The growing use of virtual funerals during the COVID-19 pandemic is having a profound impact on grieving processes and the funeral industry, according to a new scoping review from the University of Toronto published online in OMEGA—Journal of Death and Dying.
The scoping review was conducted by a team of six Master of Social Work students at the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work Program at the University of Toronto as a capstone project in their gerontology program. The team examined 62 academic and grey literature articles that examined the use of virtual funeral practices during COVID-19.
“COVID-19 is greatly impacting the ways in which we grieve,” says lead author and recent graduate Andie MacNeil. “Rituals and other mourning practices are such an integral component of the dying process, and they are being interrupted at a time when we are experiencing tremendous loss of life due to COVID-19.”
The review highlighted some of the concerns that many individuals have with replacing in-person funeral practices with virtual alternatives.
“The large recent uptake of virtual funerals due to pandemic restrictions has shone light on many challenges of this practice,” says co-author Rennie Bimman, now a social worker in palliative care services at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario and Roger Neilson House hospice in Ottawa, Ontario. “There are concerns about the authenticity of using virtual platforms for mourning rituals that are meant to take place in person, and there are also significant barriers regarding access to technology.”
Although the review highlights the challenges associated with virtual funerals, it also draws attention to resilience and resourcefulness as people find new ways to grieve despite pandemic restrictions.
“It is imperative to highlight the ways in which individuals and families have adapted in order to continue traditional ways of grieving that are familiar and comforting,” says co-author Jacqueline Ho. “Practices such as virtual shiva and live-streamed funerals emphasize how people create meaningful experiences, despite the inability to be together in person.” Ho now works for the Mon Sheong Long Term Care Centre in Toronto, Ontario.
The review also emphasizes the important role of healthcare professionals and funeral service professionals in supporting the complicated grieving process during COVID-19.
“Our findings have demonstrated significant resilience, not only among individuals who have experienced loss, but also among mental health and funeral service professionals who are finding new ways to support those who are grieving,” says co-author Tali Barclay, a social worker and psychotherapist at the Breakwater Institute for Occupational Stress and Trauma.
As the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and virtual funeral practices continue to unfold, it is important for mental health professionals to be attuned to how the COVID-19 pandemic may impact long-term grief outcomes.
“Mental health professionals must consider the strengths of those who have lost loved ones during the pandemic and also be cognizant of how these disruptions and changes to grieving may have lasting impacts,” said co-author Blythe Findlay, a counsellor with the David Kelley Services program at Family Service Toronto.
Although virtual funerals have proliferated during COVID-19, the scoping review expects virtual services to continue beyond the pandemic.
“The shift to virtual mourning practices may be the way of the future,” says co-author Taylor Hocking, program manager for the Toronto HomeShare Program at the National Initiative for the Care of the Elderly. “The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how easy it can be to open this once very private event to family and friends around the world. The shift to virtual services can increase accessibility and provide opportunities to connect with distant loved ones, allowing many to grieve in ways not experienced before.”
When my father’s heart stopped, I had no choice but to keep moving. He had lived alone, and I understood that managing the logistics of his death—planning his funeral, settling his debts, divvying up his belongings—would be an enormous task. Those looming practical matters infuriated me; I hated that my world-shattering news had not, in fact, shattered the world. It kept spinning along, so I did too. I got the news on a Thursday; flew from my home in the United Kingdom to his home in Savannah, Georgia, on Saturday; and headed to his apartment with my sister on Monday to begin tying up the loose ends of his life. We didn’t have a key to his apartment, but my sister knew the building receptionist and was sure she’d let us in under the circumstances.
Instead, she turned us away. I began to panic: How would we get his suit for the funeral? How would we figure out if he had life insurance that we could use to pay for the funeral? When would we be allowed to empty his apartment, and would I still be in the country by then?
I had never been to my father’s apartment before—I moved overseas in the fall of 2019, two months before my dad moved to Savannah and six months before the coronavirus pandemic thwarted my plans to visit family—but it hurt to be treated like a stranger there. I wanted to rifle through the artifacts of his life and sink into the happier memories their presence conjured. To sit with whatever remnants of my dad lingered among his belongings. To reclaim what little I could of the visit that COVID had denied me. And I resented the receptionist standing guard at the door to ensure that I didn’t.
I felt certain that there was some misunderstanding, but the only error was mine. Any permission I’d had to rummage through my father’s things had died with him. Successfully navigating the process, referred to as probate, for getting that permission back can be tricky and usually requires the help of a lawyer. Even then, things don’t always go as expected—which is how I ended up collecting my father’s belongings from the sidewalk when he was evicted almost three months after he died.
My circumstances felt bizarre, but it’s not unusual for a jumble of complicated and unexpected logistical tasks to fall into a person’s lap after a loved one dies. Stephanie Handel, a grief and trauma psychotherapist at the Wendt Center for Loss and Healing, in Washington, D.C., told me about pamphlets that the center used to provide recently bereaved people, detailing the enormous list of things they’d need to do in the following weeks and months: contact Social Security, find burial assistance (if they were eligible for it), publish an obituary, order death certificates, contact employers and banks, shut down social-media accounts, cancel subscriptions, handle medical paperwork, hire an attorney, pay taxes. “It’s an intellectually and psychologically challenging task. And it’s a task that you have to undertake when you’re not at your best,” R. Benyamin Cirlin, the executive director of the Center for Loss and Renewal, in New York City, told me.
