Recent Death So....i'm Gonna Rant

[white_raven23]

Okay, So I got word last night that my Great Aunt died. It wan't a surprise she was pretty old, and her health had been in fairly rapid decline since her husband died about five years ago.

 

I haven't seen her in over ten years. I guess in a way I'd said goodbye long ago......sounds mean...but I have no plans to attend the funeral. My proximity is not convinient at all. I'm over 5,000 miles away, and I have a LOT of family that is really really old. That means I kinda have to pick and choose which funerals I'm going to go to.

 

And the last funeral I went to in Kentucky left a bad impression (granted I was a kid). It was for my Maternal Grandfather, and thanks to the death cult tradition, it was an open casket viewing.

 

I don't think they did the best job on him. Didn't look like him at all. And they stuck him in this caramel colored suit.......I never saw him wear a caramel colored suit with a brown tie EVER! Seriously put me off caramel colored suits.

 

And lilies. Tons of lilies in a close space. Lilies make me nauseous now.

 

And what is up with the open fucking casket!? I've been to three or four funerals where the 'time honored' tradition of laying a body out for all to see was the thing. One was for a three year old child. She looked like wax. I felt dirty looking at her. Like it just wasn't any of my business at this point. I've yet to see a body that 'looked wonderful' (there's always some relative that says this for some reason that totally escapes me).

 

Most Alaskan funerals are of the Memorial variety. Lot of cremation going on here because the perma-frost is a bitch and not many people die conviniently during the short window when the ground isn't hopelessly solid.

 

I prefer Memorials. A nice picture of the person as you actually remember them looking on a stool.

 

Seriously. My memories of my grandfather are badly tainted by the image of his body in the box looking all fucking wrong! And don't give me that "well people need to see the body for closure" BS. There is no 'closure' there is simply moving on. And why do people need to see the body in order to convince themselves the person is dead? WTF??? Whether you are convinced they are dead or not....fact remains you are not going to see them again in this lifetime, and there's no absolute guarantee of seeing them afterwards! Holding their memory in your mind, ones of them alive, sharing good times.......that is a more fitting eulogy than anything anyone could say anyway.

 

I certainly don't want to be turned into an exhibit. I find it kind of offensive. A desecreation of who that person was. Especially when you stick them in clothes they never would have touched when they were alive. That was a loved one....this is not your opportunity to play experimental dress up! That's just sick! Tainted memory!

 

Give me a Memorial service instead! There will be no parade past my body! That is just......wrong!

[Thackerie]

I'm with you - I hate open-casket funerals. I remember when I was about 12, my family and I went to the funeral home for my grandfather's viewing and we were all very confused, thought we were in the wrong room, because none of us recognized that little wax figure lying in the casket - didn't look a thing like the crusty, old "Granpap" that we knew so well.

 

Putting make-up on a corpse seems indecent to me. I guess the funeral industry has been able to make open caskets a "custom" in this country so they can justify billing the survivors for all sorts of unnecessary things such as embalming (absolutely unnecessary unless burial will be more than 2-3 days off), cosmetics, hairstyling, and even for the room where the viewing will take place (with what amounts to a rental fee of about $600 for 3 hours).

 

Glad that when it was my dad's turn he had chosen the more practical method of cremation for himself. That's my choice for myself, too, after whatever useable parts (if any, by then) have been harvested for transplants, etc.

[white_raven23]

I just got word. My Great Aunt's daughter is going in to do Great Aunt's hair today. A nice way to save money in a way. The funeral people can't charge you.

 

But obviously it's going to be an open-casket affair.

 

Thackerie, we are on the same page! But as with the news today about Great Aunt's hair....I think I've narrowed down the part that is so offensive. Handing the body over for a complete stranger to prep. Because I wasn't disturbed that this woman's daughter was going to do her hair.

 

And embalming.....ugh! Can we find a better way to insult a corpse? If people were required to watch the embalming process on their loved ones....embalming would go bye-bye.

[Angel]

I TOTALLY agree...I can not STAND open casket funerals. When both of my parents died, it was a closed casket and I had them dressed in their favorite, everyday clothes. It would not have been closure to me at all putting my parents out on display, like some show for all to see. I had the pictures out to remind everyone what they looked like, no need to see their bodies, because no matter how they try to "doll" them up, there is no comparison to what they were when they were alive. To me, it is disrespectful, IMO, but there are others that believe otherwise.

