Do Funerals Matter?

Routledge has just published Bill Hoy’s new book, Do Funerals Matter? The Purposes and Practices of Death Rituals in Global Perspective. Learn more about the book and get your 18% discount off the publisher’s list price ($ 31.95 instead of $ 37.95 until April 1) here.

This volume details Bill’s five anchors of death rituals present in every society studied–both in the contemporary world and throughout history.  About this new book, Kevin O’Neill (University of Redlands) wrote, “Bill Hoy’s remarkable book combines elements that one would not expect to find coexisting happily within a single cover. It introduces a five-part template for performing proper grief rituals that proves extraordinarily useful, then extends this study to include knowledgeable discussions of the death rituals of many cultures. It is remarkable to find so many topics covered with such proficiency and competence in a single volume, and funeral and grief professionals will benefit from his suggestions. I recommend this book without a single reservation.”

Harold Ivan Smith, author of Borrowed Narratives wrote, “Do funerals ‘matter’ anymore? Bill Hoy resoundingly answers ‘Yes!’ in what I think will become the definitive book on the topic. Hoy blends his personal experience with ritual as a minister, a clinician, and a mourner with a vast palette of research. I thought I knew a lot about funerals, but this book kept me reading and it has strengthened my appreciation for the elements of a good funeral. Rare among academic books, this one is a page-turner!”

Learn more about Do Funerals Matter? (and order your discounted copy!) today here.

 

Ever Vigilant

Even with the approach of Hurricane Sandy’s fierce downpours and howling winds, The Old Guard stands ever-vigilant at the Tomb of the Unknowns in Washington’s Arlington National Cemetery. The soldiers of the 3rd Infantry Regiment faithfully guard the tomb through the heat of summer and the cold of winter.

In spite of the cemetery being closed and no tourists to view the changing of the guard, the soldiers of the 3rd Infantry keep up their faithful watch. Captain Owen Koch told USA Today, “Miserable is what we sign up to do as infantrymen. They do it every day, in the heat of the summer and the dead of the winter. I expect we’ll be able to keep soldiers out there the whole time.”

The vigilance of the Old Guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns reminds all Americans of the protective faithfulness of our men and women in uniform who honorably place their lives in harm’s way every day. Take a moment today to say thank you to someone you know who currently serves or who has served to protect our freedoms.

Even Elephants “Get It”

When Lawrence Anthony, the beloved curator of a private South African game preserve died last spring, South African news outlets reported that two herds of his beloved elephants made their way to his home and spent a couple of days reverently paying their respects. Similar to the North American ritual of holding a wake or offering calling hours at the funeral home, these elephants gathered to honor a life.

Funeral for “Elephant Whisperer” Lawrence Anthony (1950-2012)

Widely reported around the world in such media outlets as Readers Digest, the story seems to echo what has been generally accepted as the “emotional intelligence” of elephants. Dr. Janet McCord, director of the Edwin S. Shneidman Department of Thanatology at Marian University is not surprised to hear this response. Having lived and worked on the African continent, McCord says elephants will often gather around the bones of a member of the herd to create their own funeral ritual. Elephants have been known to bury their dead by heaping leaves, grasses and even soil on the corpses of dead members of the herd.

You can read the whole story about the two herds that appeared at Lawrence Anthony’s home on the website of the Independent Newspapers of Africa.

Thank you to Chris Butler, Butler Funeral Homes in Springfield, Ilinois for alerting us to this story.

Honoring Funeral Directors

People are sometimes critical of funeral service professionals, forgetting that these people walk with families and communities through the “darkest nigths of the soul.” So when I saw  this Denver Post photo that includes my friend, John Horan along with other members of his staff supporting the family and friends of 18-year old A.J. Boik in yesterday’s funeral, I was reminded that once again, this dear friend is leading his staff to care for their community when they are hurting deeply, themselves. I felt a sense of pride in seeing this photo and others like them in this morning’s newspapers.

But frankly, this photo is also sobering as I realize that John and his staff are doing once again for the people of suburban Denver what they did after Columbine just 13 years ago. I can speak for most of my colleagues in grief counseling to say most of us go our entire careers without being called on to shepherd our own communities through the aftermath of a mass killing; John Horan, Darren Forbes and their people are now doing this for the second time in less than a decade and a half.

At the same time, I am gladdened that John and his people are there. I can’t imagine any funeral directors in greater Denver who can better care for these people–not just the families of the victims but this entire community. It’s interesting that the criticism of funerals and funeral directors DOES NOT generally come from people who see them in this kind of setting, nor from those who live the heart-wrenching experience of a loved one’s death and who are therein served by these men and women. In caring for bereaved people and in my ongoing research into the efficacy of funerals, I have been privleged to meet men and women like John Horan from all over the world. Their task is often thankless–and it shouldn”t be so.

So to all of you who place your own grief “on hold” to lead your communities through the unthinkable, I say thank you. As a counselor among the grieving, I am deeply aware that your hard work has made my job inestimatbly easier. Not just when the “cameras are rolling” but every single day with every single family, you care with honor, care and professionalism.  I count it a joy to number you folks as the “best of the best” among my colleagues in caregiving.

Sulawesi Funeral–The Torajan of Indonesia

Torajan Funeral Rites from National Geographic is a fascinating video on Torajan Valley funeral rites. Learning from the customs of others is one of the best ways to understand our own beliefs and values.

Bill Hoy’s Baylor Page

You can find the latest papers and presentation PowerPoints from Bill Hoy on his Baylor University faculty webpage. Follow this link to find the growing collection or type the address directly into your web browser.

https://bearspace.baylor.edu/Bill_Hoy/Papers

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.

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.