The period immediately after someone dies can be very stressful and ‘high stakes’, as family members and others come together to plan what will happen with the funeral.
Sometimes these are people who are intimately familiar with each other and have very positive and warm relationships; they know exactly what the deceased wanted to happen and are all in agreement about what to do. But other times these are people who are not used to spending time together, or whose roles have suddenly changed after the person has died. It is not unusual, after all, to hear of adult siblings ‘taking over’ after an elderly parent has died, although another sibling was providing much of their parent’s personal care and meeting their day-to-day needs before they died.
At other times the people coming together to decide what to do about the funeral already have very fractious relationships. The death can blow apart their previous grievances, making even conversation nigh on impossible. Throw in disagreements about money and all hell can break loose.
What happens in these cases? We’ve just completed a study talking with funeral directors and funeral pre-pay plan providers to find out, particularly when families cannot decide or agree on what to do. Unsurprisingly, interview findings show that the time between the death and a funeral can be an extremely fraught time for families, compounding and complicating their sense of loss and grief. It can also set people up in competition with one another in terms of who is most affected, or has the right to be most affected, by the death.
When families are in such turmoil there are two options. One is a direct cremation, with a minimal or no funeral and the ashes returned to the applicant for cremation to be dealt with as they wish. This may work for some people, because there are less decisions to make (and negotiate), it means they don’t have to have contact with one another, and they can carry on as they were.
But this doesn’t work for everyone, and concerns were expressed in our study about what is lost by not even trying to compromise, find solutions, and bring people together at a funeral after someone has died.
This is where a good funeral director can be invaluable, as they can bring to the discussion their experience of what works (and what doesn’t), the risks of particular choices (eg. “if you do a procession down that route at that time you may get stuck in traffic”) and their interpersonal skills to mediate between families. Our study showed that funeral directors are routinely doing this, sometimes not even having families in the same room and liaising with people individually to find a way forward. Most are able to find creative ways to bring people together and hold a funeral; sometimes, it gets so much that two different funeral services are held for the deceased. But, to their absolute credit, something
does happen.
So, while there are concerns about the rise of direct cremation and what is lost by not having a funeral, there needs to be as much emphasis – I think – on what can be
gained by instructing a funeral director and their facilitation of family members. They can help with finding compromise, a thawing of relations, a sense of satisfaction of a job well done or meeting the deceased person’s wishes and so on. That is not to say that involving them and having a funeral is a guarantee for improving relationships; indeed, it may even make them worse. But if there is potential for some healing of relationships to take place, and the opportunity to bring people who might not otherwise see each other together at a funeral then it is arguably worth a try, and a skilled funeral director can go a long way in helping that to happen.
Written by Professor Kate Woodthorpe, Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath
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