Funerals - how many have you been to?
 

I have heard a statistic about the average number of funerals that people attend. When I heard that, I thought "Heck, I've been a pallbearer in about that many." Late last week I learned of the death of a former co-worker. The funeral will be a week from today. This will be at least the 5th work related funeral that I will have gone to. There is at least another that I would have gone to if I could have (my first boss from the current organization).

So how many have you gone to?


Civil discussion welcome.

I have been to very few actual funerals. My family tends toward memorial services. The remains have variously gone the way of cremation, or medical studies followed by cremation. My dad missed out on the medical studies, though he would have made an interesting case, having manifested ALS in his late 80s. The family of one uncle, who suffered from hereditary ataxia, went to considerable lengths to pack his head in ice the moment he stopped breathing, so that his brain would be as well preserved as possible for study of the affliction. This was in accord with his wishes.

The actual funeral-home-or-church-with-coffin kind of things, to which I have been, I could probably count on one hand. I am rather averse to the open coffin, display of the remains practice anyway, and I am not religious.

I did attend one funeral which really confirmed my dislike of the custom. It was that of a very close friend: the first I lost to HIV-AIDS. He despised funerals, especially of the religious sort. Unfortunately, his family had control, so he was put on display at a funeral home. A preacher got up and started out, "I didn't know Mark, but his family says he was a nice man who like mathematics and music." He immediately segued into what amounted to a reproach of the deceased for being gay. "Nothing matters in life except JESUS." He went on for half an hour like this, at which time the small group of his friends, sitting in back, got up and walked out. Two of us, one of them Jewish, had refused to enter the room with the body, and we rejoined them in the lobby and left.

I don't think I've ever been a bearer, but maybe once for my Baptist uncle, whose funeral was the last I attended.

Zero. Never felt the ambient around a funeral. Never had the felling of losing someone close to me.

I think most of us have family, friends or colleagues we get on well with but who would not get on well with each other. A funeral fitting the needs of all who want to mark our passing then becomes difficult.

My father lead the funeral for my grandmother, which was the last one we went to. He was acutely aware that death has a different meaning for those who believe in life after death than for those who do not, and tried to make it a service we could all grieve at.

[QUOTE=kladner;393285][...]A preacher got up and started out, "I didn't know Mark, but his family says he was a nice man who like mathematics and music." He immediately segued into what amounted to a reproach of the deceased for being gay. "Nothing matters in life except JESUS." He went on for half an hour like this, at which time the small group of his friends, sitting in back, got up and walked out. Two of us, one of them Jewish, had refused to enter the room with the body, and we rejoined them in the lobby and left.[...][/QUOTE]
One of the members of a LGBT drama group, of which I was a member in the early 1990s, took his own life after leaving a note saying that he could not live with the consequences of being HIV positive. The members of the group who went to his funeral (I didn't attend) came back with a rather similar story to what you've told here. In this case the guy's life was completely misrepresented at the funeral, his homosexuality and his illness both ignored, and the religious tone of the funeral would have been completely alien to the guy himself. The members of the acting group who went to this funeral were distraught about it.

What you describe at that funeral must have been incredibly difficult to experience, and it was a very close friend of yours. I hope you and your other friends were able to block out that awful sham of a funeral and remember your friend as he really was and deal with your loss appropriately.

I've been to too many funerals, but mostly they have been of people of the previous generation. Now I'm of the age where I'm likely to go to funerals of the people I grew up with, as their bodies give up after complaining for too long at the abuse (beer, cigarettes, fatty foods, sugar, etc.) that they have been given, not to mention cancer which seems to affect some people but not others.

I said one answer but it might be more because I'm not sure which funerals in my family I have gone to, since I was young I've had my uncle, my grandmother on my mothers side, my grandfather on my fathers side ( which we got in an accident coming home from which if things had changed a bit we all would of been dead potentially), and then my mom, for relatives close enough to me for me to go to the funeral of if I was old enough.

