IMPORTANCE of saying Goodbye PARTS 1-9
So the importance of a funeral. This is my saying, and it’s a saying that’s evolved from lots of other people’s sayings. Your farewell is actually not for you, but for those left saying goodbye.
And I’ve created that statement over many, many years as people say, I want this for my funeral, and I want this for my funeral, and I want this, but they forget who’s the ones left grieving when you die. It’s not you. So it’s really important to give some instructions.
But one of the things I’m going to talk about today is preplanning, and one of the things I always say to families when they’re saying, I want this, this, this, this, and this for my funeral, or I don’t want this, and I don’t want this, I really don’t want anything, I say to them, can we just put on the end of it, but I give you permission to do what you need to grieve. And they all go, oh, of course. Because we’re stuck in this Western culture, generally, that tells us I’m the centre of the universe, when actually it’s the we that matters.
Simple answer is yes. And what really happened, people think it happened in COVID, but it started in mid-teens, 2015, 2014, it really started, and it got up to about 15% when COVID hit. And then with COVID, some people were told they weren’t allowed to do funerals, and they rebelled and wanted to do them.
So we actually had a bit of a surge of people having funerals. And then there was a group who said, well, we didn’t have a funeral, maybe it doesn’t matter. Particularly, again, people like your son who are saying, for me, I don’t want a funeral, I just want to be cremated.
But they forgot to include their families. So what we’ve found just in the last 18 months is that number had got as high in some areas as 30%. That’s coming back down.
In the last 18 months, we’re back down below 20% of the reclamation. People who have, you know, perhaps mum died, they had it cremated, didn’t do a funeral. Said they’d do a memorial, but never got around to it.
Didn’t get around to it, so terrible things. And then dad dies, and they end up doing a double funeral. So we’ve had a lot of double funerals in the last couple of years because they’ve not been able to… Well, with first grief, it’s almost like they can transfer their stuff onto the surviving person.
And then when they go, they can’t do that anymore. So a lot of them are faced with doing something with their grief. Alan Wolfert, an amazing psychologist from the States, has a host of care centres across the States for mental health.
And a lot of them are focused specifically on grief. And he actually says, you have to say goodbye at least three times in three different ways. And a good funeral does that.
And it could be a combination of, you sit with the deceased while they die. There’s one. But it’s not three.
So if that’s all you do, then your grief journey is still handled. It’s still possible, but you’re making it really hard for yourself. But if you do… You can’t sit with the person when they die.
What could you do instead? You come and see them. Sit with them in the casket and spend some time. So there is always another way of doing it.
If you can’t do it because you’re in America and you can’t get back and the funeral’s going to happen, if you’re a visual person, why can’t a family take some photos or video or have a FaceTime while you’re all together so that you can actually achieve some of those steps? Second one, obviously, the funeral itself, which is about gathering together with people who are supportive. Sometimes funerals backfire when you have the wrong sort of funeral and you have the people you don’t want there. And it’s not supportive.
So it’s not always do it a certain way. I’m not saying there’s a formula for it. But definitely, you need to say goodbye in some way.
And that’s why we have a third tradition of doing things like unveiling memorials or scattering of ashes further down the track so there’s this chance to get back together and renew the grief so that you can move another step on. And Alan’s favourite saying is you have to pause so you can step backwards and reflect. By pausing and stepping backwards, you can launch forward.
So a long answer to your question. Yes, absolutely. So I think a good goodbye in short, helps you on that grief journey with a reverse.
It’ll help you into healthy grief, healthy positive memories as you move forward. And there are three specific ways to do that. There are three… I think you need to do it in three steps.
Whatever those three steps are, I’m not saying what they have to be. You might have your own version of what those three might be. For instance, someone might have a direct promotion, but then gather friends for a memorial.
So there’s two steps. And then they might still do something later on with the ashes. So there’s three steps.
But if they just have a direct promotion and do nothing, you see why they end up with mental health issues. But when they do get together, and when they do go through that process, there are three things that make it a good process. And they are visual, auditory, and kinesthetic or tactile.
So what you see, what you do, and what you hear. So if you’re not gathering in some way, you’re not doing anything, you’re not listening to the stories, and you’re not fluffing around and making the place look pretty. Now I know a couple of you have… I’m just going to take my tie off.
