Well my cousin in Canada didn’t come to Ireland a few years ago when get mother died because she thought it would be too emotional. Is this odd? You would expect someone would come back home. Is this common in fact?
It was during a long drive from Arizona to Honduras and back. MrsRico and I were at an internet cafe (seen in Ben Gazzara’s Looking for Palladin) across from the massive Spanish Embassy in Antigua Guatemala when my sister emailed me that our mom had died in Oregon. Services were in two days - not near enough time to drive 3400 miles north, and we didn’t want to abandon the SUV (stuffed with arts and crafts), fly stateside, and then return. So another sister threw Mom’s ashes into the Rogue River.
Distance makes a difference, as does budget. Dead is dead. Bye, Mom.
If my mother dies when I’m abroad, I’m not coming unless the trip was already planned. My brothers agree with this, it’s an all-hands decision. It’s a lot more helpful for everybody if I come a few days later when the paperwork is due, and the logistics of my trips home tend to be quite complicated; a late-minute flight depending on where from can easily be several K.
I always felt that people could get buried without my presence – same goes for getting born, graduated, or married. If you asked next week, nobody would noticed if I was there or not, except the scandal-mongers would remind them.
When my dad died, I was believed to be at a finca in rural Bolivia, and it took three weeks for a letter to reach me.
My mom died at my house, 500 miles from where the funeral would be, so I saw her off and she made the peaceful trip by herself.
I’m 81, and I have literally never attended a funeral service in my life.
Rio Rico, was that at Dona Luisa’s?
Their own health.
A few more:
(1) Some sons and daughters no longer associate with their parents, at all. Indeed, I bet there are many who would dance on the grave if they attended.
(2) Echoing Paul in Qatar: Illness. When my Mom died both her brothers were too infirm to make the relatively short trip to her memorial service.
(3) Family obligations. Think of the logistics a single parent with children would have in order to attend a far away service.
I think sometimes there are hardships and logistical difficulties that prevent people from coming. That it would be too emotional as the reason not to come…? Interesting. Seems like it would be a good time to purge that feeling while surrounded by the loving family yadda yadda. I’ve heard it’s important, psychologically, to attend because when you see that body in that casket you know it’s for real etc.
But then, an older guy and his wife were talking to a group of us about their early marriage. She was pregnant with their first and went into labor. Sadly they lost the baby. He came home that day with a big Airstream in tow and told her to pack a bag and before you knew it, they were off to see the country. He wouldn’t talk about the baby. 30 years later they’d had kids and their daughter was grown, married and pregnant and went to the hospital to deliver. There were problems and they weren’t sure the baby was going to make it. THAT was when he melted down…getting the Airstream was just avoiding the pain and it worked for a long time. But the pain wasn’t gone; it was just swept under the rug.
So keep an eye on your cousin.
Attending a funeral is something you do for yourself or family or friends. There’s no need to travel across an ocean or a continent to attend a funeral, you do it if you can, and if you want to. The closer a funeral is to you the fewer possible hindrances, so it becomes difficult to make excuses for not attending a funeral except saying in essence “I don’t feel like it”.
I don’t really think the deceased cares at all if you are there, but one good reason to attend any funeral is so you don’t have to hear about it from your family for the rest of your life.
Right now, in the midst of a pandemic, people should learn to be satisfied with video attendance at many funerals. No point in dying to say goodbye to a dead person, and then maybe hello again in a short time.
Jewish funerals have to happen very quickly. If they can happen within a day, that’s considered ideal. It’s very frequent that family, including children, can’t get home for the funeral. This is why, in Judaism, the funeral isn’t the paramount act following the death-- it’s sitting shiva. Shiva is supposed to begin immediately after the funeral, but many times, people don’t begin until the whole family is gathered, and sometimes they don’t even gather for shiva in the same city where the funeral took place. The funeral will take place where the death took place, but shiva will take place where most of the people already are.
The only reason I would come to my mother’s funeral (3000 miles) is if my dad was still alive, because it would hurt him if I wasn’t there. I haven’t the slightest interest in my mother otherwise. Same amount she has always had for me.
Possibly the real reason is that they can’t afford it, but they don’t want to say so either due to embarrassment over being broke or because they’re afraid it will sound like ‘Mom was worth less than $x to me’.
It’s also possible that what “too emotional” means is ‘X relative will be there and X was abusive to me to the point at which I can’t stand to be in the room with them; but I’m not about to get into all of that right now while everybody’s grieving for Mom.’ Or it might even mean ‘Mom was abusive to me and I’m afraid I’ll blow up and say so in the middle of the funeral services.’
