I’ve heard “I don’t do funerals” from many clients over the years. It’s often a knee jerk reaction to avoid emotional pain, but some also will add: “I want to remember them alive, not see them like that.”
Funerals and memorial services, like all rituals, serve a greater purpose. It’s not just about respect for the deceased, support for the family, or a societal obligation. Bereavement rituals like funerals and memorials have a place in the grieving process. The action of attending the ceremony with others can imbue a sense of community. There are others who also feel the loss.
Actively participating in bereavement rituals helps people move in the grieving process. It can help bring up the emotions that need to be experienced. I’m not saying that everyone needs to sob at a funeral or memorial, but avoiding feelings will often make the loss harder to manage. Certainly, numbing the feelings with alcohol, substances or other avoidance behaviors can complicate grief.
Memorials in public places are ways that some people express their grief and in some ways, they have almost come to replace the funeral as an American way of grieving.
Shrines set up roadside, or next to a building or area (i.e., field, lake) where someone died are living memorials to loved ones lost. Roadside crosses, some simple, some decorated to express the personality or favorites of the deceased are on almost every road across the country. They give loved ones a place to mark the death and in some cases, celebrate the life that was ended at that spot.
They have become so ubiquitous in American life that we forget there is a story with every marker.
In Niagara Falls, NY a young man was killed while driving his motorcycle in the summer of 2019. The shrine started the day after the accident when several friends met in the grassy area next to the place where he died. Soon after, a large picture was erected and it was surrounded by remembrances and solar lights so that the memorial remains illuminated throughout the night.
Some shrines express the grief of a community; even a nation. After the shooting at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, a shrine was begun by friends, classmates and families of those who died in the massacre by piling their cars that remained in the parking lot with flowers, teddy bears, and other remembrances. The memorial spread to a nearby park where it grew and for weeks afterwards people came and walked through it to remember and mourn for those killed.
That wasn’t the first public shrine and it wasn’t the last. The images of mass shootings have become the warp in the American fabric of life and the public shrines of mourning the weft.
These have become one of the main ways we grieve as a society.
Organizations have grieving rituals as well. The lowering of the flag to half-mast is an official expression of grief. The custodian at my children’s elementary school did the honor of raising to full mast and then lowering when it was called for. It was a solemn expression for him, even when he didn’t know who it was for.
The half-mast flag is a well-known, institutionalized marker of grief. Organizations often develop their own unique ways to honor and memorialize a member of their community.
If a University of Buffalo School of Social Work student dies before graduation, the school ties a white ribbon to an empty chair at their graduation ceremony in memory of the student.
Cycling communities across the country have a tradition of leaving a white “ghost” bike as a marker of the death of a cyclist who died while riding.
Memorials have gone digital as well. Facebook offers family members the ability to memorialize a person’s page after they have died. It enables people to continue to post images, memories and photos to the page.
Video memorials that might have been created for a funeral often get posted to YouTube and remain a public memorial to a loved one. Meet Stacey Jayne Taylor who died from cancer in 2016.
There is an active memorial group on Facebook called the “COUNTERfit Harm Reduction Program’s Drug Users Memorial Project.” It “was established in 2010 as a remembrance, healing and community arts initiative to commemorate loved ones who have died in the War on Drugs.” The group sets up memorial events for people to honor and grieve those who have died from drug use.
This is a small handful of examples of public grieving. When you think about it, grief is everywhere in small and large symbols that run seamlessly through our daily lives. It affects you more when the roadside shrine you drive by every day is your loved one; or the ghost bike memorializes your friend. But it would help us all normalize and destigmatize expressions of emotions, especially related to grief, if we took a second to nod to that random shrine and wonder who the person was or who they left behind, or notice the flag at half-mast and think about the grieving friends and family, or the flowers woven into a chain link fence and smile at the love they represent.
And the next time someone says, “I don’t do funerals” maybe give a little push back; offer to support them at the service and encourage them to find a way to express that love, pain and loss in some way.
Grief Meets. . . 