Difficult things

Difficult things at a funeral

Death is a time when we tell and retell the circumstances—the events surrounding the death and the wider stories of the person who has died. By telling and listening repeatedly to different variations we gradually adjust ourselves to what has happened and refine an accounting of the events that makes sense to us and sits more easily with us. All the visiting and reconnection with relations and old friends after a death encourages that process of telling and retelling the events, and of helping us all settle into stories which fit.

I have a general prejudice against secrets, but they have their place. Some things are clearly hurtful and unhelpful to say. Other things are better told—even things that we may resist telling or hearing, and that may cause pain. Sometimes something makes us want to keep key events out of the tellings—things which are important elements in our experience but we wish had not happened, or don’t want in our memories, or fear to talk about. Each family needs to make its own choices for its own situation.

But the fewer restrictions on storytelling the better—often the most important things to talk about are the most difficult.

Sometimes every bit as valuable as the actual funeral is meeting me as celebrant beforehand to prepare, discussing the life and death of a parent—or of a husband or wife or child. And then the funeral itself involves important public tellings and retellings of the stories. It may often be used as a time where in a subtle way the family arranges to mark the boundaries between the events they wish to have talked about and those they would prefer not to hear. Alternatively it may be a place where family and friends are licensed to range widely in their tellings, and to experiment with new or difficult story lines. This can help us by introducing new material at the point when we are being forced to reshape our relationship with the person because they have died.

I guess the reason I have a prejudice against secrets is that I too-often see secrets getting in the way of the process of telling and retelling, to an extent that makes it more difficult to develop an accounting which fits all the pieces of the puzzle together. Every family must try to balance the discomfort caused by recalling regretted or hurtful events against the discomfort of a slower and less complete development of an account in which a fitting place is found for all the most important elements of the experience as it was actually lived.

Often as they start to think about a funeral a family will say that they wish to record only the happier times. They “know” about the unhappier times, but do not wish to “dwell” on them. Often, however, it works out that it is not easy to fix the happy times in memory if we try to exclude the unhappy times. It is not enough to simply “know” about the unfortunate bits. They too need to be fitted into their proper place in the accounting of things. In addressing the unhappy memories they too can be given a place in the story, a place that helps make sense of them—which is not so easy if they remain unspoken. So, as a family considers it, they will often decide it is best to deal frankly with even the things that they might have preferred had not happened.

One of the painful or unfortunate bits families too-often have to deal with is dementia in the final stages of someone’s life, whether through Alzheimer’s disease or some other cause. Of course there is no use “dwelling” on it, but usually the celebrant should license addressing it in the funeral.

The death of someone who has been mentally absent for some time can be both easier and harder that the death of someone who has died with all their faculties. It can be experienced as a release, but that in itself sometimes sits awkwardly beside the grief we feel. I used the following words during the funeral of a member of my own family

Today we will say a kind of goodbye to Murray

In part we are saying goodbye for the parting we are having now, with his physical death.

But Murray has been separated from us in certain ways for a long time.

He has had Alzheimers disease for perhaps fifteen years now.

So in part we are saying a kind of goodbye for a parting we had a number of years ago, slowly, as Murray’s condition started to make a distance between him and us.

But it is not only “goodbye” we are saying today

There is a sense also in which we say hello

Because while we say goodbye to the kind of connection we had in the past with Murray,

we will also try to strengthen our memories today.

We’re going to look back, not so much at these last years, when Murray has not been able to be part of our lives in the fullest sense, but to the years before his illness, when he was so very much a part of the fabric of things.

We’re going to say hello again to the Murray who lives on within us in our hearts and minds.

This, it seems to me, is one way to welcome thoughts and stories which are resisted, when such thoughts and stories might in the end make an accounting for the last phase of someone’s life (and its relationship with what went before) proceed more easily than it otherwise might.

I discuss some of the ideas behind addressing the difficult problems at funerals and some examples in a talk at a conference of celebrants, “Changing World, Changing Funerals,” which referred to mental illness, alcohol and suicide. There are two texts for the beginnings of funerals here, Funerals: suicide and Funerals: drug overdose.