What I learned after losing my father was that the laws protecting a dead person’s property are surprisingly robust. If he’s made prior arrangements, the ownership of some of his things will transfer automatically. Banks, for example, allow clients to name a “payable on death” beneficiary on some accounts. In almost all cases, practically everything else—even clothing and silverware—must go through probate before anyone can legally claim it. The fact that my father had a will that named me as his executor did not allow my sister and me to sidestep this process. “The will is just a piece of paper until the probate court has verified it,” Gerry W. Beyer, an estate attorney and a professor at Texas Tech University’s School of Law, told me.
The probate process varies by state and even by county, but it generally involves tracking down an original will and getting any “heirs-at-law”—usually the spouse and children—to acknowledge it. If all goes smoothly, probating a will might take a couple of weeks. But any hiccups—say the original will can’t be found, or a pandemic overwhelms the probate-court system—can slow the process down. And if an eligible heir contests the will, probate can take years, Gregory Matalon, an estate attorney based in New York, told me. In the meantime, the deceased person’s things are in a kind of legal limbo and, except in rare circumstances, no one’s supposed to touch them.
Of course, in many cases, people touch them anyway. Family members take what they want of their relative’s heirlooms and donate the rest. Landlords may pressure a deceased tenant’s family to clear out his apartment. When it comes to items of little personal or monetary value, jumping the gun on probate is rarely a problem, the Ohio-based attorney Joan Burda told me, but prematurely making off with cherished or expensive items can lead to legal trouble down the road. For that reason, some landlords won’t allow anyone into a deceased tenant’s apartment without court approval. Our lawyer advised us to halt my father’s rent payments in the hopes that his building would relax this requirement. If my father was evicted, our lawyer reasoned, we could take his things when his apartment was being emptied.
There are some good reasons to protect a dead person’s belongings—you wouldn’t want the wrong person walking away with their prized possessions—but the rigidity of the process can create nightmares for loved ones with good intentions. One woman I spoke with had to take nine months off work to help her elderly father manage his late wife’s estate—he was the official executor but was unable to manage the task on his own.
These logistical headaches can shape the experience of grief in a variety of ways, Cirlin told me. Sometimes, the people saddled with the practical matters sideline their emotions for a while, which can seem strange to outside observers and can be unsettling for the bereaved themselves. People can feel like “Why am I not crying right now?” Handel explained. “But there are things that need to be done, which means that your ability to be present for your own feelings in some ways needs to be halted.” For others, these responsibilities can heighten grief. Filling out paperwork or donating clothing can serve as “another window into the fact that your whole reality has changed,” as Cirlin put it. Someone may feel they’ve found their footing in the aftermath of loss only for one of these innocuous tasks to pull them back into grief. Especially when the process doesn’t go smoothly—if a loved one’s paperwork is poorly organized, for example, or probate unveils unpleasant information about them—the ugliness of these chores can complicate the fond memories and rosy narratives we want to walk away with. “It’s hard to sit with resentment when you’re missing someone,” Cirlin said.
My father’s apartment building never relented, but with the help of our attorney, we did arrange a supervised visit to search for the will and pick up my dad’s suit. (An assistant property manager for the building declined to comment on specifics of the case, but noted, “Generally we are not allowed to provide individuals who are not on the lease with access to an apartment even if they are related to the resident. We try to work with family members of a deceased resident to allow them to obtain their loved one’s belongings. Our actions were taken with direction from, and in coordination with, the family’s attorney.”)
We couldn’t find his original will, but we printed a copy from his computer and then folded the lone suit hanging in his closet into a grocery bag, along with a pair of black sneakers. My sister slipped a plastic rosary from his bedside into the pocket of his jacket, and as she glanced over her shoulder to make sure the receptionist wasn’t watching, we both began to laugh, quietly and tearfully, at the absurdity of the circumstances. If his estate had anything of value, it wasn’t in that apartment. American property law stood between us and a crusty baseball cap sitting crumpled on the counter, a poem I’d written for him on his birthday that he’d printed and tacked to the wall in his office, a hundred worn books that his excessive underlining had rendered worthless to anyone but us.
On our way out, the receptionist gingerly peeked into our bag to ensure that we hadn’t taken anything we shouldn’t have and then escorted us to our car, where she reminded us that we’d be welcome back once we had the proper documentation.
He was evicted before we got it. Mercifully, the assistant property manager let us know the date and time in advance, so we hired movers to collect my father’s things and put them in storage. But when we arrived to get his belongings off the sidewalk, some of them had been damaged. An open bottle of Drano had soaked the contents of one bag. The praying hands of a statue of Our Lady of Fátima that my parents had gotten on their honeymoon had cracked off her arms. And there was nothing I could do about it, because the laws designed to ensure that my father’s things ended up safely in my possession had exhausted their reach.
