Death at a Funeral (2010).

Lean in a tad too close to any funeral director and they’re sure to either regale or terrify you with tales of family dramas in the funeral parlor.

Heck, if you’ve watched Death at a Funeral – either the UK or American version – you’re already an armchair expert on how chaos and catastrophe can sometimes loom large when there’s a death in the family. It’s par for the course, and as a funeral celebrant, I’m well accustomed to navigating this precarious emotional ground with both strangers and my own beloved families alike.

Families are fascinating constellations of energy, most notably in the days after a loved one dies. Exhaustion, shock, overwhelm, grief, power struggles, sibling tensions, and shadow energy are all factors that I take into account when I begin the process of interviewing family members. I know a thing or zillion about dysfunctional family structures – we all do – and have my own horror stories concerning fierce words in the minutes, hours and days before/after a family death.

So not only is my celebrant antenna always up, as I visually scan the surroundings in client living rooms to glean clues of collections, photos, or anything that helps me get a sense of the dearly departed; but my senses are also attuned to the verbal and non-verbal clues that help me assess if there is any kind of tension or something amiss in the family communications. And of course in the interest of transparency, I ask my key family contact to identify relationship challenges because caskets have a way of creating a kind of Pandora’s Box that brings all manner of unfinished business.

Author Mary O’Malley notes that “what’s in the way is the way.” This is true of such times. Ignoring the elephant in the room does little to banish it; so much better that we all find ways to name it and tame it.

Now granted, we celebrant-types don’t deliberately go into these family gatherings in the days before and after with an intention to play therapist and mediator, but sometimes our expert consultancy status necessitates that we talk certain family members off ledges and down from the hills they’ve staked claims upon, so to speak.

Here, in no particular order, are my top 3 F words that I call upon for such moments, as needed:

FOCUS

The best way I know to calm disparate and discontented family members when heated disagreements arise is to keep focusing everyone back to the core intention, namely, Why are we gathered here today? That applies to both the day of planning and the actuality of the day itself. What is that Why? I ask them to hold that core intention as the sacred glue.

It’s easy to become unhinged from this most basic of reasons and to get bogged down in the What, When and the How, especially when various family members have differing perceptions and ideas about everything from how to best honor the decedent to when to hold the memorial.

So I often begin by reminding families that before jumping to all those things, we first need to come to a common understanding about Why we’re doing this thing called a ceremony. Some don’t want a ceremony, so are going through the motions of duty and obligation to please others. Other key members might be really intent on the healing or commemorative aspects. I find it illuminating to glean an understanding of everyone’s thoughts on ceremony from the get-go.

Equally important is the question of Who. Who are we doing this for? And that’s where our prepositions can sometimes get dis-ordered. My celebrant colleague Linda Stuart says it succinctly, in her blog post 10 Things I Wish You Knew About Funerals. When we consider the wishes of the dearly departed, it’s important for us to keep in mind that as much as “funerals are about them, they are not for them.” This distinction between about and for is integral. Yes, absolutely, you need and want to honor their wishes as well be dedicative in your commemoration of them, but you also want to keep in mind that the ceremony is first and foremost for all of those who will be gathered, most notably the immediate family and friends.

This issue arose with one family I worked with. I had scripted an intimate scattering of ashes at sea and healing ceremony to honor a man who was a skydiving school flight instructor. The ceremony was to take place on the widow’s yacht on their 29^th wedding anniversary weekend, which was also the six month mark since his death. Conflict arose, however, when the stepdaughter, who had a different memory of certain story elements in his life tribute about how her father and stepmother met, began to resist being assigned the task of reading this story and tribute words aloud to her stepmother and brothers.

We talked at length and things were tense and in danger of not happening until I reminded her that the central strand interwoven throughout this entire commemorative piece was about all the ways he expressed adoration towards those he loved. I shared with her the closing words of his life tribute as an example: “He continues to challenge us from the great beyond even, and most especially, today. His legacy is a reminder to us to stay curious, open, vulnerable, compassionate, wholehearted, courageous and above all, grateful. And that we would keep asking of life: What would love do?”

She cried when I read that passage to her and ultimately, those last four words – what would love do? – saved the day. I asked if she might consider being the reader of this tribute not simply as a great gift of generosity to her stepmom, but more importantly, as a gift of love to her father on this special day and she agreed. Yes, she would do this for her Papa. Because love.

FUSS

Fuss is at the crux of many a family death these days as too often, families are choosing to honor the dying wishes of their loved ones by not holding any kind of memorial or celebration of life service. Instead, cremains sit in an urn on a mantel or high shelf and family members feel this sense of unease, as though some ceremonious something ought to have occurred in the weeks and months after and yet did not. That unease is more the dis-ease of our secular age and it’s born of our own inner inklings to make, at the very least, a tiny fuss and an honoring and marking of this important life/death moment.

