Wyvernsridge 🌻:solidarity: on Nostr: During the week I attended the funeral of the mother of a close friend of mine. Drove ...
During the week I attended the funeral of the mother of a close friend of mine. Drove 250km to be there for him at a deeply important time. The drive there and back, through windy and not-well kept country roads gave me time to think about death and funerals (I know, quite morbid).
I have now attended funerals in three continents, and across some cultural divides and, frankly, I don’t think the modern funeral serves us well as either individuals or as a people.
Admittedly, as a non-believer, I miss out on whatever religious people get out of funerals, but even they seem to nowadays go about it in standardised platitudes. It seems that powerpoints of their photos of their life are now a standard, along with a short eulogy that barely rises above a litany of significant dates. All of it accompanied by music that might have been important for the deceased, but never contextualised for those attending the event. In all of this, I am as guilty as anyone else, for that was the structure of the funeral for each of my parents. Now, I don’t think it is anywhere enough.
A human being has died. Their contribution to this world has ended and they merit a proper acknowledgement and reckoning of both their virtues and their shortcomings. There is no judge in some imagined afterlife, so there is only us, present on that solemn day, to remember them and see them for one last time as complete people. Not just as others saw them, but as they saw themselves.
An American writer, Andrew Scott Card, once came up with the concept of the Speaker for the Dead. The role would take sufficient time to learn all there was to learn about a dead person, and then tell their story with both good and bad sides – not hagiography but history. Maybe speak it from the voice of they who have died, maybe not. But regardless, complete, fair and humane.
The death industry has become a money-hungry machine that processes bodies while giving those left behind very little real opportunity to grieve, to mourn, and to reflect. It is all just not good enough.
I have now attended funerals in three continents, and across some cultural divides and, frankly, I don’t think the modern funeral serves us well as either individuals or as a people.
Admittedly, as a non-believer, I miss out on whatever religious people get out of funerals, but even they seem to nowadays go about it in standardised platitudes. It seems that powerpoints of their photos of their life are now a standard, along with a short eulogy that barely rises above a litany of significant dates. All of it accompanied by music that might have been important for the deceased, but never contextualised for those attending the event. In all of this, I am as guilty as anyone else, for that was the structure of the funeral for each of my parents. Now, I don’t think it is anywhere enough.
A human being has died. Their contribution to this world has ended and they merit a proper acknowledgement and reckoning of both their virtues and their shortcomings. There is no judge in some imagined afterlife, so there is only us, present on that solemn day, to remember them and see them for one last time as complete people. Not just as others saw them, but as they saw themselves.
An American writer, Andrew Scott Card, once came up with the concept of the Speaker for the Dead. The role would take sufficient time to learn all there was to learn about a dead person, and then tell their story with both good and bad sides – not hagiography but history. Maybe speak it from the voice of they who have died, maybe not. But regardless, complete, fair and humane.
The death industry has become a money-hungry machine that processes bodies while giving those left behind very little real opportunity to grieve, to mourn, and to reflect. It is all just not good enough.