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Changes in Attitudes to Death & Dying

By Alun Brookfield.

Funerals are strange events, and becoming stranger, as the general population increasingly lose their connection with the Christian faith. As a vague Christian recollection becomes increasing mingled with personal philosophies and pre-Christian superstition and mysticism, the demands on a Christian leader become ever more complex as we seek to steer the bereaved through the minefield of emotions and ideas which whirl around them when they lose a loved one.

Many people wish they could do without this localised intensification of grief which is represented by the funeral of a family member or friend. It is becoming less uncommon for there to be no ‘funeral’ as such at all - just a gathering of friends to listen to music and enjoy a meal together. Occasionally, in the turmoil of grief, a bereaved spouse or partner will resist the idea of a public funeral altogether, asking merely for the coffin to be taken to the crematorium, then the ashes brought back to stay in a pot on the mantelpiece.

The need for proper mourning

But there is still a need for proper mourning. There is still an importance in the externalisation of grief, expressed in a public ceremony to which all who knew and valued the deceased individual are invited. The reason for this is something powerfully to do with giving value to the life that has ended. Part of the route through grief involves a journey to that place where we can acknowledge the continuing value of an individual, even long after their mortal life has ended.

It must surely be significant that virtually all human cultures since before recorded history have developed and observed funeral rites of one kind or another. Perhaps the best known example is the mummification of the bodies of kings and queens in ancient Egypt, but we could cite many more in a kaleidoscope of methods and rituals. It seems clear that there is something in the human psyche which needs to address head-on the harsh, uncomfortable reality that someone whom we loved dearly is now dead. Somehow we seem intuitively to understand that a death affects the whole community at various levels and in different ways and that we have to deal with it rather than ignore it.

So what are we doing in a funeral? I suggest several things:

1.     We’re saying farewell to a loved one, a friend, a drinking partner, a spouse, a ‘mate’.

2.     We’re celebrating his or her life.

3.     We’re identifying the value of that life.

4.     We’re admitting to the pain of loss.

5.     We’re supporting one another in that sense of loss.

Much of the responsibility for including all these elements lies with the officiating minister. Sadly, some focus on one or more of these aspects, but ignore others. It grieves me greatly, as I sometimes stand outside the local crematorium, listening to the funeral before that which I will be conducting, to hear the officiant scarcely mention the deceased by name, let alone make any effort to tell their story or give value to the time they spent on earth. The sheer lack of personalization is upsetting to me as a dispassionate observer - what can it be like for the family and friends of the deceased? Still worse is the reading of poems which deny the pain and separation of death by talking about the deceased only having gone into the ‘next room’.

The personalization of the funeral

Personally speaking, I applaud the growing movement towards the personalization of funerals. I grieve not at all for the passing of those funerals in which we went through a set of routine motions, as though death were something terribly ordinary, and scarcely to be acknowledged at all. For previous generations, death was both frighteningly common (larger families meant many more family-related funerals) and unavoidably domestic (most people died at home), and the British ‘stiff upper lip’ tradition meant that we buried our feelings and ploughed on through life, ignoring the emotional agony within. To give in to the grief was regarded as weakness - letting the side down.

Thank God all that is gone (well, more or less)! As death has become more personal and less domestic, we now have a desire to make every funeral different, unique to the individual who has died. On the whole, I think that is to be applauded, but it brings with it new challenges.

For one thing, funerals take much longer to organise and conduct. On average, every funeral I conduct takes up something in the region of six hours work - it would be less if I lived nearer to the crematorium.

For another, it takes great skill to manage the requests of families who want specific music or readings included. Favourite pieces of music are usually OK for entry or exit, but occasionally one gets a request for a pop song to be sung instead of a hymn - at this point, I thank God profoundly for giving me a decent singing voice so that I can usually demonstrate gently to the family why the idea won’t work! On other occasions, I’m very happy to include items of music clearly intended to make the congregation laugh. I’ll leave my readers to guess why one family wanted the coffin taken out from the church for burial to the strains of Abba belting out “Dancing Queen”!

And, of course, if the funeral is not in church, all this has to be accommodated in a standard crematorium five minutes in, twenty minute service and five minutes out slot.

Three kinds of funeral

Some things do not change. In my experience, funerals fall into three basic categories: the loved, the unloved, and the too much loved

Funerals of people who were loved are a joy and a privilege to conduct. In these situations, we are confronted with families who, although they are sad to lose their loved one, are content and comfortable with the situation because their fund of happy memories is much greater than the depth of their grief. It’s not that they are not grieving, but that the grieving is set in the context of a lifetime of joy and often delightful eccentricity. One recalls the funeral of a teenager, whom most people regarded as severely handicapped, but whose presence in the family had been nothing but a huge blessing to them all. His death at just 15 was a painful loss, but the pre-funeral interview was full of happy, funny stories - grief mingling effortlessly with joyful memories.

