Funerals for the dead or for the living?
Anglican Brat
Shipmate
in Epiphanies
One person I know, an atheist, recently wrote that he doesn't want a religious funeral because he doesn't want what he perceives to be religious nonsense of what happens after death.
Okay, fine. But if you are dead, how exactly would you know about your funeral after death? Why would that matter?
Most of his friends and colleagues are secular/atheist/agnostic, so I think the chances of a religious funeral for him are practically next to nil. But it reminds me of a conversation I routinely get of whether funerals are for the dead or for the living. As in, if the deceased is not religious at all, but the grieving would like a religious funeral, is it appropriate to do so. What happens if the deceased is particularly blunt about his atheism/nonbelief, and yet the family is religious?
Okay, fine. But if you are dead, how exactly would you know about your funeral after death? Why would that matter?
Most of his friends and colleagues are secular/atheist/agnostic, so I think the chances of a religious funeral for him are practically next to nil. But it reminds me of a conversation I routinely get of whether funerals are for the dead or for the living. As in, if the deceased is not religious at all, but the grieving would like a religious funeral, is it appropriate to do so. What happens if the deceased is particularly blunt about his atheism/nonbelief, and yet the family is religious?
Comments
As to your last questions, if known the deceased individual's wishes should be honoured.
That is common. I played at a funeral last week where I was the only one to say Amen. Mum/Nan alone had been a member of the church. The rest of her family were completely unchurched.
They called it a celebration of her life on the service sheet. It was anything but.
I'm egotistical and nosey enough, Lord have mercy! to hope I could hover around mine to hear what's said. That would get me extra time in Purgatory if I were Catholic.
I hope I'm further along the narrow way than that when the time comes.
Something I've become more aware of recently, through clergy friends and contacts across the spectrum, is an alarming and egregious tendency that's grown since the pandemic to whisk the deceased from hospital to crematorium with little ceremony or even input from relatives and friends.
I've heard of several families who had no funeral plans in place feeling gutted and short-changed as there was no time to reflect or mourn.
My next door neighbour who was very well respected in the town and in the sport she loved and coached, had a terrific send-off. It was the largest funeral I've attended other than one of my late wife's head-teachers from her teaching career.
It meant an enormous amount to her family who were overwhelmed by the esteem in which she was held.
That really is about the mourners and not the deceased.
I was going to be the only one to attend an aunt’s funeral. She was not religious, but I was so I opted for the parish priest to take the service at the crematorium. We did our best to include music she would have liked.
I think it’s a shame when families are told by funeral directors ‘You don’t want a C of E funeral, it would be too religious’ as some of my extended family were - perhaps so that they can point a secular celebrant at them and make more money?
It put the mourners in a dilemma, and they opted for the celebrant even though they wanted a priest (and thought the deceased would have) - thinking that it would be more appropriate to cater for all of the people who attended.
Please note I'm talking about pain, not offense. Offense is a different thing, and not something I care a great deal about. It's easy to make a stink about something you don't actually have any true investment in.
FWIW, we run into these questions fairly often, as we help families deal with arrangements in a culture where almost every death is in a religiously-divided family. I can't tell you the number of Christians who've had Buddhist funerals on our watch. (We didn't do them, we just helped with the finances, funeral home, etc.) I don't think we've ever had the reverse case, though.
I’ve been to a lot of crem services, they are common in working class communities as they are cheaper than burials. I’d never been to a church funeral and burial until I was in my late 40s as all my deceased family were cremated, being working class and either non-conformist or irreligious. Crem services tend to be short and grim anyway.
In the sense of providing comfort for those grieving, no, the deceased doesn’t need that any more. But in the sense of honoring or paying respect to who the deceased was in life, then the funeral is “for” the deceased as much as the living. It can be, in a sense, a last gift to the deceased, to do what the grieving think the deceased “would have wanted.” I know that when we planned my mother-in-law’s funeral last month, and my parents’ in years past, we very much viewed it as something we were doing for them, an act of love for them, and that in itself was comforting.
In cases where the deceased leaves instructions or desires about a funeral, to ignore those, except for good reason, can well be a slight toward the deceased. That may be especially the case where the instructions or desires left were intended by the deceased to be one last chance to say who they were or what they believed.
And that’s before getting into specific religious beliefs, such as the belief that prayers for the dead benefit then in purgatory.
It can be hard enough going to one funeral, let alone a succession of events. And it would be expensive for the family, financially and emotionally.
