Funereal Neutral Zone
I sat recently at the funeral of a distant family member. He was one of my grandmother’s baby brothers.
For as far back as I can remember, whenever my grandmother was in a pinch, he or one of his sons showed up, assessed the situation, and set things in motion for the problem to be resolved.
This was no small task ever. My grandmother, as I’ve noted before, was a very strong, independent, spunky woman for her day. She was a young divorcee who reared my mother on her own before remarrying the man I knew as my grandfather. She also became a fairly young widow and chose to remain unmarried in her widowhood.
Along the way, she built a career at a small regional loan company, starting as just a secretary and working her way up to office manager, even taking a test without warning as a fill-in and skunking all the men when she was sick as a dog and had no time to prepare.
So when she felt her resources were exhausted, they usually were. But I digress…
As I sat there, looking at how aged his sons were compared to my first memories of them and considering life and the great beyond, I realized something. His family chose to hold the funeral service in a funeral home; they did not choose to use the church he had attended for the last few years.
That was one of the most merciful things to do. You see, on my mother’s side, you have Lutherans, Pentecostals, non-denominationals, and agnostics (or maybe deists or nones). Throw in my daughters who are Catholic, and you have quite the denominational menagerie.
Walking into a strange church with different customs just might be uncomfortable for any number of reasons. It could be that it’s just different. It could be that the wounding in a prior church was great. It could be that your personal denomination doesn’t accept the denomination of the deceased.
Regardless of the reason, if your denomination permits it, a service in a funeral home just might be a blessing for the attendees. Funeral homes are neutral, generic territories, devoid of all the signs of the sad divisions that make us targets of bad jokes and severe negativity.
