Q: Funerals can be wonderful celebrations of life but they rarely do much to ease the grief. Why do we bother with them?
A: There are no shortcuts to grieving. When you love someone, you cannot close the door on their death and simply carry on as you did before. Everything is different for you.
The emptiness that has settled into your life becomes magnified when a once busy day for you is filled with meaningless boredom.
It is a tough time, but you can’t avoid it.
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If you are going to make sense out of the life that has passed, you might have to allow yourself the opportunity to grieve.
True grieving starts with the recognition and acceptance of the death of someone you loved. It sounds strange that something as overwhelming as the death of a loved one should not be accepted, but it is true. We have wonderful imaginations, working overtime sometimes, to deny for us the full impact of that death.
Therein lies the merit of funerals, of celebrations of life. Funerals are not necessarily designed to make you feel better. Some do, of course, and that is OK, but that is not their purpose.
The purpose of the funeral is to help surviving loved ones accept the reality of the death. The funeral is not the end of grief, it is its beginning, and it is through that sadness, and sometimes joy in the memory of whom you loved, that you find meaning and purpose.
The meaning is more than memories of the time they spent with you, but for the time in the early morning sunrise when nothing could ever be as precious as your steaming coffee and the splendor of Mother Nature.
Jacklin Andrews is a family counsellor from Saskatchewan. Contact: jandrews@producer.com.
