I went to a memorial service today for a co-worker who died suddenly and unexpectedly last week. (A very beloved co-worker, by all of us. He was a great guy. I’ll miss him.) He was not a religious man.
The service was arranged by his sister, who is religious. She chose a man to lead the service that at one point was about to make a call to the altar. He restrained himself, fortunately for me, as I would have had to make a decision as to whether to make a call to the smoking area.
I have had a brother and sister die, for whom my parents arranged Catholic services, though they were no longer Catholic. I have informed them that if they are in charge after my death, I desire no religion in my service. I’d like a Speaker for the Dead.
The idea grates on me. Though I know that I’ll have no idea what is going on - I’ll be gone - the mere concept of people praying to a God that I don’t believe in and people counting on my everlasting life in a heaven that I don’t believe in bothers me. I hope that my parents, or whomever, follows my wishes, but I know that there is no guarantee of that.
Do you feel bothered by the fact that your service may not match what you believed in life?
Well, as a “liberal” high-church Episcopalian, the kind of service my fundamentalist dad would choose for me would be deeply offensive to me at every level, from the abstractly theological (his God and mine are more different then alike) to the more personal (his church is quite homophobic).
That said, I’d want him to pick whatever service he’d find the most comfort in. To my mind, that would be the whole point of my funeral. I’d be dead; I doubt whatever form I exist in afterwards will care much. My funeral would be for my survivors.
Well, yes, but if the poor man died unexpectedly and left no instructions to anyone and if his sister stepped up to the plate (and arranged the casket, flowers, church, etc.) then I guess she gets to call the shots. Did they live near each other; did they talk? I’m guessing you may not know for sure, and perhaps she really didn’t know that her brother had become an athiest.
Also sorry about your brother and sister, but when you say they “were no longer Catholic” had they actively converted to another religion (and if so, where were their own co-believers for the funeral?), were they also athiest, or were they just lapsed or indifferent Catholics? If your parents did not know their wishes or their current religious beliefs, then they just automatically did what they thought was right in their grief.
IMO, funerals are for the living. Now, if the living know the wishes of the deceased and actively ignore them, that’s not right, and I agree the sort of service where there’s an altar call is not good for an athiest (I’m a practicing Catholic and I wouldn’t like it either), but IF there was no knowledge of what sort of service the deceased would have liked, the family is going to do what they think is right for the person they loved.
As for you, you can do what my Dad did; let your heirs know what sort of service you’d like, what songs you’d like to be sung, what people you’d like to speak. Tell your spouse or kids or best friends and write it down for your records.
If it is that important to you, you need to make it clear in advance. How much you need to formalize it depends upon how much you can trust your survivors to respect those wishes.
I’m not sure about this, but I think if you include the instructions in your will that they are then as legally binding as everything else in the will.
The next time I update my will I know I’m including my wishes on this matter. I’ve also told plenty of people in advance. Direct cremation and scatter my ashes in a particular spot in Wyoming.
But that’s me. There’s no one I’m close enough to that I would override my wishes for their (minimal) grief. If there were someone I cared that much about and who cared that much about me, I might reconsider.
As it stands, should I die next week and the person who does my arrangements disregards my wishes and gives me a religious ceremony, then I hope there is life after death because I’m going to come back and kick their ass.
I don’t know if a will is the best place. These sometimes don’t get read until later, whereas you have to start to make some sort of decision about the postmortem events within a couple of days.
I think the best thing is to have such discussions with the people most likely to be around at the time. If there is likely to be a dispute between, say, parents and spouse, also write it down and distribute copies.
My half-brother and his wife arranged my father’s funeral and brought in their pastor who droned on and on about God this and Jesus that. My father was not a religious person, and most of my family is not religious. While it might have given comfort to my half brother, the rest of us were pissed. And I expected Dad to sit up in the casket and tell the preacher to shut up and get on with it.
My sister has clear instructions about what to do with me when I go. And I’ll haunt her if she doesn’t comply with my wishes.
I have told my husband and his sisters that if someone tries to “pray me into heaven” there will be a haunting. I am not Christian. I do not want some Christian minister who never met me in his (or my) life using my death as the chance to get more converts.
My mother’s only sister was a devout Christian (one of the reasons I am not). I attended her funeral out of respect for her - I lived with her and her misterable lying abusing Christian family for 5 years as a child. I was lied to, beaten and abused “in the name of Jesus”.
When she died 20 years after I had escaped the hellhole I lived in, the pastor of her (Southern Bapist) church got on his pulpit and said (paraprased): “Well, she’s dead and she’s going to hell. And you are all going to hell, too.”
WTF?
I didn’t go to this SOB’s church for a Sunday sermon - I went to pay my last respects to my mother’s sister. Fortunately, my husband was on one side and another Aunt on the other, so they were able to gently persuade my not to get up and walk out in the middle of the “eulogy”. The pastor didn’t hold his hand out to me very long at the graveside before the glare in my eyes and the encouragement of my family moved him on his merry way.
[/rant] Sorry about that. It has been hibernating for years and I feel much better.
I am more religious than most people suspect. On the other hand, the funeral service would make little difference to my Soul, so I would be fine with whatever those left behind desire.
(I have left $100 for beer for the military pallbearers. I think that is classy.)
Dare I as what of who is a Speaker For the Dead? (Other than a well-known Doper.)
If my organs aren’t harvested and every last usable scrap of flesh taken from me and put to medical or research purposes, I’ll haunt somebody but good.
But the service itself? Meh. Whatever my survivors need to make themselves feel better. If that means the Pope himself wants to say a few words over this dead heathen, then go right ahead.
It hurt so much to hear at my dad’s funeral that the only way to heaven was to have a close, personal relationship with Jesus Christ. My father was not a religious man, and the pastor, his freakin’ brother-in-law, should have known that. Anyone who knew my dad knew that he wasn’t a church goin’ kinda guy.
I don’t believe what they do, so on one hand what was said shouldn’t bother me. But my dad was dead and I really wasn’t happy to hear that, oh by the way, he’s burning in hell right now. Funerals are for the living, but this backhanded insult was too much.
They do not attempt to sugarcoat a life. The goal is to describe the person in all their aspects: virtues, faults, and all; to display them as the fully human person that they were.
I just want to point out that having a ceremony in church doesn’t automatically mean the clergy will hijack it.
When my father died we were all living in different cities. His boss set up a memorial service in the boss’ church. We told the priest that my father was an agnostic, and the priest made no mention of heaven, hell, God or Jesus during the entire service.
I went to a funeral a month ago of a friend, and this friend was an irreverant atheist artist who loved to challenge religion in his art, but the funeral was a religous service.
As someone else said, funerals are for the living. And because of that, I wasn’t bothered by the families desire to have a religous service.
I would be extremely bothered in having a religious service at my funeral… not that I would actually feel bothered being dead. Still I left specific instructions NOT to have some stupid religious windbag talking about God over my ashes.
If someone expressly points out they don’t want a religious service, or if they are known to all as someone who really doesn’t go for that kind of thing, I think it is wrong to do a religious service for them.
I don’t think it is wrong for the family to engage in some sort of religious activity relating to the death, if that’s what makes them comfortable.
If no instructions were left or if the person was mostly non-religious but also had never really expressed many opinions on the matter of religion and such, then basically I think the service should just conform to what the family thinks is going to be the best experience for the family as a whole.
I’ve always felt funerals were more for the living than the dead, anyways. Which sort of makes sense.
However they are supposed to be an appreciation for the deceased and in some cases a celebration of their life, so it isn’t appropriate to do things completely inconsistent with the life of the deceased.
