gmail.com.

I’ll close out with the words of Ian Curtis from the song that I performed at my mom’s second wedding:

And the resentment rides high
But emotions won’t grow
And we’re changing our ways,
Taking different roads
Then love, love will tear us apart again


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