This was done recently in my family- though as a triathlon (cremation, ash burial, memorial service)
It both worked very well: deceased’s wishes respected, surviving partner happy, choice of what to attend, people not expected to attend everything, meaningful ceremonies in meaningful places, people included who might otherwise not have made it - but it had drawbacks like Ariel is saying: spread out over time with emotional impact hitting each time, travel expense and problems for disabled travellers so not everyone could go to every event and some people had to miss events they really wanted to attend.
So both things can be true that it can be an excellent way to do things and that it can be harder in the way Ariel says.
There has been a trend here away from church funerals, though I have attended a church service followed by crematorium or cemetery and services held at the crematorium alone. Both parents had secular funerals, though I know Mum wanted a religious service. At the time, I thought it wasn't worth upsetting Dad over, we were already shocked and stressed enough as it was. Dad claimed not to have been aware of thing when it came up later in passing. In hindsight I can believe it and think that they either never discussed it, or he genuinely forgot and may have been a very small sign of the commencement of his own decline. He did do a wonderful eulogy for her though and navigated a complex family situation with dignity.
When Dad's time came we were able to hold the service in a chapel at the crematorium which had been a former church, so it was a beautiful setting and brought us much comfort at the time. Dad was not cremated but as the Funeral Directors owned the site, we were able to use the chapel, which was much nicer than the room at their premises, which we had used for Mum. We were very happy with both services and the Funeral staff were both kind and good at guiding us through the process. Dad had preplanned and paid in advance for his arrangements. We wanted to tweak a few things and we paid on top for those.
I went recently to the funeral service of a friend's Mum held at the same chapel. It was a service of prayers, a funeral mass had been held the previous day for family and friends living close by. Interment was in the family hometown and second service at the chapel. The Funeral Directors at the second service were great at directing traffic. However the priest was woeful and rattled through the service with a monotone that sounded like he was on autopilot. Given a choice between him and the secular arrangements we had made, I certainly preferred the latter, which felt really awful to me. I did feel glad for the family that they didn't have to make the financial choice to have only one service, but honoured their Mum with services that acknowledged the whole of her life and not just the last 7 years of it.
It reminds me that I should get my skates on and put on paper what I' like for my own funeral to alleviate the burden on my family when the time comes.
But if someone dies who is still, or until recently, active in a church (or other religious community) then it is important for others to be able to mourn their passing and/ or celebrate their life, and this is surely best done in the way they would have wanted or been the most comfortable with.
Last year when my husband died, my stepson, who is an atheist, was perfectly happy that we had both a private Christian burial for close family, and a month later, a public service of thanksgiving, attended by Christians from all over the country. He asked to speak, in addition to performing some music, and boldly told everyone that he was an atheist, but praised his father for his many good qualities, not least in allowing him to make up his own mind.
In many ways though, the services were for me. I chose all the music and hymns, knowing Mr Puzzler’s tastes, even though he left no specific instructions.
In the UK, any instructions in the will about funeral arrangements have no legal standing, not least because some of the requests may not be possible.
That rather depends on one’s theology and metaphysics, I think.
An instance, when my father-in-law was estranged from his cousins when my sister-in-law married a black man. The cousins just refused to accept the wedding. As he was dying, he wanted to reconnect with them. We reached out. They responded, but they did not see him before he died. They did come to the funeral, though. Hospice does this a lot.
Yes, funerals are for the living, but planning for the funeral can help the dying find closure for the past.
Gwai,
Epiphanies Host
I would agree, but don't expect to have 'conversations' with them as it were. I do speak to my dead wife though when I visit her grave.
Can she hear me? I'm not sure that's why I do it. But invoking the prayers of the Saints and those we hope are among the 'blessed dead' - yes.
I think it is important to respect the wishes of the person who has left them but also to keep in mind what those who are left need to achieve some level of peace. I'm sure I've said before on the Ship that my mum left very detailed funeral instructions and it was a real comfort to know that we were honouring her in that and doing things the way she would have wanted. One of my brothers had (in a passing conversation a long time previously) expressed that he "didn't want anything". However, his death was sudden and the circumstances surrounding it were traumatic and I agreed with the local church minister (a family friend) that we needed a funeral for us . So we had a lot of music and some readings that he would have liked, in the church where once he was an organist. I'm sure he understood and, hopefully, approved.
Not wanting to trivialise either your post or the general event, it was indeed a passing conversation.
In the event, Covid restrictions meant that he got exactly the funeral he wanted.
Dad had said he wanted 5 short speeches - from my brother and I and each of the three adult grandchildren. In the event I found it quite odd - it felt as though the Dad my brother was talking about was a different Dad to the one I remembered.
My brother spoke first and I started scoring out bits of my speech as he spoke, because my brother was in tears, I wasn't, and I had jokes in mine. I didn't think my brother was going to cope with jokes.