So three things we do, like the three Hs, hang around here and hope, and they basically are the same things. So I’m just going to give you some examples of visual. During COVID, I was on the National Board at the time, they said, right at the beginning, we were not allowed to actually let people come into the funeral home to see the deceased.
Because they weren’t allowed in the funeral home. And I argued, that’s terrible. People who are very visual need to see them.
I said, are they allowed on the property? This is me arguing with the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and the Ministry of Health. And they said, oh yes. Yes, you’re allowed on the property, because you need to be able to switch documents.
You can put it on the table and walk back two metres and they can pick it up. So if they’re allowed on the property, if they can look through a window, they can see the deceased, can’t they? Oh yes. So this is our chapel.
This is the back end of our chapel, where we have a private courtyard. So what we do is we send people, this is one of my staff, we put a tent up, we walk them around through the back, and they can stand at the window and still see the deceased. So for those people who desperately needed to see them, they still couldn’t touch them, which is another issue, that’s the kinesthetic issue, but they could see them.
So I’m a bit of a rebel, so if I’m told I can’t do something, I want to know why, and I want to know if there’s a solution, and there was. One of the other things that we do at funerals, naturally, is we tell stories, in the old days we called it eulogies. But the stories don’t just happen at the funeral, the stories begin, often, when you’re sitting around with the deceased, building up to that time of the funeral.
They continue on as you have that cup of tea afterwards. And one of the things I always say to folk, is they’re leaving, if I’m leading a service as a celebrant, I’ll say to them, we have a strange thing in our culture sometimes, where we’re scared when we see a friend who’s lost a parent or a relative, we’re scared to speak the name out. But I challenge you to speak that person’s name out, because when you do, they will want to talk about their mum or their dad or their husband or whatever it is.
But if you don’t speak their name, they won’t want to upset you, because you think you’re going to upset them. So I call it keeping that name in the group. So the stories that you tell become real.
I often tell a story about my mum’s granddad, my great granddad, who died walking along the beach at 94 in the early 1960s. Now, not many people made it to that age in the 1960s. He retired at 55, because that was the age of retirement, after 40 years of work.
But his wife died, they moved to Otaki, she died, then he moved back to live with his daughter to die in Brooklyn, but he just wouldn’t die. So in his 70s, he finally decided he was going to build a house on the Kapiti Coast. So he would walk from Brooklyn down to Wellington Railway Station, which is quite a long way.
He would then, having bought some bits and pieces, he would catch the steam train to Paikakariki. So 1954, this is when it dates it, and then he’d walk along the beach, because the train didn’t go any further than Paikakariki, and then he would build some more of his house, until he finally retired. And every weekend once he’d really retired and finished building his house, he’d walk back in the weekends, catch the train back, spend with his daughter, and he died walking along the beach on the way home one day in 1994.
Now, I never met the guy, but that’s one of my stories, because I’ve tried to keep that memory alive by telling it more and more often. My dad’s parents, I never met either, they died when they were in their early 70s, I think, 71, 72, so a massive difference in ages and generations. The third thing is the doing.
Now, what are some of the things we do at funerals? Go on, give me some feedback. Sing. Sing, absolutely.
Reading. Reading, yeah. Showing photos.
Yep, so the person putting the photos together, often that’s the doing. Visually, you’re seeing the photos, so that’s that direction. What about drawing on the casket? You know, that’s my dad’s casket, we stuck it in the garage and drew on it.
What about pallbearers? That’s the doer, isn’t it? And we’ve got a tradition now, often we put flowers on the casket at the end. But not everyone wants to put a flower on it, it’s not what everyone wants to do. Some people are more interested in listening, some people are more interested in seeing, some want to do.
So if you say to your six grandchildren, you know, we want you to be pallbearers. And two of them don’t want to be pallbearers, because they don’t want to do the do. But there’s a niece and a friend who desperately want to be a pallbearer.
So sometimes we project stuff on other people, rather than just saying who would like to be one. And the ones who really want to do it put their hand up. The ones who really want to put together the photo show will put together the photo show.
If there’s no one who wants to do that, that’s what we as a funeral home do. We do whatever we’re asked to do, but we also try and empower people to do whatever they want to do.
