We’re Doing Funerals Wrong, Psychologists Say
I know I did, anyway
There’s a room in my parents’ house that my sister and I call “the Mausoleum.” It’s a claustrophobic maze of boxes, a teetering collection of dead people’s things: costume jewelry, photo albums, quilts, china sets that are probably-junk-but-maybe-priceless-heirlooms, yearbooks, fancy old hats.
The collection began fifteen years ago when my aunt died and my mother dumped her belongings into a storage room in the basement. She meant to sort through it all eventually, but she never could bring herself to do it.
Over time, the room has collected more and more orphaned possessions: her mother’s, her father’s, another sister’s. The boxes mock my mother. She complains about them. She announces plans to organize them. But ultimately, she just keeps the door closed.
She is unwilling to touch her own grief. And now, I think I know why.
We did the funerals all wrong.
One of my first students, Sylvia*, died last month. A random seizure, no warning. She was twenty-two and had just started her first “real” office job the day before.
I was her sixth grade teacher, and I had watched her and her sisters grow up. I was the one who caught her her passing those gossipy little origamied notes in…
