Why do we have funerals?

I thought I would write my first blog post with one of the big questions- nothing like a challenge! 

Of course, you would be right to think that I’m going to argue we need funerals. However, it’s really important to me to be honest and have integrity, and I do understand that there are times when a funeral might not be wanted or feel needed, these include: 

• When the person who has died is the last one left and there is no-one to attend; 

• When culture or tradition dictates not having a funeral; 

• When the person was complicated and it might feel better to remember them as an individual or small group- for example, colleagues in one group, golf friends in another; 

• When there is disagreement as to what’s appropriate to commemorate someone. 

But, in many situations, including some of the above, not having what we think of as a funeral doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do… something. 

Perhaps that small group of colleagues might like to listen to some music together via Teams? Perhaps the golfing buddies would enjoy a picnic? Perhaps we might hire a service venue, separate from a crematorium or burial ground, where everyone has a chance to feed into what the ceremony looks like? 

There is nothing to stop any of this happening and nothing to prevent this being someone’s ‘funeral’. The only thing getting in the way is our views of what funerals ‘should’ look like. Traditional ideas, reinforced in films and TV, of black-clad mourners gathering at gravesides, or waiting outside the crematorium chapel for a hearse to arrive, only tell part of the story. Why can’t you remember someone in woodland, a hotel, or at the beach? Why can’t we just sit around and chat and share memories? Why can’t we laugh, and dance, and remember someone with joy as well as sadness. But we have a need to: 

• remember people 

• commemorate their loss 

• acknowledge what they meant to us and their impact on us (good or bad) 

• say goodbye. 

A funeral of some kind, whatever it looks like, fulfils this purpose, and these needs don’t go away without one.  

You may be reading this and thinking, ‘dancing? That’s not for me!’ and this is exactly my point. All of us are different and there are things that are right for us in death, as in life.  

Perhaps the question I have posed at the start is far too big to answer. All I know is that when someone dies, we may miss their presence and mourn their absence and a funeral- or a non-funeral event- helps us in this natural, but sometimes very difficult, part of our own lives.