Writing the Funeral

Over the last few months, as I have prepared for the final projects and ordination into ministry, I have realized that I have to come to terms with death.  As I have walked through this, I have noticed 2 things:

1.  At the moment we have a 100% mortality rate. There is no avoiding it.  No chance of getting around it, no way of not dying.

2.  Almost everyone I know wants to avoid death.  Not just their own, but everyone else's.  The process of dying is one we seem to want to avoid. 

In many cultures, death is just another transition and there are many rituals and traditions that go into death and dying.  Here, I feel, we have lost our tribal connection to the the beauty that is death.

All spiritual traditions have a belief in life after death.  We move on to something more, something different.  For some it is another stab at human existence, for others it is heaven (or hell), for others it is rebirth in another form elsewhere entirely.

I am struggling with writing a funeral.  I have changed my ideas about whose funeral write, about the ceremonies I want to include, about the prayers and the eulogy.  I have pages of notes and nothing written.

I was going to write this whole thing about how J wouldn't tell me what music to play at his funeral and how out of spite I was going to write in music by Katy Perry or Bon Jovi.  But what I find myself focusing on, is that we suffer small deaths all the time.

When relationships break up, that is a kind of death.  As we grow older and gain responsibility there is a kind of death.  As we head into recovery from bad habits, that is a kind of death.  We go through a lot of psychological deaths throughout the course of our human lives.

There are all kinds of self-help books out there addressing the psychological death and making positive change in our lives.  You can walk into Barnes & Nobel and find shelf after shelf of self-help books on any number of subjects from addiction, to divorce, to self-loathing, to getting a guy.  I have read a bunch of self-help books (it was my way of avoiding therapy).  There are all manner of options, all manner of advice on how to change, what to change and what to do.

Ultimately though, I am starting to feel like I watch people avoid the truth of what the funeral represents in a physical death and how something like it could perhaps aid in actual life change.

The funeral is the time when the survivors acknowledge that there is no going back.  The person we loved, the person we knew is dead.  We can't turn around, we can't change it, we have to move forward.  The funeral is when we, the survivors, sit together in our grief and say good bye.  It is the beginning of the process by which we heal from the loss of this person from our lives.  For some that process will be long and complex and have some back sliding, for others the healing will occur fairly quickly.

I guess I am starting to get the impression that the funeral is an important ritual in the healing process.  It is the first step (or one of them anyway) in saying "good-bye."

This has made me wonder...what if funerals weren't just for the physically dead?  What if we had funeral rituals for divorce?  Breakups?  kicking addiction?  getting laid off?  transitions of any kind really?

What if there was a chance to ritualistically say good-bye to the old way so that you could actively involve yourself in a ritual that helped close the door on something that was dead?

I don't know...maybe we do have rituals for that and I am just unaware of them.  Or maybe it is just a stupid idea.

Now I suppose it is back to writing J's funeral.  I am thinking of using "Every Rose Has A Thorn" for the opening song.  Haha!