I’ve had 3 family members die in the past 10 years or so. Not black sheep of the family or anything. Cremated, no formal funeral, just vague plans for a “celebration of life” get together that never happened.
Contrast that to my childhood in the 80’s when the entire extended family would be at the immediate family’s home with casserole dishes after a death.
is this a common trend, or a peculiarity of my particular family?
Let’s hope so.
That’s a really screwed up industry. It’s become so sanitized and standardized that, at least to me, it means nothing. Worse than that - it’s a waste of time and a money grab. When my mother died I accompanied my father to make the arrangements and it was like buying a car. They kept trying to add things on and actually got my dad to pay more money for things which I felt were pointless. It really disgusted me.
By contrast, when a good friend died some years ago he said he didn’t want a formal funeral. His close family and friends met up a week or two later and had a private remembrance which was meaningful and didn’t cost many thousands of dollars.
Some of each I suppose.
COVID really did a number on many family’s ability to physically get together following a death. And kind of like work from home, it seems lots of folks kind of liked that once they got over it being weird or subject to peer pressure.
For sure extended families are more and more spread around the country as time goes on. In 1930 it was typical that all the decedent’s aunts, uncles, cousins, and all of all those folks’ downline lived in the same town or section of the big city as the decedent.
Now? Families are all over the place. And on average a lot smaller. I’ve said elsewhere that I’m part of an unusually small extended family, so not real representative. But I’m the only one living in my time zone, much less my town. My bros each live in different timezones from each other.
Cremations are now more common. The ashes aren’t necessarily tossed in an ocean or whatever. New, cremations followed by burial in a family grave or whatever.
I’ve had several family members a generation above me die in the past decade. All of them (parents, aunts, uncles) had most everything pre-planned. The funeral home had the responsibility of cremation, death certificates, and printing the obituaries/programs for the funerals…which were really a celebration of life.
It cost each family less than $2k for each funeral, IIRC.
It’s probably worth clarifying the terminology about a burial, a funeral, a memorial, and a celebration of life. That way we won’t all be talking past one another.
Seems to be dependent on how social the person was in my experience. I’ve been to a couple of small ceremonies (one graveside, one at the family home for a cremation) for people that had a small circle of family and friends.
On the flip side, a close friend of my wife’s family, who was very influential in her church, filled the entire church plus overflow for her service. My grandfather’s funeral was similarly quite large due to how social and outgoing both of my grandparents were (and grandmother still is).
Of course there can be both a cremation and a funeral.
Yeah, good point. In the cases I described above, there were funerals in the sense that there were gatherings in a church. But there were no caskets or burials; rather there were family members sharing memories and a short eulogy delivered by clergy. This was followed by a meal in the dining hall where an open mike allowed for more sharing by friends and family.
In each case, the burial of the ashes took place before the public gathering.
It also made a difference that these were people in their 90s, so their passing was not unexpected.
Sorry, I didn’t finish this sentence. I meant to say that frequently cremations are followed by a burial in a family grave or whatever. Sometimes the person arranged long before they died to buy a spot in a graveyard.
Yeah thats true.
When I was young they’d take the body and have an open casket funeral where everyone would attend. Then they’d bury the body.
However from what I’ve seen lately, a lot of people are opting for cremation instead. And the ashes usually aren’t buried in a family plot. Also they have a memorial service after the body is cremated, not before. I would assume part of it is that people realize its not necessary to spend all that money on a funeral, esp considering how its become common knowledge about how unethical funeral businesses can be.
Also are you talking about a celebration of life pre-death or post-death? Some people use that term to describe a pre-death event for someone with a terminal illness, some use it to describe an event after the death.
For whatever it’s worth, the last three people to die in my life (my stepfather, followed by my father, followed by my mother) all had very low-key after-death ceremonies. My father was cremated, we wanted to do an informal Celebration of Life, which only kind of happened. What actually happened was a traditional thing at a funeral home a few days after he died, with a box of his ashes instead of his coffin. My sister and I did a kind of free-flowing, secular thing with some music that he liked and whatnot, but it certainly looked like a funeral.*
My stepfather and my mother were both adamant that they DID NOT want traditional, Western funerals. After each died, we cremated them then had a CoL a few weeks later. Both of which were joyful and … (well, I don’t want to say “fun,” but you get my drift). Especially my mom’s: my stephbrother even hired a jazz band to do a Second Line for her (she loved New Orleans).
