Mourning Whitney Houston

Now that Whitney Houston has been buried next to her father, I’ll venture a thought on last week’s posturing about the funeral and who was inside, who was outside and what mourning alternatives people found. The Associated Press article published in news media around the world a couple of days ago summarized the story well: “In Whitney Houston’s hometown, her family plans a private church service, with no public memorial set.  In Los Angeles, where she died, there’s not even a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for fans to pile flowers. So for the legion of music lovers mourning a global superstar, where do broken hearts go?”

The discussion last week surrounding the private vs. public memorials for singer Whitney Houston raises an important issue that all of us must ponder. Readers of this blog are unlikely to have the “fan following” of a Grammy-winning superstar. But the question remains–who has the right to mourn? Many point to the “family’s privacy,” their right to do what they want, and, few of us would disagree. After all, the legal next of kin is whose rights are upheld when families get into squabbles over what to do about mom’s funeral and whether or not she should be cremated.

But there is a bigger issue in play here. In our media-saturated society, fans become attached to celebrities as if they are “next of kin.” While the relationships are not completely similar to the parent-child bond, siblings or spouses, these relationships are significant. Every counselor knows when we overlook these “relationships” we miss important cues in helping our clients.

The larger issue here is that all of us belong to communities. Most of us belong to several (or many) communities. Just today, I was thinking about some of the communities of which I am a part: extended family in three states; professional colleagues through the Association for Death Education and Counseling; academic colleagues at two universities where I teach; a small Bible study group and many other people in the large congregation of which we are a part; parents of other kids who attend Crawford High School; people I know from business dealings; and on and on the list could go. My BlackBerry has almost 500 contacts and I know many of these people rather closely, even though they might not be in one of the aforementioned “communities.” I’m guessing my list is bigger than some and a lot smaller than others.

So what is the point?  When people tell me there needs to be no public gathering to honor their life and mark their death, I wonder how many of their friends will feel robbed in the same way Whitney Houston’s fans felt robbed. Grief demands expression–whether in the intuitive sharing of emotion or the instrumental “acting out of ritual.” For most of us, we need some of both, and one actually assists in the expression of the other.

While it is nice to leave some flowers on the sidewalk or post a Facebook remembrance, that isn’t the same as gathering with others to rub shoulders, share stories and shed tears together. Fortunately, the funeral was telecast, but watching the funeral in one’s living room is not the same as being with others. Especially when sadness interupts our lives, we desperately need the compassion and companionship of each other, even if we aren’t sure we do.

If you don’t believe it, read the stories of the people who flew to Newark last week just to stand on the sidewalk outside the New Hope Baptist Church or the Whigham Funeral Home. These weren’t nutcases, either; these fans included well-adjusted people mourning someone whose music had touched their own life and perhaps more importantly for some, to pay homage to a star battling addictions whose story intersected with their own.

If your clients, your own parents or you even think to yourself, “I’ve outlived most of my friends; there’s no need to bother with a gathering,” I urge you to think again. Whether we think we’ve made an impact or not, we have made one–usually in more profound ways than we can even imagine. And like Kevin Costner alluded to in his eulogy, I wonder if Whitney had known and really believed the impact she had made, if that wouldn’t have been a powerful agent of healing in her own inwardly tortured life.

Ignoring the Request for “No Funeral”

Seemingly, a growing number of North Americans are making the request that there be “no service” upon their death. In my ongoing research into how we have dealt with death historically and how different people groups respond today, I’ve come across an interesting artifact.

George Washington, the “Father” of our nation, made a similar request–and it was summarily ignored by his family, community and nation. Washington wrote, “It is my express desire that my Corpse may be Interred in a private manner, without parade, or funeral Oration.” In my experience, that simple “stroke of a pen” will not so easily dissuade communities of mourners, who, from time immemorial have gone to great effort to do what we need to do with our dead.

Ignoring the expressed “wishes” of the deceased, Washington’s family allowed the Masonic Lodge to coordinate the service of burial at Mt. Vernon. Though hastily arranged, apparently it was quite an affair, described a few days later by Rev. James Muir:

“In the long and lofty portico, where oft the hero walked in all his glory, now lay the shrouded corpse…. There those who paid the last sad honors to the benefactor of his country took an impressive, a farewell view.

“Three general discharges of infantry, the cavalry, and eleven pieces of artillery, which lined the banks of the Potomac, back of the vault, paid the last tribute to the entombed Commander-in-Chief of the Armies of the United States…The sun was now setting” (Papers, 2011).

