The death of the funeral

Over the past year I’ve lost five people important in my life, but only attended two funerals.

It’s not for want of enthusiasm or effort. In a strange kind of way, provided I’m not stricken by loss, I enjoy funerals. Going to a funeral is probably one of the most meaningful things you can do. Marking the end of someone’s life among the unique, never-to-form-again constellation of people and connections they‘ve gathered over the course of a lifetime, is special. At such times we come together in temporary tribes, honouring the dead and offering each other comfort and a sense of belonging.

And then there are those comic moments when the vicar says something wildly inaccurate or one of the speakers reveals a surprising fact about the deceased. Putting on a good funeral is an art; when attending one I quietly assess the service, the speeches, the choice of music — and of course, the food at the wake. The spectrum of human life can be experienced at a funeral.

In spiritual terms, funerals are essential. Most religious traditions recognise that the period following someone’s death is significant, a time when all concerned make big adjustments. Islamic and Jewish traditions prescribe forty days’ mourning. In Buddhism an extended mourning period allows for rituals to assist the departed during the transition to the next life, while in Japan memorial services are held periodically after the funeral.

The presence of “the other” signifies a deep human need to say goodbye regardless of how things turned out

In Britain, the funeral is the first thing you discuss after news of the death. Everyone has something a bit further down the road which will help with the adjustment and in our secular, death-avoidant culture it’s generally the only public rite.

So last year it was a shock when an old school friend decided that the funeral of her mother, who I’d known since childhood, was “family only”. Making a church funeral a private affair is something I’ve never heard of outside celebrity circles or the Royals. My friend’s email implied the reason was the size of the church her mother had latterly attended, but that didn’t cut it for me. “The church was packed,” my parents would often say after the latest funeral in the village where I grew up. What better tribute could a community pay to the departed than an overflowing church, with people standing in the porch, even the graveyard?

A common trope in films shows an ex-lover, a cast-out woman or the black sheep of the family standing a distance away from the funeral party, watching the proceedings at the freshly-dug grave. The presence of “the other” signifies a deep human need to say goodbye and honour the person who has died regardless of how things turned out. This is tacitly recognised by the family: the outsider might not be welcome but they cannot be excluded. In the western Christian tradition, funerals are not private for the reason that no human being belongs exclusively to any one set of people.

Last autumn, an elderly relative slipped away without any rites at all. My cousin, who was in his nineties and in terrible health and his son had opted for a “pure cremation” — another new one on me — and sending the unaccompanied body straight to the burner. The decision struck me as a bleak one, a result of the old man’s sense of being a burden and his son’s exhaustion after years as a carer.

The relative was important to me, so I made shift. On being told he wasn’t long for this world, I drove across country to say a living goodbye, making the kind of last minute arrangements that I would have done for a funeral. On hearing of his death shortly afterwards, I lit a candle in front of a photo of my cousin and his late wife and kept it lit for a couple of days.

In changing times, we need to find new ways of doing things and, if we make the right choices, some changes may create more meaning rather than less. And so it was when two friends with terminal diagnoses both chose to gather people around them while they were still here. Following a truth-telling meeting with his oncologist, one summoned the friends of his youth, and a large group of us gathered in one of old haunts for a meal. The other, the comedian Jeremy Hardy, decided to get married and throw a big party. The wedding-wake was bitter-sweet and I’ll never forget how we danced to Bella Ciao in a ring, Jeremy held up by the circle.

The two funerals I did attend last year were both traditional, apart from one significant difference. No members of the family accompanied the coffin from the church to the crematorium because, my cousin said, crems are now so busy that there is no time for ceremony. 

And the fifth funeral? This has yet to happen but I will likely attend by Zoom. For me, that’s a new technology-based option given I’ll be out of the country, not a time-saving alternative to dressing appropriately and making the trip to a designated place. 

Changes to our death rites are fine, perhaps inevitable. But they need to be done consciously, with thought given to the consequences for the living and dead, and active attempts to mark the end of life in a meaningful way. Death rituals are pretty much a universal feature of human society; we casually abandon them at our psycho-social peril.