‘I’m so sorry’ people often say to us. ‘I’m not very good at funerals.’
‘You’re not supposed to be.’ We tell them. ‘It’s a funeral.’
Funerals aren’t something we are supposed to be something we’re good at. Most of us have never arranged a funeral before. Some of us have never even been to a funeral. Some of us have been to a funeral where we’ve questioned whether it was a good reflection of the person who died. But a funeral doesn’t have to be like the ones you’ve been to in the past or the ones you’ve seen on TV. You can create a funeral that works for you, is appropriate for the circumstances of the death and fits the way you’re grieving.
When someone dies, our life changes. The enormity of the change can be huge, in many ways beyond the physical loss of the person. Funerals can serve as an acknowledgement of that enormous change and can help us to adjust to our new reality.
The person who has died may be a spouse, a partner, a relative, a friend or the person we said hello to every day at the bus-stop. Whoever it is, a funeral can serve as an acknowledgement that the physical presence of that person is now gone. A funeral is a way of making the death real.
It’s not about perfection, it’s about doing something that honours the person who has died while also allowing the living to do what they need to do. A good funeral can be a profound and transformational experience that can help the living to accept and acknowledge that someone has died.
It’s not just the funeral itself that matters – it’s the process of deciding what’s important and meaningful, completing the paperwork, ordering the sandwiches and the sausage rolls, collecting photographs, watching old videos, coming together as family and friends to share memories and stories. The process of arranging a funeral gives us something to do at a time when we feel like our lives are in chaos.
When my granny died in February 2018, we didn’t have the opportunity to acknowledge her death. Before she died, she’d seen an advertisement for something called a direct cremation, where a person is cremated with no ceremony and no one in attendance. Having attended so many formulaic funerals for her friends, she decided funerals were a waste of time and money and insisted that she didn’t want one. Like so many people of her generation, she didn’t want any fuss.
This meant we didn’t come together as a family when she died. It meant life went on as normal, as though she were still sitting in her armchair in Devon, waiting for Countdown as she did her weekly shopping on her iPad. Whatever I thought of Granny, I couldn’t imagine that empty chair in Devon. There had been no opportunity to come together as a family to acknowledge that she had died.
There was talk of organising a memorial with her ashes – but then life got in the way. A cousin was moving house, another had a new job in America, I was busy working. Without the urgency of a dead body to dispose of, the ceremony was put on the backburner, and it never happened.
We never had the opportunity to acknowledge the reality of my granny’s death and this made grieving the loss of the matriarch of our family really difficult.
A funeral offers the opportunity to come together as family, friends or community no matter how big or small, to offer support to each other. It gives everyone in that community a space in which to share their thoughts, feelings and memories about the person who has died. It’s an opportunity to cry together, to laugh together or just be together, with the sadness, pain, grief and tragedy of the situation.
It’s also an opportunity to come together to learn new things about the person who has died. After a funeral, we often hear people saying ‘I never knew Mum was so popular at work’ or ‘Uncle John helped so many people at his church yet he never talked about it’.
A good funeral is created with the belief that funerals are not about the dead but for the benefit of the living. A funeral can be whatever you want and need it to be. In the UK, there are no rules or laws about where it is held, who takes it or what it should include. The most important part of a funeral is to make sure that it does what it needs to.
Things that are okay at a funeral
It’s ok to wear black.
It’s ok to wear colour.
It’s ok to carry the coffin.
It’s ok to touch the coffin.
It’s ok to include children.
It’s ok to feel everything.
It’s ok to feel nothing.
It’s ok to applaud.
It’s ok to laugh.
It’s ok to smile.
It’s ok to cry.
An excerpt from ‘We All Know How This Ends’ by Anna Lyons and Louise Winter.
