Death – It’s a Living

This was the title of a television documentary I saw a couple of years ago.  It addressed the changing ways people are arranging funerals and memorials in North America.

The truth of the matter is that there is a cost to hiring a funeral director to take care of the myriad of details once someone has died and the complexity of those details generally is reflected in the price you’ll pay. 

But what we do with ourselves when we die isn’t just a matter of money, and funerals aren’t just about disposal of the dead.

They’re rituals we perform in order to adjust to the loss of a loved one and to place that loss within a larger context that gives meaning to the life that’s gone.

For all North Americans, religion once provided that context and for a majority still does.  Christian, Muslim, Buddhist; in my 25 years of Funeral Service I have seen all types and varieties of faith frameworks, and the comfort a faith-based ceremony provides is like none other for subscribers.  The faith that death is merely a life changed, not ended, is immensely comforting indeed.

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A societal changeover from burial to cremation is obvious in our culture. It signals a shift in how we think about our bodies and ourselves.  What is the meaning of life, and death, and how important is the intact body in the funeral process?

One of my grandfathers died in 1989 and wanted cremation.  I think this was his preference being a landed immigrant from the UK where cremation is chosen 75% of the time.  I remember my family spending a great deal of time choosing the picture for his memorial card.  We realized this picture would come to symbolize our memory of him and we wanted to remember the happy, merry man he was rather than the poor health and hospitalization at the end.

The funeral ritual is like that picture.

Rituals evolve.

What stays constant is our societal need for them, for some way to make sense of the hole in our lives that death creates. While the types of services we offer are changing, our job has remained the same.  We have an obligation to make sure the picture is the right one.