[Shadoe]

The idea of a bunch of near strangers gawking at my dead body in a box creeps me out. I told my ex husband that I wanted anything usable harvested and he should contact the nearest body farm to see if they wanted me. Because whatever I manage to leave behind should at least be useful. Barring that, he should have a funeral home stick me in a cardboard box and burn me immediately - no funeral.

[Amethyst]

Yes, I agree, it's creepy and people shouldn't actually need to see the body to have closure. The odd thing is that the people who most need to see the body, generally speaking, are fundy Christians.

[Guest Emerson]

I don't think that I've ever been to a funeral, and I've never had to look at a casket before. I guess I'm lucky that way, but geez I can't believe people would make children do that. Its kind of creepy.

[spamandham]

I have been to several open casket funerals, and I agree 100%. It's morbid and unnecessary.

 

I've been to two funerals for young children. One was closed casket and the other open. The open casket one was horrific. Her tongue was visibly sticking out. I can't imagine how traumatic this was for her parents. Worst of all, she went on to be cremated, so the whole open casket thing was just for show anyway. They played "Jesus loves the little children" as background music. I still have nightmares about that.

 

Modern Western funerals are just awfull. The days when the body was disposed of on the day of death need to be brought back. Whoever can attend does, and for everyone else, just have a memorial get together of some kind.

 

If I had my 'druthers, I would want to have my organs harvested, and the rest of my body either cremated or given to science on the day of my death.

[Taphophilia]

The open casket funerals, in the US, have their roots in the civil war. It took awhile for the dead soldiers to be shipped home by train (they also developed embalming then) in a casket. It was the custom that when a person died their family and friends would come to pay their last respects at their deathbed and immediately after they died. Since the soldiers died in some far away place, this wasn't possible.

When the soldiers returned home, the family and friends would come and pay their respects to an open casket at the undertakers who was the one to pick up the body from the train yard. They had not seen or heard from their loved one for many months and sometimes years, due to being in war, poor transportation, and no real method of communication, so for them it was closure.

 

Taph

[BlueGiant]

I have seen an open-casket funeral done well. When my grandmother died after her second bout with cancer, the family had an open-casket. Whoever prepared her did a very good job and despite being dead, looked better than the last time I saw her alive, which was in the hospital.

 

Sure in a case like that a picture could have kind-of worked, but for me, it helped to have better version of the last time I saw her.

 

I will comment on one other thing, though. Those caskets are fraggin' heavy. I mean severely so.

 

Also would embalming be more necessary if someone is put into a maosuleum? Not sure on that score.

[xrayman7040]

My beloved grandmother died unexpectedly when I was 12. That was the first time I had ever seen dead body. I had fucking nightmares about it for years. They say it's healthy for children to view a body of a deceased loved one. BULL FUCKING SHIT. That caused me great mental anguish. The death industry is one of the biggest scams in the country. The pray on peoples emotions and rape the shit out of their pocket books. It's criminal plain and simple. I had a great friend who kissed the windshield of a car and died at 28. I can't believe they actually had an open caskett. His face looked like bondo that you would use on the body of a car. But I must admit when my last grandparent died at 91, he looked like he was going to get up and start talking while he was lying in state. The bottom like is the open caskett thing is just one of the worst traditions of our culture. We just don't need it for closure.

[Amethyst]

I don't think that I've ever been to a funeral, and I've never had to look at a casket before. I guess I'm lucky that way, but geez I can't believe people would make children do that. Its kind of creepy.

 

I had to do this when my mother died. Granted, I was a teenager at the time. But still. I had already accepted the fact that she was dead, and it was more painful to see her in the casket even though I knew that she was dead. It didn't help one bit.

[godlessgrrl]

Open casket funerals are weird at best, utterly horrifying at worst...

 

I've only been to one, and fortunately it fell into the "just weird" category. And not too traumatically weird, either.