“I think, very sadly, what you’re learning is that grief is very messy,” Handel said. It’s inextricably bound up with the tedium and absurdity of human existence. It may be triggered by death, but grief is a province of the living. And life goes on.
Animism and its veneration of the ‘dear departed’ have a human scale absent from the ‘great’ faiths. Drew Forrest makes the case for Africa’s religious traditions.
Egungun spirits perform during a Voodoo ceremony on January 11, 2012 in Ouidah, Benin. The Egungun are masqueraded dancers that represents the ancestral spirits of the Yoruba, a Nigerian ethnic group, and are believed to visit earth to possess and give guidance to the living. Ouidah is Benin’s Voodoo heartland, and thought to be the spiritual birthplace of Voodoo or Vodun as it known in Benin. Shrouded in mystery and often misunderstood, Voodoo was acknowledged as an official religion in Benin in 1989, and is increasing in popularity with around 17 percent of the population following it. A week of activity centred around the worship of Voodoo culminates on the 10th of January when people from across Benin as well as Togo and Nigeria decend on the town for the annual Voodoo festival.
By Drew Forrest
Those who stayed away when Geoffrey Oryema headlined at Womad in Benoni in 2000 – the poor turnout spoke of South Africa’s cultural isolation – missed more than a luminous musical performance.
At the height of his powers the “Orpheus of Acholiland” made a compelling statement about the continent’s religious beliefs.
At the age of 24 Oryema was smuggled out of Uganda in the boot of a car after his father, a cabinet minister, was denounced as a plotter and murdered by Idi Amin. Geoffrey did not return for 39 years.
Hence the persistent note of sorrow in his songs: since Ugandan independence, the Acholi minority he sprang from has been trapped in endless cycles of regional and ethnic violence.
“In this land of Anaka [his father’s ancestral village]… we had dreams of a clear, green land… /Dead sand, dead sand,” he lamented on his first album, Exile.
Central to Oryema’s performance on the Womad night stage were the songs of his magisterial fourth album, Spirit. Released in France the previous year, it revolved around the death of his father, Erinayo…
Late in the evening I walked down Down by the river Plunging my hands in the water I felt the spirit moving The spirit of my father protects me Guides me (“Spirits of my Father”)
… and of his brother, John, who died during Geoffrey’s exile:
I can hear your voice From a distant place Among the flowers and grass I can hear your steps beneath The stone…
(“Omera John”)
In “Save Me” we meet the same idea: to a repeated, hypnotic motif the song tells of a man who, in a dream or trance, falls under the paralysing thrall of a star. He calls out to the sun and the moon, who come to his aid.
This is animism, the belief, pervasive in Africa, that the cosmos teems with innumerable spirit beings that share human concerns and can be harnessed to the human project.
The result, wrote the originator of the term, anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor, was a vision of “universal vitality” whereby “sun and stars, trees and rivers, winds and clouds become personal animate creatures”.
“The whole psychic atmosphere of the African village is filled with belief in this magical power,” wrote the father of African theology, Kenya’s John Mbiti, who described Africans as “notoriously religious”.
It is a noble idea, simpler and more dignified than the esoteric contortions of Christian theology and better suited to an age when people are striving for a new relationship with the natural world.
An ‘Egungun’ spirit stands during a Voodoo ceremony on January 11, 2012 in Ouidah, Benin.
Animism has no doctrine of the soul’s immortality and no eschatological expectations, such as judgement in the afterlife or the evangelical fantasy of “the Rapture”.
It has no central authority, no set liturgy or creed and no interest in doctrinal compliance – the main source of religious conflict and persecution down the centuries.
It takes many forms specific to different ethnicities, meaning that unlike Christianity and Islam it has no global ambitions and does not try to stuff itself down the throat of unbelievers.
Despite the imposition of the coloniser’s beliefs, it has proved extremely durable. In many parts of Africa and the New World it has fused with Christianity in syncretic hybrids that enshrine the traditional practices of ancestral veneration, ritual purification by water, prophecy, exorcism, healing and the interpretation of dreams.
Victorians like Tylor thought of animist belief in Darwinian terms, as the earliest stage in the evolution of religion and a window on the “primitive mind”. This was a step forward, at least, from the notion of an unbridgeable gulf between the “civilised” and the “savage”.
Later scholars turned against such evolutionary thinking as deeply misconceived. They also rejected the “degradation theory”, according to which animist beliefs are degenerate borrowings from high cultures such as ancient Egypt.
“All contemporary cultures and religions [are] regarded as comparable,” writes anthropologist George Kerlin Park.
Most traditional African religions hold with a single Creator – but in a way that recalls the deism of the European Enlightenment. The widespread belief is that God created the universe, but is so remote that he does not engage with it and cannot be approached directly.
The Oromo of the Horn of Africa, for example, reject the Christian ideas of the God of love, God the Father and the Trinity as implying weakness. According to historian of religion Julian Baldick, their Waqa is the all-powerful demiurge of the great forces of nature, “the sky, the stars, the clouds, the god of thunder and lightning”.