In recent years, the funerals of the famous and not-so-famous have been broadcast by television and internet, allowing a vast community of mourners opportunity to quasi-participate in the services. Almost everyone has touched more people than he or she realizes, witnessed by the manifold times the funeral for a homeless person is attended by many dozens, if not several hundred, mourners. An estimated 2.5 billion people watched the 1997 funeral for Princess Diana (BBC, 2008), a global television audience estimated at more than three times the approximately 750 million who watched her famous wedding to Prince Charles in 1981 (Robinson, 1997).

Telecasting funerals of the famouse was not the norm, of course, when Washington died in 1799. In an attempt to mourn their own sense of loss, communities across the land staged “mock funerals,”  foreshadowing the dozen separate funeral events  for President Lincoln as his body was transported  by train from Washington, DC to Springfiled, Illinois after his assassination more than six decades later (Trostel, 2002).

One of the largest mock funerals for President Washington seems to have been the one two weeks after his death in Philadelphia, the city that had served as the nation’s temporary capital while Washington, DC was built. People came from all around to observe “the spendid and somber march, accompanied by the sounding of muffled drums (as the funeral cortege) proceeded through Philsadelphia a little past noon.

“A riderless horse, escorted by two marines wearing black scarves, preceded the clergy. The Pennsylvania Gazette reported that the horse carried an empty saddle, holsters, pistols, and boots reversed in the stirrups. The horse also was ‘trimmed with black–the head festooned with elegant black and white feathers, the American Eagle displayed in a rose upon the breast, and in a feather upon the head. In the midst of the procession, pallbearers carried an empty casket” (Hawn, 2007).

What relevance for us is a dead president’s funeral 212 years ago? This relic of history, in part serves to remind us that the dead should only be partially allowed to dictate the terms of their own funerals.  As I have said elsewhere (Hoy, 2007),  when faced with death from earliest times and around the world, we humans utilize significant symbols, gather with our communities, ritualize our actions, connect to our heritage, and transition the dead from “here to there.” In my experience, no one’s “final wishes” should be allowed to trump those basic needs of the living.

And if one declares his “corpse…be interred in a private manner, without parade, or funeral oration,” he must understand the reality that a grieving community may go to great extremes to respectfully ignore his wishes.

References.

British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). (2008). On This Day, 6 September. Accessed from http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/6/newsid_2502000/2502307.stm

Hawn, J. (2007, September). The funeral of George Washington. Mall Times: National Mall & Memorial Parks Newspaper, National Parks Service, p. 1. Accessed from www.nps.gov/mall/parknews/upload/MallTimes1.pdf

Hoy, W.G. (2007). Road to Emmaus: Pastoral care with the dying and bereaved. Dallas, TX: Compass Press.

Papers of George Washington. (2011). Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Alderman Library. http://gwpapers.virginia.edu/project/exhibit/mourning/funeral.html

Robinson, E. (1997 September 1). From sheltered life to palace life, to a life of her own. The Washington Post, pp. A21.

Trostel, S. (2002) The Lincoln funeral train: The Final journey and national funeral for Abraham Lincoln. Fletcher, OH: Com-Tech Publishing.

Photographing the Dead

Hardly had the photographic revolution begun in the late 19th century with the consumer camera invention of George Eastman before there arose a new way of acknowledging the dead–the wake photograph. Early in my career, I spied a photo hanging on the wall of the Stricklin/Snively Mortuary in Long Beach, California, an early 20th century photo of a large Japanese family and community gathered on the sidewalk in front of the mortuary, around the closed casket of their loved one. When my own dad died in 1993, I used one of his cameras (he was an avid photographer) to phototgraph him in his casket and several of the arrangements of flowers that had arrived at the funeral home.

Some might call the practice macabre. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Whatever you call it–the remains, the corpse, the body, or Mr. Jones in Parlor A–the dead body has been an integral part of the memorial event from time immemorial. Like most people who posess photos of their dead–in a file folder, a frame or on a computer hard drive–I haven’t looked at the photos of my dead father in a long time, even though I know their exact location in my file cabinet. But the “body” is the physical representation of the one whom we loved, cared for and interacted with. Contrary to the thinking of some today, it is not “just a shell” and it takes a while for the bereaved to get their heads, hearts and hands around the notion that the body is not entirely the same thing as the person we loved.

This morning, my email contained a poignant reminder of this business of photographing the dead when my daily missive from Obit Magazine arrived (okay, receiving such emails is an occupational hazzard!) I invite you to read the brief tale of this journalist who started her career, as it were, as a teenaged wake photographer. You’ll find the whole story here.