As I gently cautioned my father in the months before he died, when he initially hinted that he didn’t want any fuss (which was code for, I’m terrified that either: (a) no one will attend; or (b) my life will not be celebrated), “Dad, I understand your desire to go gently into the night,” (which he did). I get it. And trust us to be fussy in all the best ways.” The truth is, he didn’t really want to consider any of it. Lord knows, I had already sent him through the ringer of fierce deathbed conversations. He was all out of decisions and insistences.

Fuss can often be a bone of contention amongst family members, as each has a differing notion of how simple or elaborate to make things, but when our dearly departed one has made a last request not to have a fuss made, know that such a statement is often more about their own insecurities about being yet a further burden. Families need to do what families need to do to vigil, to mourn, to break bread together, to celebrate, and make this last rite right, in their own way.

And as I reminded one widowed friend ~ who has been lamenting these past months how unsettling and upsetting it feels not to have a way to communally grieve her beloved husband, after he had exacted strict promises for her not to have a ceremony or make a fuss ~ sometimes our grief, in taskmaster fashion, demands we make a fuss.

So when fuss is at the root of disagreement in a family, I urge families to exercise their own creative license and for grief’s sake if nothing else, create some small no-fuss gesture of remembrance. And then I share with them this next F word, which is the conjoined twin word to Fuss in all things Funerals and Families.

FIDUCIARY

Funerals are as much a next-of-kin inheritance as that set of Old Country Rose fine china that has been passed down a couple of generations and is now making a home for itself in a far corner of your garage.

For some, this inheritance of “making arrangements” will be a natural undertaking and for others, it will feel like an unwelcome burden, and not simply because part of what is being passed on to those left behind is a bundle of Grief to have to unpack and carry for a long while.

Yet in either scenario, death care is an entrusted rite of passage. How we honor and tend to our dying and our dead is telling. And while there is always a case to be made for simpler ceremonial gestures if and when strife in the family is/was paramount, the truth is: as next of kin and adults of a certain age, we have a kind of fiduciary obligation to do something rather than nothing, as a way to model what it means to be fully human.

So if a loved one tells you, as my father did, that they don’t want any big fuss, have a talk with them to find out what that really means. And be sure that it’s a win-win solution for everyone involved. What seems like a win for one sibling (no ceremony = no work and not having to endure all that communal sympathy) will not feel like a win for another sibling who most desperately needs to honor this moment and their grief with ritual, story, music and community.

Make no mistake: the world is filled with many a widow and grieving adult child who are kicking themselves that they didn’t include a disclaimer clause in the deathbed pact with their “don’t do anything” spouse or parent, in the face of how their own resulting grief now compels them to “do something” to ceremoniously honor this loss. I’ve witnessed many a mourner whose inheritance becomes one of guilt and angst, as they agonize about betraying the wishes of the decedent. Again, it comes back to remembering who such ceremonial moments are for: who are the beneficiaries of commemorative rituals?

I finally elicited agreement with my Dad about this when he brought up his no-fuss argument one last time a couple of weeks prior to his death. “So as much as you absolutely get a say, Dad,” I told him, “you don’t get a say in dictating how we will mourn you…because we don’t even quite understand it yet. But trust us that whatever it is we do, we will do so honorably.” After a small pause, he squeezed my hand, which I took to mean yes; an entrusted, palm-to-palm signature that, thusly, sealed the deal of our fiduciary agreement. We now had a fine-print clause for a certain amount of Fuss.

And well, let’s see…apart from decorating his cremation casket, attending to and witnessing his cremation, holding a small but lovely graveside service, and orchestrating a more elaborate celebration of life complete with thoughtful touches such as a live musical tribute by one of his grandsons, showcasing his life story in a four-seasons-of-his-life slide show, putting on a nice food spread that included mini-butterscotch ice cream cups to honor his years at Palm Dairies and the ice cream shoppe, and handing out programs and bookmark keepsakes, we made hardly any fuss at all.

I jest. Clearly I ritualized the holy heck out of every single moment of what I called the Stations of My Loss (see my 2016 newsletter starting on page 5), thereby keeping my promise to him to enact honorable mourning. And if I could go back again, I would do it exactly the same way except that I would have more transparent conversations up-front with my family to say, you do you, but this is how I’m choosing to honor my grief. Sorry, not sorry. And I’m not. By enacting as much ritual as I did, I was able to embrace my complicated grief and in effect, do a ton of healing in the process.

And what I make up about it is that if Dad truly had an issue with it, he could haunt us from the grave. The core truth of those ritual moments and ceremony services was this: he would have dearly loved to have been present at each of them and would have been tickled to know his life was so richly remembered and feted.

Which is why I advocate for living tributes. All the better that we may host such events under the auspicious of late-life birthday celebrations, thereby inviting everyone to share their words of tribute with the person while they’re still alive.