Do funerals really, really give one closure, even in some measure, to the bereaved? I would think that the loss of a family member from a house would be a pretty clear signal, and that, sad as it may be, would be all of the closure needed. I remember sort of strong arming (extreme hyperbole, of course) a relative into going to a funeral using this sort of justification, but now, I’m wondering if it was a bad move.
Thank you,
greatshakes
They can, sometimes, for some people. For others, they’re just painful. For others, their presence can be a comfort to others, even if they themselves don’t get anything out of the experience.
In the funerals I’ve been to, the ones which provided the most “closure” for me and the others I’ve talked to are the ones which focus on the dead person’s life. I really really like the practice which has sprung up in the last 15-20 years of having photo collages, videotapes or other visual mementos on display. They give people both the stimulus and the permission to talk about lighthearted things, to learn things about their friend or relative they never knew, to reminisce together about good times and even to laugh.
Laughter, I find in general, is far more healing than crying.
The funerals I’ve found that provide no closure at all for me are the ones with nothing but generic flowers and non-descript funeral parlor decor. Those always seem more somber and more maudlin, and without the chance to connect to other mourners, I leave feeling depressed and lonely, and the hole left in my heart from the dead person’s death just feels even larger and more empty than before.
I think this is probably better suited for IMHO than GQ.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
The last two funerals I went to were quite “festive”, if I may be so bold. Food and alcohol were served after the service. I’d rather my funeral be a huge party filled with Dionysion revelry than have people sobbing over me. Crying won’t bring me back. Funerals are for the living, not the dead. The dead aren’t complaining about their status. 
One of my daughter’s good friends died last week. My daughter hates funerals, but she said that seeing Stacy in the casket was the only thing that would make it real. Yeah, she’s really gone.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
My grandfather—whom I was very close to—died in May of last year. His wake and funeral were wonderful. I cried a lot, but the general atmosphere was joyful. We were all there to celebrate the incredible life he led. We had tables full of photographs, some found in boxes and the grandchildren had never seen them. My Aunt Kathy, who is very into scrapbooking, did some beautiful collages of his military and wedding photos. We all stood around and talked about how much we loved him.
The most amazing part, and it happened at his funeral and my grandmother’s, was the amount of people who showed up at his wake. All these people whose lives he touched came to say goodbye, and to tell us how much he meant to them. Then we all went to my uncle’s house and drank, smoked cigars, and did what Grandpa liked to see us do: have fun.
I think they offer closure if they’re actually about saying goodbye, and not about sitting around feeling miserable that this person is gone. The celebration of a life is healthy, and I think it gives people a positive kind of closure.
My darling uncle Rueben’s funeral was both heart-breaking and beautiful. My cousins each made a picture board of his life in photos and they brought back memories almost forgotten and displayed aspects of his personality not all of us knew were there. He’d battled pancreatic cancer for years longer than anyone ever believed he could but seeing him in his casket was like seeing him healthy again. His family was delighted at that one last glimpse.
I’m in the latter category. I find funerals the general equivalent of self-torture.
I recently went to a funeral visitation for a friend of mine from high school (wow - that was almost 30 years ago). Seeing my friend lying in a box did nothing to help with my sense of loss, although hugging his sister and brothers did. Seeing the video presentation of things that had occurred in his life and being able to chat with other people who I went to school with did a lot to close the chapter for me as well. Seeing the news article about the police catching the guy that shot him did even more.
What is “closure” anyway? Isn’t that one of those buzzwords that means basically nothing?
Do funerals bring an end to grieving and loss? Of course not. Sometimes they can begin that process, though, by driving home the reality and breaking through the shock.
For me the funeral provides a definite time for beginning the work of getting on with life.
To me, closure means the end of the mourning process and the beginning of getting back to normal life. The sense of loss might never go away.
For the casket, yes. Only time will do it for humans, and sometimes not even then.
That’s just insane then. The funeral, at least in America, usually comes three days or so after the death. I don’t know anyone whos eriously gets over mourning that fast.
Perhaps this is just a case of semantics, but I agree with **SP2263 **and hajario. When my father died a couple of years ago we all felt a definite sense that one part of the process had finished at the funeral. When you see the coffin go into the ground, and you toss sods of dirt onto it, you really get a sense of the finality of death. Of course the sense of loss remains and “getting back to normal life” may well take a long time. But I always feel that a funeral is a definite marker that things have changed permanently.
No, I think about and miss my deceased friends and family more and more each day.
I’m not explaining myself well. It’s like a transition point from one stage to the next. It’s when you start to get things back to some kind of normalcy.
It doesn’t make the pain go away. It can be a step toward the process of learning to deal with the fact of loss. What’s the alternative? Most of us cannot simply go from, “Oh, how awful. My mother died yesterday,” to getting up and going to work as if nothing had happened.
For me, the typical open-casket funeral is ghoulish. My sister and I held memorial services for our parents after each death. In both cases, as our parents wished, there was an immediate cremation, and minimal expense. We had a picture board of significant moments in their lives at the memorial service, and a chance for people to come and speak about the newly departed. It was very helpful to us.
My MIL, on the other hand, really *needed *the full-blown eastern Orthodox funeral when a loved one died (she lost two husbands and a son). I’m sure many others feel the same.
Not too long ago a friend I only knew online, through an industry message board and one-on-one or small group chatting died. That was the first time I ever felt a sense of what funerals are for. I felt very strongly that I wanted to be with other people who had known him even as distantly as I did. My husband tried valiantly but wasn’t able to console me too much.
I too think “closure” is an over-used, badly defined term. But it is often used in the context where someone is gone and there is no body.
Consider the missing & probably kidnapped victim, the person lost overboard, the air crash with only small piles of unidentifiable chunks remaining …
There will be a period of time where, rationally speaking, the person is all but certainly dead, yet there is no body to prove it. And for something this primal, only primal levels of proof will satisfy the primal emotions. Particularly in the case of the missing person, hope might reasonably extend for days if not weeks. And some folks will hold out (IMO) unreasonable hope for months or years. All for lack of the primal-enough proof to get past their primal emotions about the loss.
When the people who care about the missing person make the transition from “Bobby is missing, but he’ll probably turn up soon” to “Bobby is missing, and we doubt he’ll ever turn up” to “We’re certain enough that Bobby is dead to hold his funeral”, well that’s a pretty strong indication the people have accepted the reality and are starting the process of closing down their relationship with Bobby-as-living-person.
So funerals don’t provide “closure”, they indicate the start of the closing phase of grief.
As others noted above, some people carry on a sort of relationship with the dead. Other people do not. In either case there is a transition from the living relationship to whatever comes next. And, clunky as it is, “closure” seems to be the current societal term for starting that transition.
For those who make their transition quickly, closure is more of an event than a process. As I get older I find that even for people who were important to me, the transition period gets shorter & shorter.