New GriefPerspectives Newsletter

Our newest edition of GriefPerspectives is out, focusing this month on grieving children and teens. You can find it and our past issues here.

Pausing to Remember

In the shower. Driving the freeway. Working out in the gym. Eating breakfast. Enjoying a cup of “joe” on the patio and watching Good Morning America. No one forgets where they were on the morning of September 11, 2001. And wherever we were, we can’t forget the feelings of that day, either. Shock. Fear. Anger. Sadness. Eventually, those emotions gave way to positive actions–resolve, compassion and determination.

Even if the newspaper didn’t remind us that this anniversary has come around, we would still remember. You just can’t forget the night your spouse died or the afternoon your child was diagnosed with cancer or the morning hijacked airplanes flew into the great symbols of our national pride. The trauma evoked by an anniversary is never really gone from our memories.

But anniversaries are good for something else, too. We remember the great times, the qualities that made life better and the values our loved ones lived. Anniversaries are a time for sadness and celebration, reminding us that we always need both. Anniversaries esound in our hearts the uncomfortable truth that we don’t just celebrate life but we also mark death, we don’t just rejoice in the happy times but we weep in the sad ones, too.

The television talking heads wondered aloud that bright clear September morning if this event would change us, if it would change the world. We all wondered if the newfound religious fervor and the spirit of patriotism would prevail. I’ll leave all of that to future historians to evaluate.

But as we remember 9/11, as we call to mind the thousands who died in New York and Washington and Shanksville,  we can be overwhelmed with gratitude that we have the ability to remember. And perhaps in the end, the remembering is the greatest gift anniversaries open in our lives.

Man’s Best Friend…Faithful to the End

Navy SEAL Jon Tumlinson was one of the 30 American troops killed when their helicpoter was shot down in Afghanistan earlier this month, and 1,500 people attended his funeral in his hometown of Rockford, Iowa. But one of the attendees used all four feet to lead the mourners into the high school gym for his master’s funeral. “Hawkeye,” Jon’s black lab participated in the funeral and then dutifully took his place–lying on the floor at the foot of his master’s casket.

There are so many messages in this image. Our animal companions are faithful throughout life–and even in death. They care for us, stay by our sides, and would devotedly give up their own lives if they could to keep us safe.

When their masters die before them, they mourn. We’ve known for years that animals experience significant loss at the death of those who care for them. Hospice bereavement staff recount story after story told to them by widows and widowers of patients: “He just sits by my wife’s chair and waits,” or “She lies on the bed for hours on end, almost as if she’s waiting for him to come back.” We don’t know how the emotional world of dogs and cats work, but we know they most certainly experience grief in significant ways.

But there’s another point here, and even a dog is wise enough to see it. When our lives have been turned upside down by the death of a loved one, we desperately need each other. We need to cry together, rub shoulders with each other, share stories of life and loss, and even demonstrate with clear physical evidence that we have loved greatly. Most of us don’t physically fall on the ground at the foot of a loved one’s casket. But we may very well drop to our knees emotionally.

Funerals work. It is no accident that social groups have gathered in the face of death to remember their dead and draw solace from one another, not for a few decades, but literally, for millenia. We need these ancient rites that draw us into the sadness of death and grief so that we can move adaptively into a world without the one we love. In a word, funerals work.

Read the whole story of Petty Officer 1st Class Jon Tumlinson’s funeral here.

"Hawkeye" at casket of Navy SEAL Jon Tumlinson 08/19/11

Interruptions as Caregivers

Those of us who make our living caring for people often laugh at the insanely impractical advice that comes from those really well-organized folks who run all the time management seminars. But my wife pointed me to a great article from the good folks who make the FranklinCovey organizer. You can read the whole article here, but these are a few highlights…

Professionals in interruption-prone arenas like counseling, running non-profits, providing hospice services, and overseeing funeral services must understand that a lot of our effectiveness comes about because we get interrupted. This reminds me of the plaque I saw in a store once: “Customers aren’t an interruption to our work; they’re the reason for it.”

Paige Willey, author of the article says that we need to “block our day.” That means don’t schedule every spare moment and create small blocks of time to work on parts of big priorities. The more interruptions you typically get, the smaller those blocks should be so you can shuffle them around. The time management gurus say to create two-hour or three-hour blocks to work on the big projects. That doesn’t work when very well when you must be available to people. But we can drop in quite a few 15-minute blocks.

Listing priorities and tasks is Time Management 101 but I’m still amazed at how infrequently I take time to preview my day and do just that. Maybe you’re like me. When there is a “priority vacuum” in my life, I tend to default to stupid things like email, web-surfing, reorganizing the bookshelves and cleaning my desk. Some of those tasks might need to be done but they don’t require the best hours of my day.

