Archive for year 2012
How Funeral Taboo Are You?
Answer these questions with a “yes” or “no”. If you answer all “yes”, you are 100% funeral taboo … in other words, you’re willing to try funeralization practices that aren’t generally accepted by society.
With each “no” your taboo goes down 10%.
(NOTE: these questions assume a disposition of burial)
1. Do you want to be buried/cremated in something other than dress clothes?
2. Does a house funeral appeal to you?
3. Would you like your pet to attend your funeral?
4. Are you more likely to spend money on a funeral meal than funeral merchandise?
5. Is burial in a traditional cemetery unappealing to you?
6. Would you rather have your funeral ceremony be more extemporaneous than structured … less preacher centered and more sharing centered?
7. Does having a photographer and/or videographer at a funeral appeal to you?
8. Do you want to incorporate aspects of a green funeral into your funeral?
9. Are you familiar with words like “Ecoffin” and “Ecopod“?
10. Have you considered that “DIY” can apply to funerals?
So, how taboo are you?
Disenfranchised Grief: The Unrecognized Mourners
Grief shared is grief diminished. When an individual dies, that death throws a web of relationships out of balance, causing the mourners to learn how to live in the new normal. That new normal is best found together in community.
When grief isn’t shared. When there is no community to share it. When it isn’t recognized by society, then grief becomes complicated.
There is grief that is produced by “death” (both literal and real) in our society that aren’t recognized. This kind of grief is a disenfranchised grief.
Here are a couple forms of grief that simply aren’t validated by society:
1. Grief from miscarriages. This is a silent grief. A grief that few people share; and when they do share, few people show compassion. And while the mother may have the greatest form of disenfranchised grief, the father can also be the silent sufferer as he is sometimes thrust in the supporting role, being unable to deal with his own emotions.
2. Death of a pet. Pets become part of the family; and when they die it’s almost like losing a family member, except no one in the community recognizes your loss. “It’s just a dog” is both true and false.
3. Grief from abortions. This topic has become so political that it has lost its human element. Abortions hurt. And the mothers who choose abortions will often grieve. Even if they don’t grieve at the time of the abortion, there is something lost … and that loss can hurt.
4. Grief of the supporter. When death occurs, roles quickly play out. There’s the main mourner(s) and there’s the supporting cast. That supporting cast — those who take care of the main mourner (the spouse of the deceased, the children of the deceased) — are often very close to the deceased themselves. But because they are the supporters, they simply aren’t allowed the time to grieve. They are the strong ones.
5. Grief from suicide. Suicide is such a difficult, tragic and complicated death that those who are left behind are often not sure how to grieve … or if they should even grieve at all. To complicate the issue, outside society can often look at suicide as such a taboo that they don’t recognize the grief of those surrounding the suicide.
6. Grief from the death of an Ex. Whether it’s the death of an ex-spouse, ex-lover or ex-boyfriend/girlfriend, if the deceased is the “ex” there’s an assumption that you aren’t allowed to grieve, because that relationship “has already been severed.” Just because someone is an “ex” doesn’t mean that you don’t have the permission to grieve.
7. Grief over a loss that isn’t a person.
Have you ever experienced disenfranchised grief?
Have you even been the one who has disenfranchised someone else’s grief?
Unmet Expectations and Grief
The problem is that you, the grieving person, don’t know what you need and your loved ones don’t know how to help. This disparity often leads to a lot of conflict and unmet expectations, on both sides.
Throughout our experiences with my cancer and our child-loss, we have experienced a lot of unmet expectations and conflict in our relationships with others. We have wrongly expected that people should only use the words that are helpful and encouraging, while providing the exact support that we need from them, even though we, ourselves, had no clue what we needed.
Part of the struggle is that when people are in the middle of processing grief, their emotions are all over the place. And sometimes, the very last discussion we ever want to have is to confront someone on how they have hurt us through their words, actions, or inactions. Imagine how much more difficult this is for the grieving person. The reality is that all too often, a grieving person will allow these hurts to build up because these issues become secondary to the pain that caused their grief to begin with. When this happens, it can take weeks, months, even years, to sort through the myriad of pain and hurt caused from the lack of support they felt while they were grieving!
My encouragement to anyone who is grieving is that when you are hurt by words, action, or inaction, to discuss your hurt as soon as you can with the person who hurt you. If your loved one doesn’t know how you are feeling, they will likely continue using similar words, actions, or inactions, which will likely lead to more conflict in your relationship, and cause a bigger divide.
To help you do this, here are 4 steps I use to communicate my hurt with others because of unmet expectations:
1. Discuss what the unknown expectation was to begin with. I didn’t realize how important it was for me to have people acknowledge the first year of our daughter’s Birth and Death Day, until only a few people contacted us on “Kylie’s Day” to let us know they were thinking about our family.
2. Get to the heart of why the expectation was unmet. I was hurt because it seemed like people either didn’t remember this day that was so tragic for our family, or didn’t care, neither of which felt very good.
3. Figure out if the expectation needs to be adjusted or if the unmet expectation was simply a learning experience. For me, in this circumstance, I needed to do both – adjust my expectation and learn from it. When we brought up our hurt with people we thought would have remembered to call or write to us on Kylie’s Day, some of them remembered, but were afraid to call for fear of bringing up a hurtful memory. They didn’t know if we wanted people to call, if we wanted to be left alone, if we wanted to talk, or if we wanted to be reminded. We were able to talk immediately about our hurt and move forward in our relationships with a better understanding of where the other person was coming from.