 

It was for my great aunt. She was from a small town in Tex-ass (Weatherford, for anybody from the Lone Star State) and was very traditional about the rituals of her life. She was 96 or so when she died and she'd been prepared for her death for nearly 30 years. She knew exactly where she wanted her service, how she wanted it to be, what she wanted to be wearing, she had her pallbearers and casket and everything picked out. Her instructions were followed to the letter.

 

The place that handled the details was a funeral home that had been standing on the town square and run by the same family since the town was founded. It was a throwback to the time when funeral homes and furniture stores were in the same business, when it was all handmade, all custom work. The place was honestly amazing. I don't know why I didn't find it utterly morbid, because it was the kind of building that if it wasn't haunted, I'd be damned surprised. But for some reason I didn't focus on the heavy draperies and hot Texas sun streaming through the old stained-glass windows. I focused on the flowers, and the original tin ceiling.

 

Maybe it was because the people there knew her. It was just so clear that the family knew her and cared about her. She was one of the oldest members of the community and she was a teacher, so there were plenty of younger folks in town (heh, younger like 40 to 60) who remembered her teaching them.

 

So I guess we were lucky. She really did look great. The part that was disturbing there was that she really did look as if she were only asleep, which was really odd. And the rest of it was really the weirdness of culture shock. They don't do things in the deep down, Bible-lovin', okra-sucking South the way we do in the godless, heathen Pacific Northwest. Her funeral was a full-on, formal, traditional open casket arrangement, complete with religious service. It wasn't how I'd want my funeral, but it was just exactly the way she wanted hers.

 

Up here it's cremation and memorial service, then the family scatters and/or shares the ashes as they see fit, and as the deceased wanted. My father's parents were scattered in a circle around the home that they'd built together, and where I lived for a number of years after their death. My mother's father was divided up between his wife and daughters. Grandma scattered some at the place where they built their house together too (a beach house on Hood Canal), and keeps a small container of grandpa in her home. My mom has taken parts of grandpa and scattered him in other places he loved - the beach on Maui, places he hung out with friends.

 

When I die I want to be wrapped in white silk and put in a cardboard (or simple pine) box filled with herbs and wildflowers, then light me up - then I hope all my friends have a big fucking party in grand style, with drink and dancing and great food. Then i don't give a shit what they do with my ashes. I sure as hell won't care.

[BlueGiant]

Am I the only person here who has no issue with an open-casket affair? Not that I like hanging around dead people, especially those that I care about, but I see no reason why it should be traumatic (and yes, I went to a few as a kid, as early as 5 or 6 that I can remember, and I really only cried over the fact that I wasn't going to get to see the "guest of honor" ever again).

 

Admittedly at the wakes in my family there is a lot of sharing memories, not quite an "Irish wake" but definately not a subdued affair.

 

And I still have to ask what they put in those caskets that is so damn heavy? I know it isn't the body.

[white_raven23]

Am I the only person here who has no issue with an open-casket affair? Not that I like hanging around dead people, especially those that I care about, but I see no reason why it should be traumatic (and yes, I went to a few as a kid, as early as 5 or 6 that I can remember, and I really only cried over the fact that I wasn't going to get to see the "guest of honor" ever again).

 

In a way you just answered your own question. I was talking to my mom about the whole shmeel....and she totally understood my feelings on the subject.

 

She even told me why I felt that way, and as an extension, kinda prepped me for your question. I wasn't raised with a 'funeral tradition'. It seems you were. I didn't have tons of close old people dying every six months to every year or so growing up. My mom told me that used to be the norm. And most affairs were open casket. They don't bother you, because you simply have more experience and therefore a broader range of associations with them. And that's cool.

[Taphophilia]

My family was accepting of death, and pretty open about it. They took pictures of the dead relatives in the open caskets and sent them to the family members who couldn't attend the funeral. Until I was 25, I thought everyone did this.

 

White Raven,

 

Don't you have a library full of such topics as true crime and serial killers, but an open casket viewing freaks you out?