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Meaning-making in bereavement

I have been reading and thinking a great deal lately about suffering and the finding of meaning that seems necessary for people facing loss. Most often expressed in spiritual or even religious terms, these meanings provide the compass for people in the midst of grief or end-of-life decision-making.

Victor Frankl is widely-known for his watershed book, Man’s Search for Meaning. Surviving incarceration in a Nazi concentration camp and seeing virtually his entire family and community killed, Frankl was faced with the gigantic task of trying to make meaning of the experience. In my estimation, his experience gives  him more credibility in addressing the topics of suffering, evil and meaning-making than I could ever hope to have myself.

In the Forward to one edition of Frankl’s book, the famous psychotherapist Gordon Allport* wrote, ”To live is to suffer; to survive is to find meaning in the suffering – if there is a purpose in life at all, there must be a purpose in suffering and dying – but no-one can tell another what that purpose is” (Frankl, 1984, p. 9).  Helping clients discover meaning in their experiences with grief is one of the cutting edge issues for research and theorizing in the bereavement field these days. Anyone who has worked much with grieving people appreciates the importance of this work since meaning-making is the most compelling issue for many bereaved people and virtually every bereaved parent with whom I have worked.

In their chapter on meaning reconstruction in bereavement, Robert Neimeyer and Diana Sands (2011) write, “In the aftermath of life-altering loss, the bereaved are commonly precipitated into a search for meaning at levels that range from the practical (How did my loved one die?) through the relational (Who am I, now that I am no longer a spouse?) to the spiritual or existential (Why did God allow this to happen?). How–and whether–we engage these questions and resolve or simply stop asking them shapes how we accommodate the loss itself and who we become in light of it” (p. 11).

Neimeyer and Sands (2011) quote research indicating that the role of sense-making (which is a form of meaning-making) accounts for nearly all the difference in bereavement outcomes for people whose loved ones died traumatically as opposed to those who died by “natural causes.” They continue their analysis of the research by suggesting that for widowed people and for bereaved parents, the ability to make meaning of the loss contributes to healthy adaptation to the loss.

For those of us who work with the bereaved, the application seems clear. We must accompany our clients, congregants, patients and friends as they discover meaning in their loss. Far from “attributing meaning” or superimposing my meaning on the experiences of another, we must accompany sufferers as they find meaning.

Does this mean that I believe there is no absolute truth and that all meaning is personally-determined. No, not at all. What it does mean is that, while I can always humbly share the meaning I have discovered in this loss or others, I cannot tell another individual that my meaning should become his or hers. As a disciple of Jesus Christ, my faith makes a huge difference (I hope!) in the sense I make of suffering. When invited, I will glady and respectfully share that part of my pilgrimage in accordance with the same boundaries I share other parts of my own experiences with loss.

But as a counselor, I am wise to approach my clients as a facilitator of their growth rather than as a hawker of my understanding of truth. Asking questions about the sense currently being made of a loss, staying present in the sometimes angry protests of “this makes no sense” and quietly helping constituents find ways to make meaning in the loss are essential strategies I’ve found helpful in the counsel and support of bereaved people.

* The quote, “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering…” above has been attributed to numerous individuals including Frederich Nietzsche, Victor Frankl, and even American songwriter Roberta Flack. Though my research is far from definitive, I believe Gordon Allport originated the quote.

References.

Frankl, Viktor E. (1984). Man’s search for meaning: An introduction to logotherapy. New York: Touchstone

Neimeyer, R.A. & Sands, D.C. (2011). Meaning reconstruction in bereavement: From principles to practice. In Neimeyer, R.A., Harris, D.L., Winokuer, H.R. & Thornton, G.F. (Eds.) Grief and bereavement in contemporary society: Bridging research and practice (pp. 9-22). New York: Routledge.

“Blessings”–faith when the solution can’t be seen

This spring, I heard a song on Christian radio entitled Blessings and then learned the artist’s name is Laura Story. I’ve enjoyed the song for several months and you can see a great slide show with the music here.

But today for the first time, I heard the story behind the song. When Laura and her husband Martin had been married only about 18 months, he began to have symptoms that eventually led to a diagnosis of a brain tumor just before their second anniversary. Five years later, Martin’s healing has been remarkable–but by no means complete. He continues to struggle with memory and vision deficits.

Out of that experience, Laura wrote “Blessings.” I hope you enjoy the song–and are as moved by it–as I have been.  You can hear Laura tell their story live to the congregation of Gateway Fellowship in suburban Washington DC.