Their proverbs convey the deity’s deafness to human cries and the need for resigned submission among his creatures: “A man does not stop praying and God does not change what he has decided”; “People are right to praise God when someone is killed by lightning”; “One does not understand the deeds of God or the laughter of dogs”.
In a widespread tradition, the Dinka of South Sudan hold that God withdrew from the world when the first woman lifted her pestle to pound millet and struck the vault of the sky.
Kenya’s Kikuyu believe the deity has:
No father, no mother, nor wife nor children He is alone He is neither a child nor an old man He is the same today as he was yesterday
For this reason, worship of the high god is rare in African tradition – it is the multitude of secondary divinities, who throng the sublunary sphere, that are the objects of veneration, propitiation and service. Foremost among them are the ancestors or, in classical mythology, the shades.
For many non-Africans, this is not a remote idea. Ancestor veneration is practised in Japanese Shinto, Hinduism and Chinese patriarchal religion. Roman Catholicism, the oldest form of Christianity with many pagan borrowings, incorporates remnants of it in All Soul’s Day and Halloween, when the spirits walk abroad, and in the cult of saints.
In Africa, Ghana’s Asante people, for example, acknowledge an inaccessible creator, while their ritual life revolves around the veneration of their matrilineal forebears, conceived of as guardians of the moral order and intercessors with the great spiritual powers.
The Yoruba religion tells of orishas – tutelary spirits subject to the unapproachable supreme being, Oludumane – believing that 401 of them “line the road to heaven”.
Many African theologians resent the term “ancestor worship” as a paternalistic misconception. What is offered to the dead through prayer, offerings and sacrifice is not the worship of deities, but an extension of the honour and service due to living parents. The purpose is to reassure them they are still remembered and loved.
Ancestral spirits are seen as the invisible but most important part of the kinship network. Dead relatives and community members preside over landmark events, including such rites of passage as the Xhosa imbeleko (ritual inclusion of the newborn in the clan), ukubuyisa (reincorporation of the dead), and ukwaluka (initiation into adulthood), and must be cared for and kept favourably disposed.
Former Kenyan leader Jomo Kenyatta distinguished different ancestral spirits in Kikuyu belief, including those of one’s parents, who continue to advise and reproach, and those linked to the wider clan.
Feelings towards the shades are not straightforward: they are objects of love and reverence, but also of fearful placation and numinous dread.
In Totem and Taboo, Sigmund Freud deals with this complexity, noting that people in traditional societies also “fear the presence and the return of the spirit of the dead person”, and offer propitiatory ceremonies not just out of love, but “to keep him off and banish him”.
A Kenyan scholar relates that once they have placated the spirits by offering them sacrifices, villagers expect them to move away.
But “the living dead” are mainly invoked to use their superior resources for earthly ends. One writer notes that ancestor veneration is about “supporting fertility and sustaining the community, by maintaining a harmonious relationship with divinities and channelling cosmic powers for good”.
One conduit is the igqirha (Xhosa) or mganga (Swahili) – the diviner/seer/healer with the gift of access to the spirit world. In traditional society this is enhanced by a strict initiation in which the novice is said to fall ill and dream of “beings in an endless westward march across the heavens, arrayed in feather headdresses and carrying sleeping mats”.
The dead live, but not – as in some creeds – for all eternity. University of London scholar Alice Werner points to the grandparents in Maurice Maeterlinck’s play The Blue Bird, who wake from the sleep of death only when someone remembers them.
The ancestors survive and retain their potency as long as they are held in the communal memory. As this rarely stretches back further than grandparents, they become increasingly attenuated and fade away after a few generations.
Once forgotten by the living, they are assimilated to the great impersonal forces of nature – storm clouds and the eclipse.
My wife’s ashes are buried in our garden, overhung by an elderberry tree that is strangely frequented by the same robin. At our rural plot, which we bought and built together, I feel her presence.
Habit and tricks of the imagination, no doubt. But one can understand the power and tenacity of animist belief – It has a human scale rooted in one’s kin, free of great frowning cathedrals or high priests in snow-white vestments pronouncing infallibly “from the throne”.
It has no Grand Inquisitor, Day of Wrath, purgatory or everlasting hellfire. It does not practise forced conversion, foster racial hatred, or call for the violent overthrow of other people’s gods.
With its vision of an intimate cosmos, it is more likely to engender respect for the natural world than a faith that tells men to subdue the earth and have “dominion over every living thing”.
Above all, animist beliefs, particularly in ancestral spirits, provide continuity of the ties that bind the living and the dead. For the bereft, like Geoffrey Oryema, this must help to staunch the dripping inner wounds of grief.
At the heart of a Zen funeral is ordination. In the ceremony, the deceased is ritually ordained in the same way that living monks and nuns are. This is done because total dedication to spiritual life, of the kind undertaken by monastics, is seen as the natural endpoint of life, even if that wasn’t the case when the person was alive. Ordination is also seen as increasing the probability of a favorable rebirth.