*My father was the Central Illinois Champion of Bogarting Lighters. He’d bum your lighter so he could light his smoke or his J or whatever, then it would disappear into his pocket, never to be seen again. Before his funeral, I bought a gross of lighters, then gave one to every attendee who was an adult. We lit them in unison during the chorus of “The Weight” by The Band, and then I told everyone to keep their lighters, as it was my way of replace the ones he had stolen over his life.
As for me, I want the same as my mother and stepfather. Cremation (I have a prepaid plan), followed by a CoL, with fun and laughter and music that I liked, some time after.
Can’t people just have a “funeral” without involving a funeral home (though perhaps without the deceased present)? So you could rent a meeting room in a hotel and have whatever sort of event you like.
Nichols and May were satirizing this over 60 years ago:
Assuming that skit appeared in 1965, that was a couple of years after The American Way of Death was published by Jessica Mitford.
Sure. But as I mentioned above, the funeral home took care of applying for the death certificates, making sure the obituaries were published, notifying the pension plan that the beneficiary had passed (both my parents were public school teachers), and probably a bunch of other details that I don’t remember.
Also, there’s the small issue of transporting the body to the crematorium and performing the cremation.
We had a death in my family recently and, to be honest, I appreciated the work done by the funeral home. They collected the body from the house, assisted with publishing the death notices, hosted the funeral and transported the body to the crematorium. I’m sure we paid more than we needed to but we weren’t bothered much by that. (The one thing I regret is that they didn’t get a weight for the deceased when they collected him. I was curious just how little he weighed at the end.)
Nobody in my immediate family (and frankly this goes for most of the extended family that I’m vaguely in contact with) wants a burial, memorial, ceremony or any sort of remembrance. Maybe a quiet family dinner and drinks at somebody’s house at most.
When my mother died a couple years back the tough decision was to pull the plug (not that tough, she was never going to regain consciousness and she would have hated the thought of being an unconscious dying vegetable in some nursing home somewhere). But I was thankful that she had been very explicit about not wanting any more money than the minimum necessary spent on her and no fuss to be paid after she died. It was still a miserable near year of dealing with the bureaucratic complications of end-of-life. Being spared the extra headaches of ceremony was a relief.
I want to just be disposed of to legal standards as cheaply as possible and then dumped into the cheapest cardboard box available. Whatever heirs I may have can then flush me down the toilet or keep me in a back corner of a garage or attic somewhere if they think I will come in handy to freak out a later generation. Whatever is more convenient.
I don’t know that I would say funerals are exactly going out of fashion. What I would say is that things are changing - the people I know are still having funerals as in there is a service at a church ( for Catholics, it’s a Mass), people then travel to the cemetery where there might be a service conducted by the funeral director and then lunch. That part is the same as it’s been as long as I can remember. What different is the wake/visitation - it used to be two days, from 2-5pm and then 7-9 pm. Now, it’s more often one day from 3- 6 or 8 pm. I think the change happened after COVID. I would say it’s a generational change, except it’s not - the people dying now are the same generation as those who died 2010-2020. I’m guessing like a lot of things that changed after COVIS, people saw they didn’t have to do what was always done. Everybody always had afternoon and evening visitation for two days - and I bet people never thought about the fact that when a 75 year old dies, there aren’t so many people showing up that all of those hours are necessary.
My extended family is probably a bit unusual in the opposite way from @LSLGuy - nearly everyone lives in the Northeast (the rest have retired to Florida) so that when my great-aunt died in 2011 or so, many of her nieces and nephews drove from NY and Connecticut for the wake and funeral. I’m absolutely certain that’s the sort of arrangements my mother has pre-planned - but because things have changed ( my grandparents had 40 something nieces and nephews while my mother has 12) it won’t be necessary to have two days of calling hours at the funeral home. Although my mother had a very large social circle when she was younger , there won’t be many friends at her funeral because she’s outlived almost all of them.
You can absolutely do without a funeral home for many of the things that may happen after death - you can notify SS and any pensions and insurance companies yourself. You can rent some space and have whatever memorial you want . But you’re going to need a funeral director to pick up the body from home/morgue/hospital and to transport the body to the crematorium at the very least. You cannot in most places just deal directly with the crematorium unless they have a licensed funeral director on staff. (not all do)
In my experience, the age of the deceased has large impact on this.
My father was a very outgoing man, but sadly shared with me toward the end; he had outlived his siblings, all his cousins, all his classmates from a small high school, and every close friend.