WHY YOU SHOULD BE FARED WELL: YES, YOU NEED A FUNERAL (OR DO YOU?)

 People tell me they don't want a funeral. There are the rational reasons: that funerals are expensive, that they would rather leave money to their loved ones, that gatherings are a waste of resources and too difficult during these Covid times. There are the personal reasons: that no one would come, that their families are absent or would not want to take responsibility, that family gatherings end in fights, that it is too sad to think about. 

There are some answers to these issues that are more worldly, and some that aren't. 

Firstly, there is a whole movement towards taking control over the funeral process, including what to do with the body. Home funerals, straight-to-crem options, eco burials, are all options here in Aotearoa. The funeral industry looks like a juggernaut and its history implies a kind of cultural hegemony, but that is not necessarily true. You can build or pre-buy a coffin. You can have a body at home without embalming. You can transport a body. You can do the paperwork yourself. The advantage of having a funeral professional take over it all is that you don't have to do the work, and it is work. So DIY funerals are best for functioning families with time and some resources. Good funeral directors listen and understand that funerals are more personalized these days. 

It was a funeral director who explained to me that the opposite trend, towards no funeral, is not ideal for grieving. A funeral has a moment of realization in it, that the person is dead. That this is a farewell. This realization needs to happen at a social level. Regardless of how messy the family is, how fraught the grieving, how difficult the relationships, there still needs to be this social acknowledgement that the person is dead. Whether you do shots during the speeches or burnouts in the car park or play the whole of  Handel's Messiah is less important than that moment of truth. The rest of it is just how you get to that moment. 

I have said before that the time between the death and the faring well, however you do it, is a tender and liminal time. A limen is a threshold. The soul, or the part of it that leaves, is at the threshold. What we do and how we handle ourselves can have an effect on the soul. Because we are in a tender and liminal state too.

Martin Prechtel in his beautiful book 'The Smell of Rain on Dust' talks about death processes in Meso American societies. There is a river between the village of the living and the village of the dead. The soul crosses that river in a boat made of tears. It follows that the job of the living is to make the boat. They need to cry. What happens if the person who died was a asshole? They still need to cry. Because if the soul does not cross the river, they are stuck in the village of the living. Then they are suffering, and they make the living suffer too by haunting them. 

That liminal time between the death and the farewell is not safe. It depends on your view of death itself. In white North cultures we are trying to normalize death and lose our fear of it. We want to consider it a natural part of the order of things. Other cultures see death as an evil brought into the world, perhaps because of human sin. A bad or sudden death denotes serious wrongdoing. Death is never welcome. It must be treated directly and with bravery and care. There is a hint of this in the Bible. Humans were meant to live for ever but for the sin of Adam and Eve. 

To have a right relationship with the soul of the newly dead is not just about our own emotional passage. It is about the safe passage of the soul. The soul must be guided and even propitiated. As if it were dangerous, which it can be. 

In te ao Maori, death was not there at the beginning. Hine Titama, the goddess of the rainbow, discovered herself to be the product of incest. In her shame, she retreated to the underworld where she became Hine Nui Te Po, the great lady of the night. It was then that death came into the world, and it is Hine Nui Te Po's loving position to receive us all in time. The Maori tangi lasts for days, and is a major social event. For important people, there is often a fierce argument over the body and where it belongs. This indicates respect, but it is not just a token. It is a heated and painful exchange. The movie Waru (2017) has moving sequence where the two kuia from each side of the family argue over who should have the body of the boy Waru, who has died. The tangi is also not the last ceremony for the dead person. A year later, the unveiling of the grave takes place, where a veil is drawn over the grave stone.  This is a hint of a more traditional ceremony of disinterring and reburying the bones. 

https://www.nzfilm.co.nz/films/waru

In parts of Africa, much work must be done to ensure the respected person who has died goes to the land of the ancestors. In Ghana among the Ga people, 'fantasy coffins' are made to display the talents and interests of the dead person. An example might be a coffin in the shape of a Mercedes Benz for a taxi driver. The coffin is carried in a wild drunken procession by young men through the town, partly to give people a chance to say good bye, but partly to confuse the dead person so they can no longer find their way back to their house. Here is a common mix of respect, and sorrow, along with the concern that the soul must find its way to the ancestors and just as importantly, not come back. 

Back to the North society I am used to, we may not have the socially sanctioned belief that the soul is in need of help or that this tender time is dangerous, but we can consider the needs of our souls nevertheless. Anglo Saxon style funerals can be deeply connecting and emotionally satisfying. Even up into the early modern period, we took our deaths seriously. Here is the Lyke Wake Dirge, a truly scary dirge sung to the dead either during the wake,, or on the way to the graveyard,  in order to help the soul be received by Christ and go to heaven:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3JyVHOq7PQ

 Chances are they are not going to play the Lyke Wake Dirge at your funeral. Or run your coffin through the street. Or grieve openly for days. If the funeral you attend for the person you care about is not emotionally satisfying, or does not engage with that tender and dangerous liminality, do your own. Have an alt-funeral, even if you do it informally. Here we are:

A young man dies of cancer. His funeral is large, as they usually are for the young, and mostly the preserve of the family. Lots of aunts, lots of hugs, little cousins, sandwiches, the crematorium booked for an hour and the next funeral party waiting as everyone leaves. At the 'after party' some uncles get ridiculously drunk, and there are more little cousins twirling in their fairy dresses. It's a generic celebration. It could be anything. 

But it isn't.

Blessed reverence comes to his friends the next night. They meet up more or less accidentally. They light a fire on the beach where he used to surf. They smoke probably too much pot and cry more than they expect. They talk about him, only a little, but they feel his life as it streamed through their lives, and they feel it streaming still.

 

  The photos are from the book 'Soul of Africa: Magical Rites and Traditions' (1999) by Christoph, Muller and Muller.