It worked out ok, because Covid, but if it had been in "normal" times, I think a bigger funeral would have been better for the family.
She preached the sermon at her own funeral.
It was an incredible witness to the faith that had sustained her for her whole life, and the hope she had in Jesus.
Wow!
I am expecting a very small service in the local Crem, which is actually very nice, but I am not expecting anyone from the Black Country to attend. They will know about it though.
There was, of course, a lot of this caused by Covid. We've had several families make a "big thing" of an ash interment, because the cremation/funeral had to happen with a small number of mourners, family members couldn't travel, and so on.
On the flip side, when my uncle died fairly early in the Covid era, a zoom memorial service meant that I was able to attend, whereas had there not been a global pandemic, the logistics of flying half way round the world might have been too complicated.
My aunt died in September. Her funeral was held in the large gathering room at the retirement community where she lived. She was a very good organist, and when going through some of her things, my cousins found recordings of her playing. They use those for the prelude at the funeral, so she played for her own funeral.
We always stream funerals/memorial services now, for this very reason.
The problem that I have not yet solved is how to make zoom participants first-class citizens in any kind of meeting that is part in person and part remote.
When everyone is on zoom, then we're all talking (virtually) face to face, and everyone is placed in an equal position. When there's a group in the room, they automatically occupy a privileged position, and remote participants tend to get relegated to the sidelines. I sort of feel like there must be a way of doing hybrid gatherings well, but I haven't yet encountered it.
Being a spectator is better than nothing, but it's not the same as the equal participation that we had with a fully-virtual gathering. I don't know how to recreate that.
Our church never did services via Zoom, though I have encountered Zoom services in other contexts. I have to confess to not being a fan at all. But then, I hate Zoom meetings, too.
It's none of my business, of course, but that sounds desperately sad.
You deserve a Black Country 'send-off' or a coach load heading to Sheffield and faggots and peas at the wake.
A nice thought but If I can't travel to their funerals, I can't expect them to come to mine.
Especially if the two funerals happen in that order!!!
One of the problems associated with increasing age (and perhaps infirmity)! Mind you, I was surprised at the number of My Old Dad's former factory workmates turned up to see him off, given the fact that he'd retired some eight years previously...
With most funerals being held on a weekday, it's often difficult for the hale and hearty to attend, if they happen to be working, and can't get the time off.
Back to the OP, and this evocative poem by Thomas Hardy is pleasingly ambiguous on the subject, with perhaps the living being better off:
https://hellopoetry.com/poem/1403/the-choirmasters-burial/
Something to explore further.
I enjoy 'celebrations of life' and usually learn something interesting about the deceased but for myself I would hope to have prayers for my passing.
Recently I attended a funeral for a young person who had died suddenly in Toronto.His husband brought back to Scotland the ashes of the young man and there was a Requiem Mass which was very moving though more than one person told me that it was quite different from the 'celebrations of life' which are now much more common than prayer led funerals.
/slightly tangential/
Indeed. Hardy regarded himself primarily as a poet, rather than a novelist, and wrote only poetry for the last three decades of his life.
I my tribe, the funeral/memorial service is formally termed a “Service of Witness to the Resurrection,” so that gives an indication what the main focus is intended to be. Our Book of Common Worship (p. 769) says:
In a similar vein, the Book of Common Prayer (p. 507) of the Episcopal Church says in regard to “The Burial of the Dead”:
So in the understanding represented by these two examples, the funeral/memorial service is neither focused on celebrating the life of the deceased nor on praying for the soul of the deceased, though aspects of both may be present. Rather, it is focused on worshipping God and on recalling/proclaiming what God has done and what God has promised. Care and comfort for the bereaved and grateful remembrance of the life of the deceased both happen within the larger context of focus on God.
I shall always remember the well-loved, gifted, and celebrated artist in one of my congregations who died well into her 90s. She wanted the BCP service. Her instructions were also: NO soloists, NO eulogies, JUST the service. I was waiting to hear that she'd also said "NO sermon." She hadn't.
However, her instructions provided a wonderful opportunity to remind the community that Christ, God's care, and the resurrection were what the service was about. It was rather different from what some people had expected when they arrived.
No churches around here would have a burial in church grounds these days. Maybe some in country parishes would. Burial of ashes may still be possible, but there are very few such that I know of. Perhaps cremation followed later by scattering of the ashes at some favourite venue? The rose garden at a nearby park would be suitable for that and would be acceptable to the local council.
Very tempting to direct no eulogy. I've had to give eulogies, and would not want to do any more. It's not an easy task and would it be fair to put the burden on Dlet?