The Great Unknown
Almost everyone knows the feeling. You’re about to walk into the funeral home for the visitation of a loved one or friend and you’re terrified. You consider every possible excuse to explain why you aren’t able to stay and develop elaborate strategies to execute the quickest possible exit. Okay, I’m exaggerating a little, but sadly, not very much. Few people are eager to face the great unknown that is the funeral home experience.
The questions are inevitable. How will the surviving spouse react when he or she sees me? Will others be crying? Will I cry? Our brains try and reason the best answers to these questions, but we are never sure. Nor should we be. Death rearranges lives and creates difficult situations, but the funeral home is the perfect place to begin facing these questions and challenges.
The funeral home offers the comfort of tradition and community in which family members and friends can express their feelings. When you think about it, the funeral home experience is even a bit like Facebook. Now, I bet you think I’ve gone off the deep end after reading the last sentence, but humor me.
Facebook is a community in which we share our life story. While the information shared is not always pleasant, it’s there, staring you in the face. Funeral visitations and services are similar. Sure the medium and venue are completely different, but the meaning behind it remains the same.
On Facebook, a person wants to tell the community their story. You want people to care and you want people to comment, because even though your posts may be unimportant to someone else, it is meaningful to you. That is what a family is saying when they hold a funeral. They are saying to the world, “This person was important to me! Let me tell their story! Share your stories with me!”
Just like on Facebook, most people are concerned about saying the right thing at the funeral home. Know that there are no magic words. It’s perfectly appropriate to offer your condolences to the family, but nothing you or anyone else can say will take away their pain. Secondly, why would you want to take it away? I once read that the intensity of the pain of grief is proportional to the intensity with which a person loved the deceased. By trying to minimize their pain, a person might see it as a minimization of their relationship to the deceased.
Everyone has a right to mourn in their own way. Be kind and genuine, and if that means you are able to offer nothing more than a hug or a handshake, so be it. The sense of a caring community means more to the bereaved than most can ever know, until they have gone through it themselves.
Written by: Kelly Keddie, Licensed Funeral Director