[QUOTE=Brian-E;393303].....
What you describe at that funeral must have been incredibly difficult to experience, and it was a very close friend of yours. I hope you and your other friends were able to block out that awful sham of a funeral and remember your friend as he really was and deal with your loss appropriately.[/QUOTE]

We were angry at the time. There was the temptation to chant "Act Up! Fight AIDS!" on the way out, but it would have been ugly and would not have accomplished anything. I was comforted at the time by a story Mark had told me about his beloved grandfather's funeral. Now grandpa was a very earthy old East German who often outraged his stiff-necked wife with his droll comments. Once, at some holiday family meal when he was in his eighties, he turned to Mark and said, "You know, Mark, you got to get it while you're young. Me and Elsie (grandma), only three or four times a week!" To which grandma responded, "Bill! Das kinder!", as if he was perhaps telling the truth.

At his funeral, Mark said the preacher went on about how old Bill loved to play pinochle, and how he was probably sitting down with friends in heaven for a game right then. Mark, college-aged, in the front row, loudly said, "Bullshit!" He knew that old Bill had not cared for this Lutheran preacher's visits in the hospital, saying that he was an "arschloch." He had found the Catholic priest who stopped by more entertaining. In the thread of grandpa's funeral, I could imagine a theoretical Mark-in-heaven calling BS on [U]his[/U] funerary orator. :razz:

While Mark was in the hospital, I had Medical Power of Attorney, though at the time, it did not give me enough clout with the hospital to uphold his wishes that his family be kept out of the room. A sympathetic nurse told me, "Hospitals practice law before medicine."

He spent a few weeks on a ventilator. I was trying to maintain the fantasy that he would somehow pull through, and that Dan and I would be able to take him in and care for him, so I was at work when I received a call from a nurse. She said, "He has tapered off to a few heartbeats a minute. We think it's time to withdraw life support. His mother wants to know if he has any insurance to pay for a funeral." Such were the familial concerns. His sister showed up at the funeral straight from a party, wearing a silver lamé sheath dress, loaded up with downers, and talking about her deep faith that she would see her brother in heaven. All that, and the ham and Velveeta on Wonder Bread sandwiches we saw at the funeral home, made the whole thing so tawdry that it was hard to take seriously.

At my uncle's funeral, my father was shaking in anger because he knew that his dead brother hadn't wanted this kind of big production. Afterwards we went to my grieving aunt's house where a big spead of food was laid out for us as some Jewish families do; and she didn't even know how she was going to be able to pay the next month's rent. To top it off I learned that my grandparents had come to the new world to get married because they were cousins.

When my sweetheart died, I respected her wishes for a cremation with the ashes at sea near the beautiful Palos Verdes Peninsula that she loved growing up.

Wow, what a morbid thread. :surprised:

To answer your question, I've been to one so far, for my late maternal grandmother. She passed away in Taiwan, and her relatives already had a funeral for her overseas, but we had her ashes shipped back to California for burial because she was really found of America when she lived here.

In a previous life we served on [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_funerals_in_the_United_States"]military funeral details[/URL] for several years. (Not as a primary job, fortunately!)

We have often thought about writing a little bit about that experience but as we age the line between what happened and what we think happened is getting blurred.

We have never been to a funeral for anyone that we have known and we have no intention to.

[QUOTE=Uncwilly;393282]I have heard a statistic about the average number of funerals that people attend. When I heard that, I thought "Heck, I've been a pallbearer in about that many."[/QUOTE]

What is that number? I haven't been able to find that data.

I can recall being to about 5 funerals; I am 21 years old, and expect I'm younger than the typical member of this forum. I'm surprised that the median here appears to be only around 5.

[QUOTE=Mini-Geek;393367]What is that number? I haven't been able to find that data.[/QUOTE]IIRC it was 7 for a lifetime.
I have been a pall bearer at least 4 family services, one family friend, and escorted the flag draped casket at a military type funeral (never expected that one, myself and a 'dignified' looking relative were pressed into service), and maybe another one or two.

I just realised that my 'work related' number will hit 7 next week (which excludes 1 'viewing'), only one was from old age.

For the sake of the poll formalized "memorial services" that are pretty much the same as a funeral probably should be counted.
I suspect that within ~2 years I will be in the Harold & Maude range. In about a 10 month stretch, I went to 4 funerals and 1 wedding.