This is the second in a two-part post about some of the F Words embedded in difficult family dynamics that can sometimes arise in my work as a funeral celebrant. To read the first post, click here. 

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FEAR

For kicks, I anagrammed the word “Funeral” and all kinds of interesting words emerged (more on that later), not the least of which is fear. Fear of deviating from the familiar, showing up vulnerable with family, or fear of what others might think, etc., sometimes make for many a crazy-making ordeal.

Just the seemingly-simple act of hiring a celebrant to craft a memorial service has proven to be cause for family feuding with a few of my clients. It’s not uncommon for conservative siblings to object to my role as a non-denominational officiant and view my work with suspicion, even as I seek to assure them that I only have their best interests and the prevailing wishes of their dearly departed at heart. For these few and far betweeners, it seems safer to choose the “recite by rote” small town pastor than the big city celebrant who will craft something that is meaning-filled, personalized, and heart & soul-stirring. For these sorts, a fear of the unknown (personalized ceremony) prevents them from taking a leap of faith.

I navigate this tricky terrain by doing my best to assuage their fears. I am in-service to them and while it’s sometimes impossible to please the most resistant of family members, I’ve had many a devout doubter apologize and praise my work after the fact.

One grieving father, who had initial misgivings about having his co-workers discover his son had died by suicide, came up to me after the ceremony (see page 5 of my 2017 newsletter) to share that he was glad I insisted we name the hard truth of death by suicide aloud because it kept the service real (real is the most important word embedded in the word funeral). And ultimately this fear proved completely unfounded because the same co-worker he feared might judge was the first person to approach me after the service to exclaim what a beautiful and moving service it was and to ask how it was I came to know the decedent so well. (I had never met him but her perception that I was a close family friend is absolutely what I strive for in my ceremonies.)

The last thing I want to say about fear relates to my favorite fear quote about how “fear is excitement without breath.” Now granted, reminding people to take a deep breath when tensions arise is not exactly a wise tactic, but if I can begin from a place of grounding words or simple breath work with families, we can often start with calm…or at the very least, calmer.

FIGHT OR FLIGHT

It’s no secret: death can bring out the worst in a family. Tensions are high, the workload of duties is overwhelming, exhaustion is at its tipping point, and everyone is on edge.

I’ve born witness to supposedly adult children fighting over their mother’s mismatched teacups, siblings feuding over their parent’s estate in court, and have had my own fierce conversation with my mother about the divvying up of his cremains amongst us. This actually happened over Dad’s barely dead body. Suffice to say, I don’t recommend arguments of this kind in such moments.

There’s a reason we end-of-life advocates preach from a pulpit of getting one’s affairs in order ahead of time. It cuts down the workload thereafter and it invites these crucial conversations about final disposition, the estate and all the last wishes well ahead of time.

And there’s a reason we counsel that people take their time after death, religious beliefs withstanding. Yes, you will need to deal with a burial or cremation but even then, you have more time than you think. You can opt to care for your beloved at home in those first few days under the guidance of a home funeral guide like myself.

Hosting inclusive family chats about last wishes in advance and completing end-of-life planning forms, while not solving age-old sibling dynamics, can greatly alleviate some of these potentially fierce discussions.

When initially meeting with family where I know or sense there are conflict issues, I typically like to begin with a kind of grounding ritual. If they are the type who resonate with candle lighting, I will usually ask my key family contact person to set a small altar table with a photo of their loved one and a candle, and I will invite someone to light the candle. I then often lead with the reading of Rumi’s poem, “The Guest House,” which poignantly speaks to the perfect storm of emotions that often make themselves at home in such gatherings. And then lastly, I share grounding words in order to set intention about the tender work we are about to do.  My gentle and subtle reminders are about agreeing to posit love as the centerpiece of this family interview conversation, to assume best intentions by all involved, and in recognizing our myriad ways of grieving and honoring our loved ones, to even agree to disagree on the little things relative to logistical planning.

For one such family where tensions were high, this type of grounding before an intimate family ceremony helped them each to quell their individual apprehensions, and shift their focus from their mistrust of each other’s intentions to a place of centering their deceased relative. That small shift can make all the difference.

Or not. I have also worked with families who were barely speaking to one another and who disclosed to me that after the service was over, they intended never to speak to the other relatives again. Navigating those kinds of dynamics can sometimes take superhuman strength, which makes my job of self-care afterwards particularly critical.

After negotiating this difficult terrain with a large and spiritually-diverse family in recent months (ranging from atheists to agnostics to evangelicals), I happened to stumble upon a kitschy but amusing yoga-posing skeleton at a gift store. I picked him up and set him upon my desk as my reminder and talisman to Keep Calm and Celebrant On with future difficult funerals and families, which leads me to my last F Word.  

FORTITUDE

The four horsemen of Death for those left behind are grief, gratitude, grace and grit. We feel sorrow during this season of loss, gratitude for our memories and love, grace for the outpouring of support we receive, and grit for the courageous work we must do of putting one foot in front of the other and soldiering on during a difficult time.

Grit, as in Resilience as in Fortitude, is a challenging discipline at the best of times but when Death is the factor, grit displays itself in interesting ways. For some family members, that means being the shoulder for the demonstrative grievers in the family who are most affected or rendered defenseless by the loss. For others, most notably the constructive grievers in the mix, it translates to throwing themselves into the planning work as a way to keep busy with task-oriented duties. And for still others, it might look like avoidance and distancing. Having a triage of support in a family can be a blessing (many hands make lighter work) or a challenge, in those instances when power dynamics create push-pull conflicts and a scenario where there are way too many cooks in the kitchen.

In the initial planning phase, I often sketch a tree, with my key contact’s name at the top of the tree and my name at the roots and base of the trunk. I then fill in names of the family members and friends who become the support branches and adornments to the tree. This visual mapping helps me get a sense of who the key family players are, their role in the funeral service, and in an emotional sense, how they are helping (or hindering) the health and resilience of the Funeral Tree. Micromanaging or sabotaging planning efforts under the guise of being in-service and helpful are two such hindrance tactics.

I don’t always reveal my visual mapping to my funeral families, but sometimes I find it’s a helpful analogy for them to understand, in part-to-whole fashion, how everyone adds strength, health and balance to the structure of the tree, which is this case, equates to the funeral service being planned.

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As you might have guessed, there are countless other F words where funerals are concerned – Food, Fun, Faith, Flow, and Forgiveness are 5 more that come to mind. And of course, there are all those other words embedded in the word Funeral that I alluded to earlier. Some of the more interesting and amusing ones include feral, rule, flare, learn, urn, near, earful, lunar, lean, and unreal.

Acknowledging that funerals can be both the best of times and worst of times helps dispel unreasonable expectations of perfection and calm. In fact, lowering expectations of everyone and everything is a wise strategy and to that end, slowing the pace down to allow for plenty of rest stops along the way is truly the best approach in such circumstances.

Ram Dass famously noted that “we are all just walking each other home.” To begin to see how this notion of communal walking relates to the planning and delivery of the funeral service is to see how we might all begin to step a little more gingerly and in tandem with our friends and family, as a way to better honor our beloved one’s walk home.