To begin the funeral ceremony, a vigil is maintained by relatives for a day and a night while Zen priests chant from scripture and an altar is prepared in the household. Attending mourners offer okoden, or “condolence money,” to the family of the deceased. The centerpiece of the altar is a portrait of the deceased, alongside candles and offerings of flowers and fruit.
The dead’s ordination is the same as a living nun’s or monk’s. The precept master asks the body three times if the deceased will observe and embody the five precepts. Where a living monk or nun would offer their vow, the corpse’s silence is interpreted as acceptance.
The deceased is then given a Buddhist name and presented with a lineage chart connecting them with enlightened masters stretching all the way back to the Buddha himself. The family of the newly ordained is provided with their own tablet with the deceased’s Buddhist name on it, and the tablets are either kept in the local temple or displayed in the family’s household altar afterward.
Some Zen funerals also feature a shout which is meant to sever the deceased’s bond to the earthly plane. Those who have attended such ceremonies say this also provides a moment of catharsis for the mourners. The funeral concludes with the cremation of the deceased’s body.
What, then, are Zen funerals like for those who are already ordained? The funeral of a monk or nun can take different forms, both long (involving a procession including the deceased’s robes and lineage papers) or very short. The funeral for the founder of the Soto Zen, Dogen, is famously said to have consisted of just a short moment of chanting by his most senior disciple.
Sharing Merit with the Dead
White cloth, a symbol of virtue, marks a Theravadan funeral in the Sri Lankan tradition. Fringed palm fronds and white banners, often with a picture of the deceased, mark the way to the home of the deceased. A white banner declares in large writing: “All conditioned things have the nature of decay.” In the house, mourners in white are greeted by relatives of the dead, the men dressed in sarongs of white cloth and white shirts, the women in white saris. Having been washed by family members, the body of the dead is also attired in white.
The wake, during which the deceased’s family greets and feeds the guests, lasts for several days, which allows those traveling to reach the funeral house. Guests sometimes bring gifts of food for the family.
The funeral ceremony truly begins with the arrival of the monks. They enter the front room of the funeral house, where their feet are washed by a male member of the household. The monastics are guided to chairs draped in white cloth and the deceased’s family kneels before them in respect.
Then the coffin is brought to the front room, or remains in a tent in the front yard if there isn’t room in the house, and a salutation chant to the Buddha is offered, followed by the chants of the three refuges and the five precepts. Parcels of white cloth are presented to the monks, and the mourners chant, “We offer the ‘cloth of the dead’ to the community of monks.” This gift of cloth has a practical origin. Monks in Sri Lanka, as elsewhere in Theravadan societies, rely on the community to feed and clothe them. Payment for presiding over the ceremony comes in the form of white cloth.
In this merit-sharing culture, the Theravadan funeral also features a bowl filled with water by the deceased’s family until it overflows, representing giving merit to the dead so their rebirth will be a promising one. As the water is being poured, the monks chant: “Just as rivers full of water fill the ocean full / Even so does what is given here benefit the dead.”
After a sermon based on Pali scripture is delivered by the senior monk, the mourners chant “Sadhu!” three times, an expression of gratitude connected to the attainment of arahatship. Speeches by family and neighbors follow and then the coffin is conveyed to the burial ground or crematorium under a white umbrella.
Two important dates continue the remembrance ceremonies after the day of the funeral: Mataka-bana, when a monk returns a week later to deliver a sermon to the family and other mourners, and Thun masa-dana, an alms-giving three months after the funeral to support the monastics who officiate at funerals and other ceremonies in the community.
Guiding the Dead Through the Bardo
A Tibetan thangka painting of the pure land of the primordial buddha Amitabha, known as Amida in Japanese.
The Tibetan approach to death and dying is guided by the teachings of the Bardo Thodol, popularly known in the West as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. This text describes what happens to us in the bardo, an intermediate period or gap between death and rebirth. During this time, it is possible to advise and help the deceased so they can achieve enlightenment or at least a favorable rebirth.
In Tibetan Buddhism, there are a number of meditations and rituals that can be performed after someone dies or during their dying process. These include reading them the Book of the Dead over a forty-nine-day period to guide them through the various stages of the bardo journey, and powa practice, in which an accomplished master can help the dying person transfer their consciousness directly into an enlightened state.
The sukhavati ceremony is traditionally performed shortly after a person’s death. In this ceremony, their loved ones, friends, and fellow practitioners, guided by a Buddhist teacher, pray they will be reborn in Sukhavati, the Western Paradise or Land of Ultimate Bliss. This is the enlightened pure land of the primordial buddha Amitabha in which they are free of all karma, defilements, and suffering.
In this ceremony, the congregation generates loving-kindness and compassion toward the deceased, who may be suffering confusion and fear in the bardo. They urge the deceased to let completely go of their previous identity and karma and ask the buddhas and bodhisattvas to guide them to the pure land. Here is a prayer that is typically recited in Sukhavati ceremonies in the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism:
Wonderful Buddha of Limitless Light [Amitabha], to his right the Lord of Great Compassion and to his left the Bodhisattva of Great Power, surrounded by an infinite retinue of buddhas and bodhisattvas.
