My mother passed away back in 1988. She had made her own arrangements for cremation with a company called the Neptune Society. I got the call she had passed and rushed to get there four hours later. I was in a different state. By the time I got there they had taken her for cremation and her ashes were soon to be taken out to sea to be scattered. She wasn’t Catholic, but this hurt me a great deal. Her friends had a “Celebration of Life,” which was a get together mostly of a theater group she worked with. They drank wine and told stories with a lot of laughing. I broke down. I felt betrayed.
Talk to your priest and get his advice. Funerals are as much for the living as they are for the dead.
I’m so sorry, Convert3! How terrible! A military closed casket left me feeling empty, but what you endured had to be far worse. I’ve come to believe that funerals are essential for helping the living to adjust to the finality of death. We become accustomed to an orderly progression of days from the death to the burial. We feel very jarred, very much at loose ends, as though things are unfinished when some of those steps are skipped, as so often occurs now after cremation, with no funeral, no burial and no marker.
I miss Ann Landers and Miss Manners. Their substitutes today just aren’t the same, mainly because people pooh-pooh standards and insist upon doing whatever they wish. Society hasn’t yet come up with a satisfactory protocol for what happens after cremation, leaving the surviving family members with huge gaps and hurting hearts.
When I was in grade school, many wakes in small towns were in homes. The funeral director would take the casket to the home. A friend or relative of the immediate family stayed with the body throughout each night of the two or three afternoons and evenings of visitation. If the house was large, the funeral would be held at the house or a church, but very rarely the funeral home. If the house was small, the funeral would be conducted at the church. Normally, only funerals of non-church-goers were conducted at the funeral home. Most family homes had an upright piano, so that would be played softly during the visitations, with a soloist, duet, trio, or quartet also at the funeral. Catholics, of course, were buried from the parish Church. Gradually, viewings in funeral homes prevailed. The last home wake that I attended was in 1958.
We’ve gone from that scenario, where mourners had a chance to mourn—to become accustomed to the reality of their loss—to what we see today. Expediting the disappearance of the one we’ve lost seems cut and dried, cold and utilitarian, and detrimental to the healing process.