 

Taph

[Evelyn]

I've been to three open-casket viewings and I didn't like them. The first was my grandpa on my mom's side. I was 8 years old, so it was weird to me. The second was a former close friend of my husband. My husband had lost contact over the years and this guy was 30 when he died of hepatitis, so here was this young man in a casket. That was hard to take. The most recent was a co-worker in her mid-30s who accidentally overdosed, so this was sudden and unexpected. I went to a "viewing". They had her thoroughly made up, though the way her head was positioned on the pillow made her lower jaw not look normal. Her hair was also in a different style and the makeup on her face, arms, and hands was heavy and obvious. She didn't look like herself at all. I ended up sitting at the back of the chapel where I just barely saw her head and I instead looked at a large photograph that was next to the casket.

 

My dad was cremated. I did see his body in the nursing home after he died and whether that helped bring closure or not, I'm not sure. He was so thin at the end that he didn't look like himself before he died anyway. We had a memorial service with a photograph on a table at the front. We also had lots of photos on a back table. That was nice. My mom plans to be cremated, too, so we'll probably have a similar service when the time comes.

 

Me, I think I prefer cremation. My hubby jokes to just put him out in the trash

[white_raven23]

White Raven,

 

Don't you have a library full of such topics as true crime and serial killers, but an open casket viewing freaks you out?

 

Taph

 

Ironic....isn't it?

 

It's not so much a 'freakout' (except the viewing for the young child....that was disturbing) as I feel like I'm looking at something that is none of my business. Something deeply private. I'm looking at a natural process that has been stalled and rendered unnatural purely for the convinience of people needing to view.

 

Now that doesn't mean if I come across a decomposing body in the woods, that I'm going to feel just fine....I don't know. It hasn't happened yet. I'll let you know if it does though.

[Guest GrewUpFundie]

I honestly thought that open casket funerals were the norm until not too long ago. Being from the South, the only closed-casket funerals I can remember were when someone died in a car wreck or were otherwise horribly mutilated.

 

It always struck me as odd, though, that someone could walk up to an open casket and say, in apparent sincerity, "He/she looks so good!" Um... thanks, grandma, but he's actually DEAD. Sometimes people say really strange things when they're trying to be comforting.

 

The absolute WORST type of funeral is the hell-and-brimstone variety, and I've been to several. When one of my aunts died in a very small town in Georgia, the semi-literate preacher, in between yelling and pounding the podium about the fires of hell, did everything but guarantee that my aunt was headed there herself because she wasn't a regular churchgoer. Of course, the rest of us were bound for hell as well, for various reasons. There was even an altar call - at a funeral! I was absolutely stunned. (The only thing that has ever come close was a Grandparents' Day service where the pastor advocated beating children with sticks for a solid hour - "My momma beat me, and -I- turned out fine" - but that's another story.)

 

Of course, my wacked-out family stood around afterwards and talked about what a good service it was.

 

I told my parents at a very early age that I wanted to be cremated; I never did understand the rationale behind putting a corpse in a strong metal box inside a concrete vault. I'd rather feed a tree, personally, instead of taking up useless space for hundreds of years. They were, of course, horrified. How would God raise me up during the Rapture if I were cremated? I patiently explained that God would raise me up the same way he would for someone that died 800 years ago, however that was. I was a difficult child.

[Amethyst]

The absolute WORST type of funeral is the hell-and-brimstone variety, and I've been to several. When one of my aunts died in a very small town in Georgia, the semi-literate preacher, in between yelling and pounding the podium about the fires of hell, did everything but guarantee that my aunt was headed there herself because she wasn't a regular churchgoer. Of course, the rest of us were bound for hell as well, for various reasons. There was even an altar call - at a funeral! I was absolutely stunned. (The only thing that has ever come close was a Grandparents' Day service where the pastor advocated beating children with sticks for a solid hour - "My momma beat me, and -I- turned out fine" - but that's another story.)

 

 

And people think that kind of thing is comforting? They must be from another planet.

[Evelyn]

My dad's memorial service turned into a church service, so to speak, but he was an xian and so are most of my relatives and friends of the family. We sang a lot of hymns and xian choruses and a couple of pastors were invited so they got to preaching a bit when it was their turn to say a few words. I joked to my supervisor from work, who was nice enough to attend (even though he didn't know my dad) and is an xian, that he probably didn't need to go to church the following Sunday as this service had plenty of "church" in it to last a few days. Though there was some preaching, it wasn't hellfire and brimstone.