funerals...

[Andy]

who came up with this creepy concept? nobody who is alive likes going to them and i'm pretty sure the dead person doesn't give a shit.

i'm currently in arkansas for the funeral of my wife's grandmother.  2 hour viewing and then a grave side service.  I would never tell her this, but its torture.

[joanna]

i think they're good. there are people who don't know how to grieve unless they're given a clear cut (and socially acceptable) venue to do so. like my dad, who'd been estranged from his brother for 20 years and when his brother died, my dad just openly wept throughout his funeral. i don't think he would have been able to do that otherwise.

then we all went back to my uncle's house and got drunk, which was good for everyone.

but i think that viewings are creepy. so creepy! and after reading stiff, there is no way i would allow anyone to prepare my body for a viewing, anyway. just burn me, please.

[Matt]

who came up with this creepy concept? nobody who is alive likes going to them and i'm pretty sure the dead person doesn't give a shit.

i'm currently in arkansas for the funeral of my wife's grandmother.  2 hour viewing and then a grave side service.  I would never tell her this, but its torture.

Yup, funerals are bad, but Arkansas funerals? I'll keep you in my prayers, Andy.

[Martin]

I've been to several tasteful, moving funerals - but yeah, it's always a terrible experience, I never get the closure or whatever people are hoping for.

Been to two funerals these past six months - my favorite uncle and a very good friend. Also, my brother-in-law's dad completely unexpectedly passed away last week, but hopefully I can sit that one out. Enough with the deaths, I say.

[Sarah]

They make some people feel better, but not me.  It helps, I imagine, if one is not as antichurch and antireligious as I am.  And if one doesn't mind showing emotion in public (which I do).

Where a funeral takes place makes a big difference, I think (and, obviously, the degree to which one is grieving).  Of the church funerals I've attended, I preferred the Catholic one, because the ritual was straightforward, codified, and traditional.  But the three at a horrible, more evangelical joint where the preacher insisted on singing pop schmaltz, even once when the family asked that he not do so, were painful (oddly, one was better than the others because the corpse was given military honors; here, again, I think the rigid ritual made things easier to stomach).  And then there was a weird double-religious graveside service for the sixteen-year-old son of a friend of mine where each of the classmates put a rose in his grave (weird because with all his talk of the misery of life on earth and the glories of the hereafter one of the ministers seemed to be recommending suicide).

Good luck, Andy.  Sorry you have to go through this.  And sorry for your wife, too, of course.

[Trotskie]

I read an excerpt from a book called Awaiting the Heavenly Country in the New Yorker (yeah, I'm bragging) a couple of months ago.  It suggested that some of the traditions still afoot in funeriality were derived from how we dealt with death during the Civil War. 

[andrew in philadelphia]

raised catholic and hating every minute of it - the more funerals i've gone to (it's been several dozen - not counting the dozens more i served as an altar boy) - the more callous i get about death. viewings are the worst and just downright creepy. it never looks like the person you knew and always a lot more like a bad mickey rourke-esque botched facelift. even worse is when the priest doing the church service obviously doesn't know your loved one (beyond seeing their name on their annual church donation envelope) and gives a brief "personalized" summation of their life so impersonal and devoid of detail that it could apply to absolutely anyone.

the guy who did my uncle jackie's funeral a couple years ago said it best i think: "funerals are for the living - for us that are still here. jack, well.. he's home."

[Beth]

Wakes can be okay, though. When my very Irish grandfather died, we had a pretty good time at his wake, reminiscing about all the funny things he used to do. His funeral was, however, gut-wrenching. I didn't feel very good. I would have rather just had the get-together of the wake and then scattered his ashes somewhere nice.

[Emily]

I remember hearing that wakes are left over from when medicality was like new and unrefined and we couldn't tell if people were really dead yet or not, so we would have a "wake" to see if they would wake up before we buried them.

so in that way they're kind of like cool, but outdated - since there have been great medical advances afoot since then.

[mokin]

I remember hearing that wakes are left over from when medicality was like new and unrefined and we couldn't tell if people were really dead yet or not, so we would have a "wake" to see if they would wake up before we buried them.

so in that way they're kind of like cool, but outdated - since there have been great medical advances afoot since then.

This is a cool idea, but it's an urban legend.

Still, wakes do stem from some pretty outdated traditions. They serve their purpose, though, otherwise we wouldn't still be doing them.

[Emily]

urban legend?

drat.

[Oogie]

I like funerals.

Not that I like sadness and death, but it's kind of neat to see a dead body, right?

I was an altar boy when I was a lad, and often had to serve funerals at my school. It was run by a batch of crazy old nuns, who loved to die. I got to ride in the hearse with the coffin. The return trip was better cus I could stretch my legs. One time a nun made me touch a dead nun on display. She said " Touch her! What are you afraid of! She's dead!" In retrospect I am afraid that I got formaldehyde poisoning. Which would explain alot. After the funeral, we'd always get to go back to the convent and eat chicken mcnuggets. One funeral I didn't like was in high school, when one of the popular girls in the school got killed by a jet ski. I went to the funeral and felt like a jerk, even though she was my classmate, because all the popular kids were crying and stuff, and I felt like a hanger-on. Like a nerdy ghoul. One of my favorite funerals was for a mentally disabled homeless person I knew who did odd jobs at this restaurant I worked at. He had the biggest smile on his face. A happy corpse. I don't like open-casket funerals, but prefer them to closed-casket funerals for friends who have been mangled/badly decomposed.

[erika]

Jewish folks don't tend to do open-casket viewings. So when I have to go to a viewing, I don't really go over and look at the body. I know it's supposed to be respectful to look at someone's corpse, but I find it invasive and a little gruesome. If it were a close close relative, sure, I can see that, but not having the body on public display.

When my brother was little his Scout Leader died and another leader took him to the funeral. They didn't ask or tell my parents that my brother (6 at the time) would be seeing a dead body. Poor kid came out of that funeral white as a ghost and a little traumatized for a few days... people should realize that not every cultures publicizes the bodies of the dead. It can be creepy if you're not used to it!

[iAmBaronVonTito]

sorry you have to be at a funeral, andy.



since i have a tendency to only attend the funerals of those close to me, i loathe funerals.  and as for wakes, i think theyre sick.  granted, "different strokes for different folks", but i dont know how people can eat after burying someone.

ive never been able to do it.  especially since i dont feel well enough to eat the previous OR later days.