The joy and happiness is limitless and wonderful in this pure land called Dewachen [Sukhavati].
As soon as this life has passed away, without the diversion of other births,
May [name of the deceased] be born there and thus behold the face of Amitabha.
All buddhas and bodhisattvas of the ten directions, please grant your blessing that the wish expressed in this prayer be accomplished without hindrance.
In some versions of this ceremony, a photograph of the deceased is burned at the climax of the ritual so the deceased does not hold on to their former identity. As the photograph becomes ash, the prayers conclude and in the silence, the teacher intones the single syllable HUM, the mantra of great compassion. All pray their loved one will take the excellent opportunity of the bardo state to enter Sukhavati, the paradise that is freedom from karma and suffering.
Taking Refuge in Amida Buddha
The funeral rituals of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism, as practiced in the Buddhist Churches of America, remind practitioners that through taking refuge in Amida Buddha, the central figure in Pure Land Buddhism, one can transcend time and space, and join together in the pure land as buddhas before returning to samsara to help others. In this way, death is understood to be a beginning rather than an end, and funeral rites offer comfort, solemnity, and the opportunity to express gratitude to the surviving family and friends.
After a person’s death, the minister is contacted by the family and the Makuragyo (literally “pillow service,” or bedside service) is performed. The home altar is decorated with white cloth and flowers, as is the body. The minister will chant one of the gathas from the Larger Sutra of Immeasurable Life, such as Juseige or Sanbutsuge.
Often, relatives live too far away for the body to remain long enough for them to travel to the funeral, so a cremation is done and the funeral takes place with a photo and urn. The funeral service itself begins with the ringing of the calling bell, reminding listeners of the impermanence of all things, an important remembrance in times of death.
Next, the presentation of the Buddhist name occurs. If the dying person has not already received a Buddhist name, the chanting of Kisamboge, by Shan-tao, helps to confirm the person; for those who have already received their name, the chanting is considered a rededication.
Then there is a chanting of Shoshinge, by Shinran, during which guests come up to burn incense, symbolic of the purification of one’s heart and mind to receive the truths of the Buddha. After this, there is an opportunity for eulogies by friends and family, followed by a dharma teaching and the recitation of Rennyo’s “White Ashes” from the minister, which concludes with the line: “By so understanding the meaning of death, we shall come to fully appreciate the meaning of this life, which is unrepeatable and thus to be treasured above all else.”
Traditionally, the service ends with some words of acknowledgment and a meal afterward, held at the temple or a nearby restaurant.
Taoists believe in concentrating more on health and longevity than on the afterlife. In Singapore, Taoist funeral services differ according to the language group of the dearly departed. The goal particularly in early Taoism was to achieve eternity, with the practice and cultivation of several tasks classified as Neidan and Waidan. Moreover, the Chinese traditionally avoid talking about death there is very little written about Taoist Funerals. Besides all, Taoist funerals becoming more simplified with each passing generation.
Taoism, for most of Chinese history, co-existed with Buddhism and Confucianism. There is therefore some influence from Buddhism in the Taoist practice of some Singaporean families. For the funeral, both Monks and Taoist Priest performing rites for the deceased during a Taoist Funeral wake.
Taoist Funeral Ceremonies
Preparation of the Body
The first thing that happens for any death in a Taoist family, is the preparation of the body of the departed soul. Family members gathered and clean the body with a wet towel dusted with talcum powder. Afterward, they dress the deceased in their nicest clothing, usually something white, black, brown, or blue. But never use red because it could cause the deceased’s spirit to become a ghost.
After that, a yellow cloth is used to covers the face and a blue cloth covers their body before putting them in the casket. Mirrors must have coverings so no one sees the deceased’s image, as this could cause another death.
A white cloth is then placed over the doorway of the house, and a gong is placed to the left of the door for women and the right for men. A sacred ceremony also takes place before the funeral. Using a sacred lamp signifies the light of wisdom, while two candles express sunlight and moonlight. There’s also tea, rice, and water. Finally, red, yellow, green, white, and black fruit means the five elements: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water. They arrange the fruit on plates and fragrance burns in the middle.
Taoist Funeral Service
As far as the Funeral Services Singapore is concerned, At a Taoist funeral, smells of perfume and flowers and photos of the deceased surround the area. During the service, a priest chants manuscripts while others play drums, symbols, and woodwind instruments. Then, the priest circles a fire where nine tiles rest to represent the levels of the underworld. Then the priest waves a sword to ward off evil spirits and breaks the tiles to free the deceased from the underworld.
Funeral Feast
After the burial or cremation, there’s a funeral feast with a seat left for the deceased’s spirit. Since the number eight rhymes with the Chinese word meaning good fortune, they serve eight dishes. They eat sugar water dessert first, which is a sweet soup, so it’s a sweet and happy celebration. The other dishes usually contain fish and other meat, but never beef or horsemeat.
Ward off Evil Spirits
To ward off evil spirits, everyone gets a yellow piece of paper to the funeral. The paper has their name, address, and birthday on it. Then after the funeral, they burn it in their doorway and cross over it while it burns. It says that this ritual is done to stops any spirits from chasing them home and bringing bad luck.
