So I had this thought that somewhere in the world there must exist this cool tiny country or village where funerals were joyful, not sad. Celebrations of life, if you will. A place where even mothers who lost their young children could devote a short period of time, an hour or two, to holding hands with neighbors and friends and relatives. In this obscure village they would laugh as they remembered through stories and pictures they told with sticks in sand, the child who had passed, as they embraced one another.
It would only be after this period of celebration that the body, placed in it's box, would be presented for burial.
I attended a funeral three weeks ago. Two parents had lost a son, two siblings a brother. The family called the service a celebration of life. The casket was in the room, but a PowerPoint photo presentation and guitar player and accompanying bass guitar, singers, and story-tellers comprised the centerpiece.
An earthquake happened in my body that day, and I was shaken.
One by one, family members and friends shared stories about this young person who had passed.
I'd brought Kleenex, but apparently not enough.
I'd worn sunglasses, but apparently they weren't too sagacious because my mother ended up handing me more tissues from her purse as well.
Eventually I got up and grabbed a box from the next aisle over.
When story-time was finally over I was grateful. I couldn't bear it anymore. But I went home feeling changed and grateful for the experience. Lots of people were moved, from this funeral celebration service. I decided I'd blog about it.
I Googled it to start, funeral celebrations, and was disappointed. I read a lame article on Business Insider that some weirdo yuppie with purple hair surely wrote, which categorized five types of funerals in five major countries. Boooo. And that feminist-economist-slacker-writer-wannabe probably charged a day's wages to BI and got paid $500 for her posed labor.
But what I really wanted Google to tell me, and I went 17 pages deep! was whether this cool little tiny village really existed where people didn't automatically do something sad or bizarre like eating someone's burned bone ashes. Can't there just be a celebration of someone's life? Can't we just honor a person for having lived? Isn't talking about the deceased and giving one another a hug a normal thing? Can't all cultures agree on that?
Are people typically sad all around the world at funerals? Can you tell me that Google? Instead of throwing up this BI BS?
Are we supposed to be sad? Would the person who just died have wanted us to walk around in black dresses and suits and hang our heads?
What if something amazing just happened earlier that day and someone happens to be really happy? Is it okay for someone to be really happy at a funeral?
Are we allowed to stay home if we feel too upset to go? How much emotion is it okay to show?
I've been wondering about why I cried so much at that funeral celebration. It was kind of ridiculous, honestly, how much I cried. I just had a storm brewing inside I guess. Emotions are like the rumbles that happen way deep down at the ocean floor, but sometimes those rumbles cause shifts and all of a sudden the sea comes tsunami'ing out.
I won't be talking to my family about how I want my funeral to pan out anytime soon, but when my uncle passed away three months ago, he had every detail of his funeral worked out. He asked his youngest of three daughters to officiate the service, too. She did a great job, really holding it together. I don't know how she did it. I bawled when I watched the video. She had this beautiful glow. It made me wonder at the gratitude for her almost 35 years shared on this (somewhat still) green planet with her dad. The same amount of time I've had with mine. How lucky I am to have my father here still.
Death certainly puts things in perspective for those of us who are still living. It makes us hold each other a little more closely. Even for those of us who don't really hug. I'm holding my family closer in my heart and thoughts this holiday season for sure. It seems that death this winter has been all around.
I wasn't very close to my uncle. He was hard to be close to. His wife and daughters were the only ones he really let in.
He was a very tall man. I remember looking up to him, literally, from a very young age, and I never stopped. He pastored a church and was a true bible scholar, but also a man of very few words, ironically. Uncle Royal. Uncle Ironic. He seemed to do plenty of speaking in his final months, finely crafting his funeral service. Every t was crossed, i dotted. He and his daughters sang hymns during the final days of his life spent in hospice care, and my aunt shared pictures through email with my mom and I. It's hard to even write about this. Something about old Christian hymns, and going to meet Jesus. There's something so powerful in that.
His funeral service was not quite a celebration. But it was not a sad event either. It was upbeat, formal, and at times, entertaining! It was an honorary service to the Lord. Royal had picked out hymns, scriptures, and a blue grass gospel video, all honoring the Jesus he preached about for over 40 years.
Maybe not everybody wants people to make a big fuss over them when they die. And I for one don't want to even talk about it. Well, that's kind of hypocritical to say. But I don't want to even think about it as far as my own funeral, at least not yet. But I think it's good to think about in general terms, anyhow. It's good that we can explore different models of how to let go here in the liberal Western world, where anything goes. We're not bound by tradition, although some people still are, and there's comfort in that to some extent. I hope we continue to break away from traditions that don't serve to better us, however, when it comes to helping us grieve in healthy ways.
