~ 330 St. Landry Street ~
~ Lafayette, LA 70506 ~
~ 337-234-2311 ~
mourning@mourning.com

Why Have a Funeral

Pat Andrus, MS
A Comforting Voice


Funerals really are for the living. This may be hard to accept in our thinking. Funerals are for the persons suffering the trauma of the death... the death of a family member, friend, pet, or perhaps other losses. By pre-arranging our own service, we express our preferences, likes and dislikes, as well as something of our hopes and desires. We exert a type of control over the last event of our lives. But, most of all, we ease the burden of those making tough decisions for our service.

Funerals, like many other celebrations and ceremonies in our lives, are rites of passage. A funeral declares a life was lived and a death has occurred. By offering our family and friends the opportunity to gather we also offer the hope of healing the pain and trauma often associated with death. Funerals often signify the beginning of the healing for they are also early steps in acknowledging the death, understanding the death and moving through a natural period of denial.

Funerals offer the opportunity to pay tribute to a person in our life, whether he/she was a blood relative or a part of our larger community family. Therese A. Rando (1984) has concentrated on the psychological, social, spiritual and social group benefits funerals offer mourners. Wolfelt (1988) lists these as follows:

Psychological Benefits:

• Funerals confirm and reinforce the reality of death.
• Funerals assist in the acknowledgment and expression of feelings of loss.
• Funerals stimulate the recollection of the deceased, a necessary aspect of healing.
• Funerals assist mourners in beginning to accommodate to the changed relationship between themselves and the deceased person.
• Funerals allow for input from the community that serves as a living memorial to the deceased and helps mourners form an integrated image of the deceased.
• Funerals in and of themselves contain the specific properties of rituals employed in therapy.

Social Benefits:

• Funerals allow the community to provide social support to the mourners.
• Funerals provide meaningful, structured activities to counter the loss of predictability and order frequently accompanying the death of a loved one.
• Funerals begin the process of reintegrating the bereaved back into the community.

Spiritual Benefits:

• Funerals with a religious orientation give mourners a context of meaning as they attempt to fit the death of their loved one, and ultimately of themselves, into their religious and philosophical framework.

Social Group Benefits:

• Funerals help the group to adjust to the loss of one of its members.
• Funerals affirm the social order by offering testimony that despite the death which has occurred, the community lives on.
• Funerals bind the social group together through present experience and collective memory.
• Funerals demonstrate to members of society that they themselves will someday die, and serve as vehicles of anticipatory grief prompted by the rehearsal of their own mortality.
• Funerals are a way in which the community conveys its values and beliefs regarding the meaning of life and death.
• Funerals are means by which the community may maintain symbolic connections with the dead and reap therapeutic opportunities to complete unfinished mourning.
• Funerals provide the final disposition of the body or the remains of the deceased.

Once a person has experienced a funeral, some of these benefits may seem reasonable. Others consider funerals barbaric and morbid, not yet realizing the necessary roles funerals may play in our healing.

Minimizing the funeral ritual or eliminating it all together has resulted in confusion about healthy ways to mourn a loss. By minimizing the ritual of the funeral we unconsciously may be minimizing the grief we feel over the loss. Thus, we hinder our responses to our grief and to the grief of others. We hinder the ways we mourn and heal our pain.

People often find themselves experiencing isolation and feeling alone, not knowing how to mourn their losses throughout life. By distorting the ritual of the funeral we are distorting our own perception of the mourning necessary to our healing. Holding no funeral may result in people experiencing complicated responses to grief such as delayed grief or absent grief.

As the traditional forms of funeral ritual takes on updated images, funeral directors, clergy and other helpers are challenged to find new ways to help mourners. One response is the evolution of funeral home aftercare as seen through our program, The Mourning After. We feel a responsibility to attend to mourners in special ways.

Funeral directors, clergy and counselors are helping families find ways to meet their psycho-social needs while being attentive to the last wishes of the deceased person and working within financial guidelines.

While cremation continues to be a growing trend in may areas of our country, beautiful memorial services aid in the healing process. People are realizing they can select cremation with a viewing and funeral service. For many families, traditions are blended with individuality to create unique and meaningful services which play a strong role in accepting the death and allowing ourselves to move forward in life.

The grieving process is not a simple one. In fact, it can be full of stumbling blocks and mazes. Yet, for at least 60,000 years there is historical evidence of funeral rituals being used. (Aries, 1981) What humans have learned about death is still compounded by wonder and fear. What we have learned about mourning and grieving now constitutes a field of science. What we have learned about ourselves as individuals in this life... well, we still learn best by experience.

Life teaches us by stretching us into areas we were not sure we could manage. Many of us were positive we could not even make it through the hours of decision making after the death of our family member or friend much less through the days of the funeral and afterwards.

Yet, here we are still, learning more about grief, mourning, funerals and ourselves. We are sorting through memories, treasuring what we have learned from this loss and learning to let go of that which must be relinquished.

It may seem strange or perhaps ironic that the ending of one personās life indicates the opening of doors in another personās life. So might it seem odd that funerals may be the catalyst of our healing. Life leaves us much to ponder.