Also, during the funeral, everyone needs to be cautious of evil spirits. Whenever the casket is open or people move the body, everyone should turn away or may leave.
A Funeral Gift
Funeral invitees give the deceased’s family a white envelope with money to help with cremation payments. However, the money amount should be odd because an even amount means immense happiness. Along with a money envelope, they also give a funeral gift. However, it should only be one gift because two gifts suggest more than one death. The deceased’s family also gives guests a traditional funeral envelope with a one-dollar coin and fruit candy.
Funeral Director in a Taoist Funeral Practice
In Taoist practice, there is some form of influence of Buddhism and funeral services are aware of the Taoist practices regarding funerals. There is essentially a funeral director who plays a key role in the funeral service of the Taoists. The Funeral director not only offers supervision services but also has expertise in the practice of Singapore Taoist funeral services as well. Besides that, the director offers family members advice and guidance to ensure the smooth process of the funeral.
Other than just providing the arrangements, a funeral director, experienced in Taoist Funeral practices and customs will be able to provide advice and guidance to the family to ensure their loved ones are properly honored with a meaningful and dignified funeral.
Post-Funeral
Taoist funeral ceremonies last for 3 days, 5 days, or 7 days commonly. After the burial, the ritual states that the family must have a meal for the guests who visited the funeral. Some families prefer to restrict the number of courses in this meal to the lucky number seven. Afterward, guests are offered a red packet filled with money, and everyone must burn the clothes they wore to the funeral. The funeral does not mark the end of the rituals, as families are expected to mourn for 49 days with prayers occurring every seven days.
Taoist Beliefs
In addition to prescribed rituals, Taoism also teaches that several actions are taboo during burial ceremonies and many other activities may have negative consequences. It is prohibited to dress the body in red clothing, as some Taoists believe it will cause the spirit to come back as a ghost. Similarly, Children and grandchildren of the deceased must not cut their hair for 49 days after the funeral. Some believe that people who see the deceased’s coffin reflected in a mirror will soon have a death in their family, and so all mirrors are removed from the house while the coffin is inside.
Summoning of Soul
This is a method done by calling out the deceased’s name, in the hopes of the return of the soul, so that the loved one might be resurrected.
Ritual Cleansing
An act of acquiring water from Earth goddess that is usually done by the elder son, to signify the ‘letting go of earthly attachments, and to clean the deceased’s spirit for the next world to come.
Burning of Paper beside Coffin
This serves as an entry pass to go smoothly to the otherworld, where the paper is to be burnt piece by piece.
Chanting
One of the main rituals includes chanting to break hell, reciting most ofutras, and asking for repentance of sins. The priests will sing songs and to bridge them the deceased to crossover from earth to heaven.
Some other Rituals in Taoism
Encoffin Service
This ritual during funeral service is done by placing items inside the casket such as the incense and joss paper to be used by the deceased on his/her journey to the other world.
Placing of Pearl
The meaning of this activity signifies that the deceased have a rebirth with a better life. In the past, only the Kings or Royals family members was entitled to such practice but now they have opened it to everyone.
Offering of Food
This belief during funeral service implies that whether spirit or human, both are equal beings. For Buddhist funeral service, the food to be offered should be vegetarian-based. For good karma, a part of the grieving process will be to avoid killing innocent animals, nor digesting meat or seafood dishes. After that, red, yellow, green, white, and black fruit symbolize the five elements: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water. They arrange the fruit on plates and incense burns in the middle.
Wake and Vigil
The children and offspring are to stay awake, pray and hope that the deceased will come back to life.
Red String
For guests, a promising practice during funeral service, wait for it to come off naturally, but must remove it before entering a home.
49 Days Ritual
As per the teachings of Earth Store Bodhisattva, to create merits, generous actions will be done and dedicated to the deceased in the next 49 days, to rescue them from their sufferings.
100th Day Ritual
After a hundred days, the comprehensive departure from this world is ended. This is also the dateline for the completion of the tomb construction. Complete prayers are offered to the divinity overseeing the tomb.
1st/3rd Anniversary
The 1st year consists of 12 months, while the 3rd year is the 24th month of the date of death. Post-funeral ceremonies are observed to symbolize the unity of the deceased with the ancestors.
Conclusion
Taoists believe in focusing more on health and longevity than on the afterlife. The goal especially in early Taoism was to achieve immortality, with the practice and cultivation of various tasks categorized as Neidan and Waidan. There are many different denominations within Taoism, rites, and rituals for the deceased can differ. Taoist Funerals typically last 3, 5, or 7 days.
Television shows and movies show a Will being read at a funeral, as if the Will is automatically valid and assets can be distributed immediately. Unfortunately, the probate process is more complex and time intensive. This blog post will explain the five important things you need to know about probating a Will in probate court.
A Will Must Be Approved by the Probate Court
There is a process governed by a statute (the Massachusetts Uniform Probate Code) directing how to file a Will with the probate court after your loved one has died. The probate court must approve the Will before a nominated personal representative can distribute any assets from an estate to any beneficiary.
