Funerals are supposed to provide closure for the survivors. How does viewing a heavily made up corpse illuminated by pink light and surrounded by flowers help with closure? Our funeral rituals creep me out. Whatever closure I get has to happen in my own head. I don’t need the visual aid.
I’ve been to a lot of funerals. I’ve only been to one open casket, and that wasn’t at the funeral, it was at the viewing.
Viewings are weird and I don’t understand who gets anything out of them. I do appreciate the less formal nature of the environment, and the opportunity to express my condolences to the family - but I don’t have any interest in checking out the dead body.
As a physician I’ve observed it can be essential for some folks to see the bodies of their loved ones for them to truly accept the death on a very deep level. For many, a viewing cuts down on obsessive intrusive thoughts about whether they’re really dead or not (yes, those intrude despite the best evidence and logic amongst some very logical, rational people).
It also helps for a pregnant woman who miscarries or loses the baby at birth to see her child. Good OB nurses make sure they get that opportunity, otherwise they too may be haunted by ideations about whether the baby was really deceased or not.
Then I guess you’ve never been to the graveside service. Gladly, the attendance at those seems to be more optional now. There was a day when you were stuck for the whole ordeal.
Funerals aren’t closures so much as they’re next steps. In my family, the steps are more likely to happen after the funeral at the pot luck or buffet. That’s when you get to talk to relatives you haven’t seen in years, to tell stories about the deceased, and to give support to grieving survivors.
Y’all would love the way it’s done in Korea! The hospitals, especially elder-care hospices, have a funeral home and the funeral lasts, IIRC, three days. The surviving family members are there, dressed in mourning clothes, wearing brassards to indicate the kinship degree to the dearly departed. And after the visitors attend the vieweing and/or funeral itself, they go to the attached cafeteria to chow down on cafeteria food and drinks (both soft drinks and booze).
I guess it makes people feel they have satisfied an obligation to their departed family member, or in the visitor’s case, to their friends or workmates.
There’s a Japanese comedy film, The Funeral, that manages to seriously touch on a few things involved with funerals.
As usual, The Mercotan is wise and correct. My Uncle Max had a closed casket service. As we were close, I was given the option to see his body before the lid was shut. He did NOT look like he was sleeping. Asleep, Uncle Max always had a slight smile as if he would suddenly wake up and tell you a joke or offer to cook you something. His corpse was cold and dead and it very much helped me accept on a deep emotional level that he was gone.
It’s very common these days to have a “celebration of life” in which people gather to speak about their memories of the dead person. No body at all. Remember that death ceremonies are above all, social occasions, they are gatherings to honor the passing of that person. They aren’t necessarily about any one individual and their ‘process’. They are a community rite.
I don’t think one should take the weird awkward formal funerals created by American funeral directors as the norm. I’ve been to Catholic church funerals which were really kind of raucous, bawdy, and at the same time, full of weeping. There are all kinds of funerals.
My Mom is 78. I have told her that, in accordance with Jewish tradition and her wishes, she’ll be buried in a cheap, plain pine box with rope handles. At the funeral, in keeping with my Mom’s cheery optimism, mourners will come up, share a happy memory of her and place a smiley face sticker on the coffin.
I watched my mom die slowly of cancer. I watched my father die while I was holding his hand. The fact that they were dead was firmly cemented in my head well before any funeral ritual. I didn’t need to see either of them again to confirm they were gone.
I had no doubts about either of my parents being dead – but remembering putting that shovelful of dirt on the coffin (another part of a typical Jewish interment) helped me chase those dreams where they were somehow still alive.
Interesting question for me is how well these rituals work for people not as intimately connected with the deceased as surviving children or spouses.
That’s a weird assumption to make. No, I’ve been to dozens of graveside services as well - none of them open caskets. Maybe it’s a cultural thing?
I generally do not do funerals.
When one of my aunts died, her sisters sent pictures of the open casket around to the rest of the family. My sisters and I were shocked and somewhat disgusted, but others in the family seemed to appreciate it.
OTOH, when our father died, my sisters and I ended up making jokes and smartass remarks all through the funeral planning. The priest was not in the least bit offended by us. It seems that’s a fairly common way for the bereaved to blow off steam. We also cried and told funny stories at the actual funeral.
We sat with my dad for about 30 minutes after he died at the hospital. It was in the middle of the night and although the doctor called us knowing that the ends was near, we didn’t make it benefits he died.
Being a Jewish funeral, that was the last time I saw him.
Funderals are for living, so if you don’t need it then you don’t need it. I don’t know if funerals really provide closure for everyone. When my father died, I was certainly sad, but it wasn’t until a few months later that I really started to miss him, the depression sank in, and I had to come to terms with living my life without him.
But a funeral is nice and cathartic because you get together with friends and family sharing your grief and happiness. It allows people to say goodbye. I didn’t see my father at the funeral because we had him cremated. But I did see him on the slab at the hospital shortly after his death and I am glad I had that chance to say goodbye.
I’ve done several types. Not as the guest of honor, but I’m well aware my turn is coming.
Open casket seems weird to me, although that was done for my Dad at his second wife’s insistence. Then again, for all the services (deliberately generic term) that I’ve done, I’d either been there as they died or seen the dead body as discovered. So never a doubt in my mind they were gone, gone, gone long before we had a gathering of family & well-wishers.
Regardless of the cultural details, the point is to gather family and well-wishers to say in effect “I knew the decedent. They were important enough to me to take this time out of my life to think of and remember them and to commune with those others who also knew or were related to the decedent.”
In my view this comes from the fact that the Universe is a vast impersonal space of void and dust and a few pebbles. The only thing in this vastness that gives the slightest shit about any of us is … each other. So when one of us leaves to join the dust and vastness, the rest feel a need to cling more tightly together, at least symbolically and temporarily.
Lots of different cultures have very different funerary practices. It’s real unclear to me what specifically the OP is unhappy with. Or whether he’s aware of just how different funerary practices are and have been for humans across place and time.
My view frankly is I got more “closure” from watching someone die than from seeing somebody else’s made up refrigerated corpse in a box wearing ill-fitting clothes. One was natural. One was artificial. Both were death.
Our culture is in a time of transition and perhaps the OP comes from especially traditional stock hewing to especially traditional customs yet himself is more modern in attitude.
This is appropriate, if both the decedent and those who attend want it.
There’s a Doper who experienced a pregnancy loss, and as an Orthodox Jew, did not wish to see, dress, name, etc. her baby, much to the chagrin of the OB nurses. I was horrified at her account.
@nearwildheaven: It’s not clear to me whose account you’re horrified about. The pregnant lady’s, or the nurses? Or is it the treatment of the nurses by the pregnant lady or vice versa?
A lot of religions are real specific that the individual adherents aren’t “allowed” to have feelings or desires other than the officially approved ones. That leaves adherents who don’t actually feel the official feelings during moments in extremis pretty much in the lurch. Which is IMO not a good thing.
I’m glad I never saw my grandfather after he died. Now I can remember him happy, in his overalls puttering in the garden, tending his roses.
When my grandmother died a year later, the funeral home practically rubbed our noses in the open casket. Proud of their work I guess but I couldn’t recognize her. If I had been asked to identify the body for legal reasons I would have shrugged my shoulders and said “I don’t know this person”.