4. Adjust your actions in the future. This is where I took what I learned from this unmet expectation. I now do my best to make sure that when someone I know experiences the death of a child that I write down important dates for them on my calendar. Sometimes, there are separate birth and death days, sometimes what is important is the original due date of their child, the day they miscarried, the day they had to give back a child they were intending to adopt, or the day the family buried their child. Then, I do my best to connect with these family and friends on these days, because the truth is that families hurting over the loss of a child, DO want family and friends to remember and acknowledge these milestones because it helps them feel like their child is loved.
Question: When you were grieving, did you have expectations of other people that were unmet? If so, how did you deal with this hurt?
*****
Author of Good Grief!, Erica McNeal is a three-time cancer survivor, who has also experienced the loss of five children. With sixteen years of experience in Youth, Marriage, and Women’s Ministries, Erica is passionate about equipping people to love others well through difficult times. She uses her experiences to teach people what not to say, what to say, and how to help when people are hurting. You can follow her on twitter: @toddanderica, or visit her website: www.ericamcneal.com.
Morbid Obesity + Cremation = ?
I mentioned this phenomena on my 20/20 interview.
I mentioned the Germany cremation fire that recently occurred in a post a few months back.
And now this news headline out of Austria: “Dead obese woman had so much body fat she set the building on fire during her cremation”.
I’m not a fan of macabre, but this news article highlights more than the grotesque … it also highlights the growing difficulty the funeral industry is having as we adapt to the every growing obesity epidemic.
As you may realize, when a morbidly obese person is cremated, there’s a danger of what can only be called (in layman’s terms) a “grease fire.” In the past — especially in America — such fires have prompted crematoriums to purchase larger retorts (a retort is the “oven”) and to use different methods of cremating morbidly obese persons.
Despite such responses by crematoriums, morbid obesity is a growing problem in first-world counties. A recent survey shows that 63% of Americans are either overweight or obese. That percentage has stayed relatively steady over the past couple years.
Yet, the percentage of morbidly obese persons (those who are 100 pounds over a healthy weight) has doubled every five years.
And as more and more people become morbidly obese, crematoriums — despite their efforts to accommodate this epidemic — are still behind the curve, especially the crematoriums in smaller countries which seem to be slower to adapt.
And so we have this out of Austria:
Firemen in the southern city of Graz were covered in thick sticky soot as they tried to prevent the blaze from taking hold of the building.
The case has been widely reported in Austrian media, including in the ORF – the country’s equivalent of our BBC – and has ignited calls for a weight limit on bodies to protect against future fires.
Firemen whose clothing was left covered with a layer of greasy black soot were snapped as they tackled the difficult to extinguish blaze in special breathing gear to avoid breathing in the fumes.
In the end they had to bring the fire under control by sending a blast of water in through the vents used to clear the filter. Repair work took several days during which time the crematorium was out of action.
Firemen said that after reports of similar problems at other cemeteries not only in Austria but also in Switzerland, officials were now are considering a ban on larger bodies.
And now for the picture of those greased covered fireman:
So … what would you do if you were in the Austrian government?
Would you ban larger bodies?
Or …
Would you accommodate larger bodies by increasing the size of the retorts?
Hello, My Daughter Died
Since Elli slipped into eternity 730 days ago, my daily reflections on her life have not faded. I still fold her pink pajamas and her flowery dresses, now worn by her little sister, some still slightly discolored around the neck from Elli’s drool. I love to watch Anna run and play in those clothes. They never moved that way with Elli in them.
The photos on the walls in our house, some taken weeks or months before she died, are of an 8-year-old Elli. It is strange to think that when we are 80, we will still have an 8-year-old Elli framed on our wall. We will not know a 10 or 12 or 25-year-old Elli. Her face is frozen at eight. I’m sure that is something all grieving parents have to come to grips with, and I still am.
I still dream about Elli. Often. In all of my dreams about her, she is active, able-bodied and full of life — more so than she was while on earth. I am not one to spiritualize dreams, but I have awakened many mornings with a smile on my face, because the dreams remind me that she is in that spiritual reality now. Heaven is hers.
Oh sure, tears can creep back in, in some scattered private moments when I least expect it. A speeding ambulance. A uniformed paramedic in line at Subway. A potato chip bag or a gallon of milk with the expiration date OCT 19. Small unexpected artifacts bring memories of the day, the morning she died, rushing back in.
Until the day I die, I will be a father of four. In my frequent “join-ups” with new colleagues at work, I will tell them about Elli because there is no other way I know. I cannot, with a good conscience, say, “I have 3 children.” I always say, “I have 3 children now. We lost our fourth, who was our oldest, at age 8 in 2008.” That feels right to me. And it has also opened up countless opportunities to share my faith that would have never otherwise emerged in a boring, get-to-know-you business lunch.
God has never stopped being good and gracious and kind in these 730 days. He has done much to mature each of us through what is often described as a parent’s worst nightmare. Her physical death has had a ripple effect of new spiritual life, both in our immediate family and beyond. Therefore, I cannot bring myself to call it a nightmare as I look back on it. All I see is beautiful grace budding up out of the ashes.
As Joy and I were making the short drive from the funeral home to the gravesite to bury Elli’s body, I remember turning to her and saying, “Time is going to go by so fast.” I was sensing the brevity of life at that moment, and how short a time we all spend from cradle to grave. Elli’s was especially short, but ours is not much longer, no matter how long we live.
I still sense that brevity — a bittersweet reminder that life is short, but heaven awaits. And today I am one year closer to seeing my little peanut again in the presence of the One I most long to see — the One who orchestrated it all the way He did, for my good and His glory.
We miss you, pumpkin.
*****
Today’s guest post if from Scott Bennett. Scott is a full-time writer for a global consumer goods company, currently specializing in social media. His daily bus commute became the canvas for his blog—Moving Bus Meditations—where he opens up about real life as a Christian husband and father. Scott is married to his best friend, Joy, author of the long-running blog Joy in This Journey. He tweets at @ScottB3nn3tt.
