Are Funerals for the Living or the Dead?
‘Are funerals for the person who has died, or those they leave behind?’ is a question I’ve pondered a lot in my work as a funeral celebrant, and really it is both, always both…... with different emphasis depending on each situation.
But something happened a few months ago that made me suddenly very clear on my position on this topic.
I was sat around a table with a family discussing plans for the funeral of their matriarch who died peacefully in her 90s surrounded by 3 generations who loved her.
Nothing controversial there, except….
One of her grandchildren is trans.
And it emerged in our conversation that this otherwise loving and big-hearted Granny had never accepted “the whole name change thing.”
And then I was informed that the family had decided “We never told Granny they were trans. And we’d like you to refer to them in the ceremony by the name and gender they were assigned at birth…..
……Because it’s Granny’s funeral.”
And I had this deeply visceral response in my body of “Hard No!”
Everything in me resisted the prospect of diminishing the wholeness of this young person WHO IS STILL ALIVE for the sake of maintaining the status quo for granny (who is sadly dead).
That was the moment that I realised, my priority in my work is to advocate for the living.
To create spaces for grief to be named and held in all its confusing fullness.
To welcome the bereaved in their full humanity to honour the full (flawed, complex, unknowable) humanity of the person who has died.
To invite honesty and authenticity into the room alongside loving and honouring the person who has died.
To weave ceremonies where we can say the difficult things as well as the positive ones.
Where we can lament what wasn’t as well as what was.
Where there is spaciousness for naming the ways this person we loved didn’t always love us the way we longed for them to.
And to encourage us to see our mortality as an invitation to inhabit our lives more fully and joyfully!
Because grief is a sacred process, and to deny anyone the opportunity to grieve as themselves feels like a violation.
In short - death is unavoidable.
Dead-naming the people we care about is not.
Also, I believe (or at least hold onto hope!)that when we die, our souls take what they have learned, and leave behind the fear, bigotry, discrimination and prejudice that they carried in this lifetime. I hope and trust that in this case, granny on the other side of the veil has nothing but love and pride for all her grandchildren and the ways they show up in the world.
So, that’s where I’ve ‘landed’ on this question. ….. Yes funerals are for honouring the dead, but if I’m pushed….primarily they are an opportunity for those left behind to gather, grieve, reflect, process and name what matters.
Having said that, what REALLY lights me up is when I get to have these conversations with people who are still here and who are being really intentional about thinking ahead about how they want their people to gather when they die, and how they can help to ease the transition for those they love…..
Who’s with me on being more honest and authentic in the ways in which we mark the end of life?! And making ,funerals death care and grief spaces genuinely inclusive for our trans and LGBTQ+ friends?
Comments