Funerals

Five people I very much care about -- my parents, my two best friends, my brother -- requested that after their passing there be no formal funeral or memorial service. These requests were granted.

For most of my life, I agreed with them, a protest of the commercialization of dying, with outrageous expenses and manipulative advertising, yet another institution ruined by greed. But I since have realized that funerals and memorial services have little to do with the dead and everything to do with the living.

These decisions, as a result, are selfish, taking away the best environment for expressing grief and memory by the living left behind. As a result, there is no solid closure after these deaths. There is no formal acceptance, no sharing of memories, no moving on. It's as if one day a person is here, the next they are gone, a disappearing act, now you see him, now you don't, and that's that. For all their gaudy commercialization, funerals still help the living make an important transition.

So my brother's recent death feels surreal. Not quite real. He was here, and then he was not here. End of story. Supposedly.

Here are some thoughts expressed in poetry as I've wrestled with this over the years.

My Memorial

Obituaries

Dropping Dead

Applegate