The first funeral I ever attended was for my paternal grandfather. I was 12 years old and the funeral was held at the very dark and ornate Armenian church which he never attended but from which everyone in the family was married and buried. The priest was garbed all in red, wearing a tall mitred hat and passing up and down the aisle repeatedly, waving a golden scepter over the heads of the mourners, intoning long sing-songy sentences in a strange, guttural sounding language.
I was terrified. But the big family funeral was customary, and it was expected that every member would attend.
“I told you she was too young for that,” my mother whispered angrily to my father as I sat huddled speechless in the backseat of the car on the way home.
After such a traumatic first experience, you would think I would eschew the idea of funerals rather than attempt to convince you how important they are. But in the ensuing decades since my grandfather’s funeral, I’ve attended a lot more final send-offs and I’ve learned to appreciate how valuable a meaningful ritual or ceremony is to those left behind.
Nowadays I think we want to dismiss death entirely. Death means all the medical miracles we’re so proud of have failed. We say that the deceased “lost their battle” with whatever dread disease from which they suffered, somehow implying they didn’t fight hard enough to defeat the grim reaper. Death is the ultimate loss of control, the final failure, neither of which we have any stomach for.
We’re managing to stave off mortality longer and longer with each generation, evidenced by the number of nursing homes, assisted living centers, and retirement communities that pepper the landscape like fast food restaurants. But no matter what we do, eventually death will catch up with each and every one of us. If death is an inevitable part of life, I believe we should make some attempt to acknowledge it’s occurrence in a meaningful way.
My father died four months ago, after “battling” cancer and Parkinson’s disease for almost a decade. I feel justified in using the warrior terminology, because he did fight hard against the coming of the night. Even at age 86 he was willing to try more chemo, hoping against hope for one last miracle that would buy him a little more life. But in one of our last conversations, he alluded to his final wishes when “the time came.”
“Don’t make a big fuss,” he said. “I don’t want you to make a special trip down here (to his home in Florida) when it happens. I don’t want any of that religious stuff. Just make it simple.”
Naturally we want to respect the supposed wishes of our dying family members or friends. We already feel powerless and ineffective — we can’t ease their pain, we can’t take away their fear (or our own). So we agree, trying to demur with phrases like “Don’t talk that way, you’re going to be around for a long time yet.”
But when they die we recall the psudo-promise we made. “Don’t make a fuss,” my Dad told me. Apparently he had held my stepmother to the same pledge, because she was quick to tell me that “he hadn’t wanted anything,” so there would be no visitation or funeral, just cremation.
I disobeyed one of my father’s instructions and flew to Florida the morning after he died. But my stepmother and I were completely alone when we consigned my father’s body to ashes. There were no other shoulders to cry on, no last words spoken in remembrance, no liturgy or ceremony to give credence or authority to the 87 years he walked the earth. We spent 10 minutes with his body in a small room at the back of the funeral home. He was lying in a heavy cardboard box draped in the American flag to honor his WWII service. My stepmother placed a golf tee and stubby pencil in his pocket, a poker-hand of playing cards in one hand and a love note in the other.
In the ultimate of ironies, I attended another funeral the day after I returned from Florida. This was for a friend’s mother, a woman in her late seventies, who died the same day my father did. The night before the funeral, her four children and umpteen grandchildren were “staging” the church, filling it with dozens of artfully selected displays of photographs and memorabilia. The social hall was lined with rows of her books, her entire library had been carted over from her house with signs saying: “Loretta’s Library: Please help yourselves!” Someone had even made bookmarks with her picture and a favorite poem on them. The day of the funeral, the parking lot was filled to overflowing. Triumphant hymns rang out, funny stories were told, tears were shed. Her body lay in a large silver casket at the foot of the alter where her children had been baptized and later married.
The dichtomy between the two events nearly undid me.
In the days after my father’s death I found myself passing through the familiar stages of grief, including anger. Surprisingly enough, one of the things I felt most angry about was the lack of fanfare associated with my father’s passing. Didn’t he deserve more than that? This man who was always generous and kind, who overcame the poverty of childhood to build a successful business, who served his country in a time of war? I felt more than a little guilty that I hadn’t insisted on “making a fuss” despite his exhorations to the contrary.
“A good funeral transports the newly deceased and the newly bereaved to the borders of a changed relationship,” writes Thomas Lynch, a funeral director, writer, and poet. “The dead are disposed of in a way that says they mattered to us, and the living are brought to the edge of a life they will lead without the one who has died. We deal with death by dealing with the dead, not just the idea but also the sad and actual fact of the matter — the dead body.”
Ah yes, says the cynic in me, Lynch is all for big funerals. He’s a funeral director. It’s money in his pocket.
But I think there’s more to it than that.
The rituals of death lend credence to a life well lived, putting a final stamp of acknowledgment to this humans existence. These rituals give us time to re-group and re-organize, to transition from one stage to the next in our relationship with the deceased — the part where we live with them only in memory. They make us feel less alone by connecting us to our family and friends, but also to mourners from centuries before us. Death is the one event we all have in common — it does not discriminate race, age, gender, culture, or sexual orientation. With every tender hug, every murmured condolence, we hear echoes of all the losses gone before, in our own family and in the wider world.
I just read a novel by William Kent Krueger in which I came across these words, spoken by a pastor at his own daughter’s funeral: “I’ve come to understand that there’s a good deal of value in the ritual accompanying death. It’s hard to say good-bye, and almost impossible to accomplish this alone. Ritual is the railing we hold onto, all of us together, that keeps us upright and connected until the worst is over.”
I realize now how much I needed the support of that railing, that ritual to keep me upright and connected. I could have used the comfort and company of others as I tried to accomplish my task of saying good-bye.
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