The Court Process Can Be Long
One of the goals of the Massachusetts Uniform Probate Court was to streamline the allowance of a Will. Now, there are three different ways to probate a Will, in order of longest to shortest length of time: formal proceedings, informal proceedings, or voluntary administration.
For instance, the formal process involves the court issuing a Citation, which includes a return day approximately four to six weeks later. During that time, notice is given to interested parties, who could file an objection to the allowance of the Will, thereby slowing down the probate process. On the other hand, the informal process requires notice to the interested parties at least seven days before filing the petition with the court, with the requirement to publish in a newspaper within 30 days after the court has allowed the Will. Also, for small estates consisting entirely of personal property (no real estate) valued at less than $25,000 (excluding the value of a car), there is the quickest option available: the voluntary administration process. There are strategic reasons why you might decide on one process over another, such as the powers available to the appointed fiduciary and the dynamics of the family, that will be discussed in another post.
The Court Process Allows Disgruntled Parties to Object
One of the most important things about the court process is to ensure that the decedent’s last Will and testament is allowed for probate, such that the decedent’s intentions are carried out. This can result, however, in competing Wills being filed with the court. Prior blogs posts have explained the grounds and process to object to a Will and to probate a different Will.
The Probate Process Involves Fees
There are fees associated with filing most court forms, such as any petition to allow a Will; appoint a Special Personal Representative, Personal Representative, or Successor Personal Representative; issue a Citation; and file estate accounts. The Uniform Fee Schedule is available here. In addition, the appointed Special Personal Representative or Personal Representative is entitled to receive reasonable fees for their services to the estate.
The Court Process Is Public
The probate file is publicly available, both in hard copy at the courthouse and online through masscourts.org. The only documents that are not scanned into the online docket are the death certificate and the Citation. Given the sensitive nature of the death certificate, it makes good sense to not be publicly available. If you call the court clerk, they will inform you over the phone of the “return date” listed on the Citation. Some clients are concerned about the public nature of the assets belonging to the estate that are revealed on an inventory and account. The best solution is to plan ahead to avoid probate by meeting with a skilled estate planning attorney to discuss an estate plan that fits for your assets and family.
We should not assume that people who are near death do not know what we are saying
A very significant change that happened in the last century or so has been the ability of science professionals to see what happens when people are thinking, especially under traumatic conditions.
It was not a good moment for materialist theories. Here is one finding (there are many others): Death is a process, usually, not simply an event.
Consciousness can persists after clinical death. A more accurate way of putting things might be that the brain is able to host consciousness for a short period after clinical death. Some notes on recent findings:
Recent studies have shown that animals experience a surge in brain activity in the minutes after death. And people in the first phase of death may still experience some form of consciousness, [Sam] Parnia said. Substantial anecdotal evidence reveals that people whose hearts stopped and then restarted were able to describe accurate, verified accounts of what was going on around them, he added.
“They’ll describe watching doctors and nurses working; they’ll describe having awareness of full conversations, of visual things that were going on, that would otherwise not be known to them,” he explained. According to Parnia, these recollections were then verified by medical and nursing staff who were present at the time and were stunned to hear that their patients, who were technically dead, could remember all those details.
Death is probably, in most cases, a process rather than a single event:
Time of death is considered when a person has gone into cardiac arrest. This is the cessation of the electrical impulse that drive the heartbeat. As a result, the heart locks up. The moment the heart stops is considered time of death. But does death overtake our mind immediately afterward or does it slowly creep in?
Some scientists have studied near death experiences (NDEs) to try to gain insights into how death overcomes the brain. What they’ve found is remarkable, a surge of electricity enters the brain moments before brain death. One 2013 study out of the University of Michigan, which examined electrical signals inside the heads of rats, found they entered a hyper-alert state just before death.
Despite claims, current science does not do a very good job of explaining human experience just before death:
Researchers have also explained near-death experiences via cerebral anoxia, a lack of oxygen to the brain. One researcher found air pilots who experienced unconsciousness during rapid acceleration described near-death experience-like features, such as tunnel vision. Lack of oxygen may also trigger temporal lobe seizures which causes hallucinations. These may be similar to a near-death experience.
But the most widespread explanation for near-death experiences is the dying brain hypothesis. This theory proposes that near-death experiences are hallucinations caused by activity in the brain as cells begin to die. As these occur during times of crisis, this would explain the stories survivors recount. The problem with this theory, though plausible, is that it fails to explain the full range of features that may occur during near-death experiences, such as why people have out-of-body experiences.
Such explanations are a classic case of adapting a materialist hypothesis to fit whatever has happened. They don’t explain, for example, terminal lucidity, where many people suddenly gain clarity about life.
Research medic Sam Parnia found, for example, that, of 2000 patients with cardiac arrest,
Some died during the process. But of those who survived, up to 40 percent had a perception of having some form of awareness during the time when they were in a state of cardiac arrest. Yet they weren’t able to specify more details.
So we should not assume that people who are on the way out cannot understand us. Maybe they can — and would like to hear that they are still loved and will be missed.