I also recall the death of my own father, when so much of the day of his death was taken up with reminding one another, often punctuated with affectionate laughter, of his energy, his eccentricity and his clear-eyed determination to make the most of what he knew would be his last few years of life.

Then there are the unloved. Perhaps one of the most difficult funerals for us as Christian ministers to conduct is that of someone who was loved by nobody. I guess we’ve all had to do it at some time. We visit the family to offer our condolences and to pray with them - so far, so good. But then we ask them to tell us the story of the deceased, and they lapse into an embarrassed silence, not because there’s nothing to say, but because there is nothing good to say, and it is ingrained into us that we must not speak ill of the dead. Our task then is to help them to verbalise their negative emotions, perhaps even to tease out something of what caused the deceased person to be as they were, perhaps to bring them to the beginnings of understanding and forgiving. These are the most challenging of funerals, but they are also, in my experience, the most rewarding, because these are the occasions when our skills and gifts as spiritual healers are most rigorously tested.

A friend of mine told me of a funeral he conducted many years ago. The old lady had died alone, for she had never married, had outlived most of her family, and had alienated those few she had left. The only mourners at her funeral were the funeral director and his staff, along with a few members of staff from the care home where she had spent the last few months of her life. There were no hymns - it would have added even more to the poignancy of the funeral. There were no tears, for no-one mourned her passing. But there was an opportunity to tell her story, which, thankfully, my friend already knew in part and was able to add to with the aid of the care home staff and some of the old lady’s personal papers. He told a story of poverty, abuse and the kind of ill-treatment which made her desire to avoid personal relationships entirely understandable, if not entirely forgivable. It was the most difficult funeral my friend had ever conducted, but he remembered it as the most rewarding, for it depended entirely on him to give this tragic life some sense of value and purpose.

Occasionally we are faced with people who really - bless them - have not the faintest idea how to deal with death in the family. Very often, these are the funerals of people who were too much loved, or perhaps not loved in the best way, with the family clinging to them after death in much the same way and to the same extent that they depended on them in life.

These are the families who will have the greatest difficulty coping with a funeral, for the service will act as a terrible reminder of what they have lost. Sometimes, a member of the family will refuse to attend the funeral because they cannot deal (yet) with the finality which it represents. With love and patience, they will find the healing they need, but, at the time of the funeral, they will still be in an agony of denial.

I have no way of knowing whether this latter phenomenon is an increasing aspect of our difficulty in dealing with death. I suspect it is, because as we have lost from our culture the confidence in the saving death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, so we meet the death of a loved one with no certainty as to the value of their life. Hence there is the growing financial problem for the National Health Service of people sueing hospitals over the death of a 90+year-old loved one. It seems that we can no longer cope with death, so we want our loved ones to live forever. Once upon a time, we believed they would, through faith in Christ, but that confidence is gone so we cling to the physical with ever more hysterical ferocity.

Celebration and the European influence

I want to end this set of random thoughts by talking about celebrating life in the midst of death. It’s usual to have some sort of reception following a funeral. It takes place either at a local pub or restaurant or, less commonly nowadays, at the home of a family member. These are the occasions when everyone gets together to catch up on each other’s news, but also to tell their own stories of the deceased.

But the death of my father in 1990 at the early age of 66 brought me into contact with a non-British approach to death which I embraced with relief and which I regularly offer to families. Please indulge me by allowing me to retell the story here.

On the day of my father’s death, I, my mother and my brother gathered at the family home in south London to console one another and to begin the process of planning the funeral. One of the visitors that day was our Italian neighbour, Leo. After paying his respects to Dad and to us, he insisted we come and eat with him and the family that evening. Being British (the stiff upper lip syndrome!), we demurred, not wanting to be a burden to anyone. But Leo, with complete, but courteous disregard for our Britishness, insisted that he would call for us at 7pm, which he duly did. Reluctantly, we followed him, really not sure that we wanted to go.

The meal was, of course, sumptuous - Leo’s French wife is a cordon-bleu trained chef. It was washed down with several bottles of red wine and seasoned with as much laughter as there were tears as we told story after story of my wonderful, eccentric father. When we tottered home, sometime after midnight, we knew we had done what Dad would have wanted - we had celebrated a life well lived, even if it had ended too soon for our liking.

My prayer is for all funerals to be Christ-centred celebrations of the continuing value of the individual who has died, for, in one sense, every individual - loved, unloved or too much loved - lives on, for good or ill, in the lives of those they leave behind.