When I was growing up and someone died, we spent a lot of time at the funeral home. Between the ages of 10 and 12, both of my maternal grandparents died along with a maternal uncle. My memory is that for each there were two evenings of public visitation at the funeral home followed by a funeral on the third day. For each occasion, the dead body was present and available for view (at least before the funeral service began). It was a lot to take in for a young boy and, I expect, for the older members of the family. This three-day ritual left no doubt someone died, who the dead person was, and both their life and death were important.

Several years ago, my father told me that things had changed in our hometown regarding how visitations and funerals were done. Most commonly, there was one time of visitation and it immediately preceded the funeral. Everything–visitation, funeral, and burial–all in a morning or an afternoon. It was much more efficient and easier to manage. Not nearly the interruption to people’s busy lives. It does beg the question if our lives were actually less busy and less full of meaningful things in years past. Still, the elements were there–visitation, funeral, and the presence of the dead body.

In recent years, I hear and see more and more about a “celebration of life” rather than a funeral following a person’s death. At the celebrations of life I have attended, the body is absent and there is no burial procession. The other trend I have noticed is one where there is “just cremation” and no following ritual at all–no gathering of the family and community to recognize the person’s life or the person’s death. While I don’t propose the universal adoption of the three-day visitation and funeral cycle of my youth and I am not opposed to cremation (my present choice for my body’s disposition), I do feel some concern about current trends for responding to a person’s death with only celebrations or no ritual gatherings at all.

With no known exceptions (at least for me), every culture has rituals for the family and community after a person dies. And it’s not just death that motivates us to pause in ritual–it is many other times of life transition, big and small. We have graduations from preschool to graduate school. We have weddings. We do welcome breakfasts and farewell dinners for coworkers. When babies are on the way and arrive, we have baby showers and ceremonies to bless and incorporate the new arrivals into our communities and traditions. In our political lives, we gather to swear in and inaugurate. Sadly, divorce is the one striking life-transition for which we have failed to develop a supportive ritual and we suffer for this absence.

There seems some fundamental human wisdom here. When there are major life transitions, we need to pause to reflect on how the world was before and how it is different now. And when we so pause, we need our community with us for witness and support. Cultures around the world and throughout history have done this even as their rituals have changed and evolved. We need rituals to help us hold these big changes and to remind us of our connections to our communities, our histories, and the ways that we make meaning of life.

The increasing absence of ritual following death is worrisome. We need the pause, the opportunity to reflect, the chance to remind ourselves of what was but is no more, and the encouragement that meaningful life persists. We also need our community and the opportunity to share stories, hugs, and knowing glances.

Sometimes we hear someone say something like, “When I die, no crying and being sad, just one big party.” Of course, this is silly. For one, the dead don’t get to decide what is best for the living. For another, if you and your life are worthy of a party, you and your life are also worthy of tears and sadness in your loss. No picking and choosing, no either/or thinking that it must be one of the other–sadness or celebration. Life (which includes death) is a package deal, and we do well to recognize and respond accordingly. As noted in the wonderful juvenile novel, Each Little Bird That Sings, life if complicated–life in all of its “messy glory.”

Which brings us to “celebrations of life.” I’m for that. In my work, over and over I have opportunity to remind grieving people that the fact that someone died is important, and how they died is important, but the most important fact is that the person lived. So let us celebrate a person’s life, but let us not do so without some needed acknowledgement and grappling with the reality of the person’s death. We need to do both. We need to remember and be grateful for lives that blessed us and continue to bless us, and we need to look into the mirror of our mortality and the holes in our hearts with our wonderings and grief, not alone, but hand in hand with those who love us.

“Celebrations of life” or funerals?

Yes.

 

Greg Adams

Program Coordinator

Center for Good Mourning

goodmourning@archildrens.org

 

Greg Adams

Greg Adams is a social worker at Arkansas Children's Hospital (ACH) where he coordinates the Center for Good Mourning, a grief support and outreach program, and works with bereavement support for staff who are exposed to suffering and loss. His past experience at ACH includes ten years in pediatric oncology and 9 years in pediatric palliative care. He has written for and edited The Mourning News, an electronic grief/loss newsletter, since its beginning in 2004. Greg is also an adjunct professor in the University of Arkansas-Little Rock Graduate School of Social Work where he teaches a grief/loss elective and students are told that while the class is elective, grief and loss are not. In 1985, Greg graduated from Baylor University majoring in social work and religion, and he earned a Masters in Social Work from the University of Missouri in 1986. One answer to the question of how he got into the work of grief and death education is that his father was an educator and his mother grew up in the residence part of a funeral home where her father was a funeral director. After growing up in a couple small towns in Missouri south of St. Louis, Greg has lived in Little Rock since 1987. He married a Little Rock native in 1986 and his wife is an early childhood special educator and consultant. Together they have two adult children. Along with his experience in the hospital with death and dying and with working with grieving people of all ages, personal experiences with death and loss have been very impacting and influential. In 1988, Greg’s father-in-law died of an unexpected suicide. In 1996, Greg and his wife lost a child in mid-pregnancy to anencephaly (no brain developed). Greg’s mother died on hospice with cancer in 2008 and his father died after the family decided to stop the ventilator after a devastating episode of sepsis and pneumonia in 2015. Greg has a variety of interests and activities—including slow running, reading, sports, public education, religion, politics, and diversity issues—and is active in his church and community. He is honored to have the opportunity to be a contributor for Open to Hope.

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