Or it might mean ‘I’m afraid I’m going to start screaming and wailing and throwing myself on top of the coffin and what I, personally, need to do is to go out into the woods all by myself until I can breathe and talk at the same time.’ People grieve in all sorts of ways; and even if everyone in the family is entirely loving, some people still need to grieve alone.
“People grieve in all sorts of ways…”
Absolutely. And there is no rigid timeframe for grief. People who say, “It’s been long enough, get over it,” need to be kicked in the head. Preferably with a foot wearing cleats.
A person who cannot make it to a funeral because of logistics or money will oftentimes have a longer, more wrenching grief, because it will be flavored with guilt. In the OP, the person who could not attend the mother’s funeral in Ireland, I saw that as a possible passport problem. Can you just imagine getting the call, “Mom’s dying, better come home now,” and you find your passport has EXPIRED?
As I have told my kids almost from the day they were born: Life isn’t fair. And all too often, Death isn’t either.
~VOW
Good points. I wouldn’t fault anyone for not coming…it’s a matter of personal choice. How (and when) people make their peace will vary.
I was in Europe when my father died, about to attend a math conference. I immediately cut it short and flew back home (well, my original one anyway) mainly to console my mother. Fast forward 22 years. I was in Europe touring with my own family and preparing to attend a math conference when my mother died. There was nobody I especially had to console and it would have been enormously expensive for all of us to fly back so we didn’t and I went to the conference. My brother
I’ve managed to attend very few funerals. Just as well.
Sorry, I don’t recall the name and I’d have to dig through old notes. The cafe (with food, drink, WiFi, and a small courtyard) and the Spanish Embassy were west side corners of 7a. Av. Nte. A few staff and UN peacekeepers wandered in.
I did not attend my mother’s funeral. First, it took awhile for word to reach me that she was dead, as she had removed herself from the family. I’d had no contact with her for years. But even had I known immediately, I would not have bothered to go. She was a total harridan who was never happy unless she was making someone else unhappy. My reaction when I heard was a shrug and then going about the rest of my day.
Your brother what?
Money can certainly be an issue as well as budget. Someone may have the money for a last minute trip to Ireland but then that’ll mean canceling the trip to Disney that summer and a heartbroken kid.
Also, it’ll depend on the work situation. In a perfect world, this wouldn’t be an issue. But we don’t live in such a world. I can definitely say at a previous job too many ‘life happens’ moments earned you a spot at the top of the shit list and it was almost impossible to get off of it.
This is so true, and it is especially true of people in subcultures.
In Judaism, a stillborn baby is not formally mourned. Some people might choose to, but it is not a requirement (actually, it’s not a requirement to observe formal mourning for a baby younger than 3 months-- a rule from the year 500CE, which y’all can figure out). When some friends of mine, Jewish, had a very late term miscarriage, that was late enough to be a still-birth, albeit, they preferred to think of it as a miscarriage, she was in the hospital for a couple of days after a procedure to remove the dead fetus.
The nurses there kept giving the couple brochures on grief that would be more suitable for people who had lost a live-born baby (their words), encouraging them to hold the fetus, and say goodbye, and name it. Jewish babies are formally named in ceremonies, and people usually don’t reveal the name they have selected until after the ceremony, even if the baby is several weeks old at the time. It was totally inappropriate for people raised in the Jewish tradition to name a dead fetus. Also, the nurses kept calling it “their baby,” even though they referred to it as “the fetus.”
The nurses wanted them to call a funeral home, and bury the fetus, but they knew a Chevra Kadisha (Jewish burial preparation committee) would not prepare a still-born fetus.
He was from a Modern Orthodox family, and she was from a very observant Conservative one. They were members of a conservative synagogue. He had a kippah and a beard, and she wore pants only very rarely, and was generally modest in her dress (she didn’t wear a wig, though). But they were coming from a very strong Jewish tradition.
They finally had a very long talk with their rabbi, who then had a talk with the head nurse. The things the nurses were encouraging were causing them much more pain than the original loss was, and cut it out. They did. I hope they learned something about people who clearly were not responding to their suggestions, that maybe they were not well-received.
15 months later, they had a healthy baby.
I have no idea what they may have done privately to manage their feelings, nor what their feelings were, but I do know that when my mother had a somewhat late miscarriage (5 months), she handled it by not making it a big deal either. And since she and my father were “0 population growth” people, and my brother, born after the miscarriage, was the apple of her eye, I think she had very little regret or “what could have beens” over it.
I know that’s a little off-topic, but I think it’s very much on-point that you cannot tell someone how to grieve.
I was in Germany when my stepfather died. Too long to get back for a funeral.
I was in Romania when my mother died. Same problem.