NO SERVICE BY REQUEST!!!

How do you know what you don't know?

Or, how do you make a decision based on what you don't want.

I hear the "so and so didn't want to have a service " all the time in my work as a hospital social worker. Sometimes I have the time and space to unpack this complex phrase. Today I would like to take the opportunity to explore this question in more depth and make some suggestions. 

Here are some of my thoughts why people don't want a service:

1.  I am not a suit and I don't want to embrace the Victorian experience of pomp and circumstances.

2.  I don't feel comfortable in a funeral home, where every time you turn around it costs another few hundred dollars. Unfortunately for many, especially those that don't know what their choices are, the death care industry can seem like a huge upsell. When the dust all settles you can't believe the final total of the cost of the funeral. It leaves you with a huge pit in your stomach and you feel guilted into making decisions you later regret.

3.  I am not part of a church, synagogue or temple. In these spiritual communities there is a central figure in whom you have known for years. You trust this person to take charge of your arrangements.

4.  I am a humble person and I don't want to make a big deal of my death. The flip side of this is people might feel insecure and are worried that no one will show up ... or even worse, they feel that someone how they are not worth the bother. I don't deserve ...

5.  I have never been to a funeral I enjoyed. This can mean you haven't attended a lot of funerals in your life, and the only time you "had to go" is when it was when someone in your inner circle has died. At this point it pushes you so beyond your comfort zone you are in  total dissociative haze and you think if you don't have a "gathering" you will protect those closest to you in having to go through that experience.

You see we no longer live in a village where we go to gatherings in our community. The old guy who lives on our street who dies a natural death after a long productive life. You may know him because of how he kept his front yard perfectly landscaped, or he was a master gardener and always shared some potatoes with your family in the fall.  In this type of Gemeinschaft community, relationship and connection are central and a funeral is just one of those rituals you take in.

Here are a few principle's that can guide us in exploring some options:

1.  It is not all about you. The real purpose of a gathering is to assist those around us to come together and create an opportunity of connection, Many people don't realize how much of their loved one's lives they don't have the opportunity to hear about. It is only in their death that people feel they are granted the permission to come together and share some of these stories.

2. You have noticed that I have replaced funeral with the word gathering. This gives us the opportunity to rethink and reframe this experience to customize it to reflect our own personality and circumstances. I would recommend that unless you have lots of experience in these rituals, that you enlist the assistance of a professional funeral celebrant. They understand the power of ritual and recognize all the ingredients that are required to create a successful product. It seems weird to discuss this like you would a wedding cake, however you must realize that it is kind of like planning a wedding in a week in the midst of the most difficult emotional/psychologically stressful period you can imagine.

3. Gatherings can add to your story and can guide the future conversations.  Narrative therapy teaches us the principle that rarely is our story simple enough to be black and white, and to remember that our story is not over once we have taken our last breath.

4. Just because something is difficult doesn't mean it is not healthy. I have suggested it before in this blog, but the words seem to ring true. The more you engage with the difficult process and leave the professionals out of the death care process, the less you require a professional counsellor later to piece together and make sense of your narrative.