One of my close friends just had her brother pass away last week. He was 22 years old and had a blood clot that unexpectedly took him. The open casket funeral happened on this past Friday and as I was talking with my friend, she showed me a bracelet she received from some friends of hers. The bracelet was a little like a charm bracelet with a metal piece in the shape of a heart hanging off of it with her brother’s name on it. They gave her brother a matching necklace on him that he was going to be buried with, with my friend’s name on it as well.
I’ve never seen this before and it just seemed a little… well… I’m not sure what the right word for it is. But it just doesn’t seem “right”. My friend said that the gifts were a surprise from them, so she had no previous conversation about them and they weren’t her idea.
That’s really bizarre. It’s common here to give money in the card to help with funeral expenses or for a memorial in the deceased person’s name. But matching jewelry for the dead brother and living sister? I dunno. It’s touching yet bizarre at the same time.
When my grandpa died some friends of the family took a flower from his casket and had it preserved in a paperweight. They later gave it to my grandma. I thought that was weird, too.
Sorry to hear about your friend’s brother. What a difficult time of year to lose a loved one!
I’m unfamiliar with the concept of funeral gifts in general - here one sends flowers (or a donation to a charity) and might bring food to the house. I know from other threads that elsewhere it is considered appropriate to send money to the family, but not here. I’ve never heard of actual gifts, either.
Well-intentioned, I imagine, but creepy. I don’t think it’s uncommon for an SO to bury something with their loved one (or to keep something of theirs - my mother kept my Dad’s wedding band).
There are 3 elements that make it seem particularly odd to me:
[ol]
[li]The gifts came from outside the immediate family.[/li][li]The gifts were for siblings where one was the deceased.[/li][li]The necklace was for the guy. (??) [/li][/ol]
But maybe this is how they were dealing with the awkwardness of your friend’s loss.
A friend of mine passed away suddenly over the summer, at the very young age of 27 (on her birthday, actually.)
Her boyfriend had given her a pair of beautiful gold hoop earrings. She was wearing them when she died. He had the earrings turned into rings, one for him, and one for her.
They had been a couple for nearly 10 years, I thought it was an extraordinarily sweet gesture.
Hmmm, why is that weird? I have on my dresser two pressed roses in a frame, one rose from each of my grandparents funerals.
The matching jewelry thing is … different. I don’t think it’s wrong; just different. I think I’d rather receive a locket with a picture of the deceased.
A little morbid, but not in a bad way – not if it makes her feel better. Somewhat Victorian – again, this is not a bad thing. Various types of ‘death jewelry’ – some much more morbid than this – were common among Victorian people.
Back in “olden times” (early to mid-1800’s?) they would often take a lock of hair from the deceased and either enclose it in a locket, or if it was long enough, “weave” it into a pin or brooch. There’s quite a collection of these macabre remembrances at the Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, MI.
It’s weird because my grandma did not take the flower herself. It was done by non-family members. I should probably have also mentioned that my grandpa’s name and the dates of his birth and death are also inside the paperweight. It’s not just the flower.
My father was very close to his nephew who died this past spring. After the funeral, mom took Dad’s boutonniere that he’d worn as a pall bearer and had it preserved in a little dome thingy along with the name and birth-death dates engraved on the bottom. Pretty weird to me, but Dad seemed touched by the intent.
The only commemorative funeral jewelry type things I’ve ever seen were keychains, not actual jewelry. In my senior year of high school, one of our friends was involved in a freak accident and suddenly died. The parents asked his closest friends to be the pallbearers, quite an honor to choose the friends over the family members, and gave each young man a simple brass keychain with something maudlin like “Brian says thank you” and the date of the funeral. I thought it was incredibly odd, but the fellas seemed very touched.
Yikes. If I had a close family member die and someone presented me with a “funeral gift” I’d be mortified beyond words!
It would be one thing if another family member (say within the following year) sent me a family heirloom with an “I thought you would appreciate this, belonged to Dead_Crayon and meant a lot to him.”
But for someone to hear the news, go to a store and say “Here, I got you this watch as a ‘funeral gift’. Dead_Crayon’s name is engraved on the back, so you’ll never forget him” I would climb into the casket myself and die of embarassment.
One of those things that it’s fine if the bereaved person or a close family member did it, but is totally tacky for someone else to do.
What probably happened was that gift givers did the matching jewelry thing when they lost someone, and bereaved sister told them how sweet she found the gesture. Then the gift givers assumed she’d like to do something similar when she lost her brother.
In the same way you might tell your grandmother that you like her new sweater, and she buys you an identical one for Christmas.
It’s not like they got something off the deceased’s registry.
They gave it to a specific person they knew well; presumably well enough to know how the woman would react. Presumably well enough to know that she’d welcome a way to remember her brother.
In my family, people bring food. So the grieving won’t have to cook for a while.
Y’know, I was in a hurry earlier and missed this last line. I’m going to have to revise my opinion from morbid-but-acceptable to wierd-and-possibly-inappropriate. Current society does not hold the same views on death and mourning that Victorian society did. In those days death jewelry (of which the hair jewelry mentioned by Genghis Bob was one type), the extended wearing of black, formal photography of the recently dead, and etc. were common and unremarkable. Nowadays however, unless the mourner has chosen some Victorian-style mourning symbol on their own, I think it’s pretty questionable to thrust it on them.