What Happens at a Christian Burial?

If you aren’t someone who goes to church regularly, then you might be intimidated by the idea of going to a Christian burial. However, you shouldn’t be worried. While Christian burials certainly have their rituals and traditions, most burials are accessible to secular individuals.

Every religion has its versions of a burial service. For example, a burial at a Catholic church is going to focus less on the deceased person and more on religious readings. This means that there won’t be any eulogies by friends or family.

However, you shouldn’t let that put you off Christian burials entirely.

Many Christian funerals, such as Protestant ones, are more low-key and modest. They tend to focus more on the person who is being mourned.

So if you are interested in learning about Christian burials, then keep on reading and we will take you through everything you will want to know.

What Happens During a ChristianBurial Service

A Christian burial will usually take place about one week after the death takes place. A lot of Christian families will choose to hold a wake before the actual funeral.

Christian burials all have some religious aspects, regardless of the denomination that the person followed. These rituals tend to be laid out in programs that are handed out at the beginning of the service.

If you do not attend church regularly and you are not sure what you should be doing, then just follow along with what everyone else does.

The Wake Before the Service

Wakes tend to be held a few days ahead of a funeral. However, there are some instances where they take place on the same day.

In the case of wakes that take place on the same day, the wake will usually occur in the same church as the funeral.

A lot of wakes tend to happen at a funeral home.
Christian beliefs about burial traditions and death allow for embalming. So the casket might be open at a wake. This will depend on a lot of different factors, including the wishes of the deceased and the person’s family.

If you have never been to an open viewing before, then you might be a little unsettled by the experience. It can be hard to see the person you knew and is no longer alive.

You can still attend the wake even if you do not want to go up to the casket to say goodbye or to get a better look. Instead, you can simply focus on interacting with fellow mourners in the spirit of the event.

Typical Service Program

Mourners will take seats at the burial site or in the church. After everyone has settled down, a pallbearer will bring the coffin to the gravesite.

If the deceased was cremated, then someone will come with an urn of ashes.

After this happens, a lot of Christian services will include a hymn in their program. Someone who was closed to the deceased will then read a message of hope.

This could be a piece of secular text or a passage from the bible. Whatever the text is, it is meant to honor the deceased and give hope to the people who survived them. The minister might also read a message of hope.

After, there will be a section for remembering and reflecting. The church might choose to play music.

Families will sometimes ask people to lay a flower or other item on the casket.

These kinds of burial rituals are meant to create a sense of connection to the deceased. After this reflection, another hymn is going to play to encourage everyone to go back to their seats.

The ceremony will end with everyone saying goodbye. The minister might also ask you to bow your heads while another piece of music plays. This tends to be the most emotional segment of the event.

Christian Burials and Post-Funeral Practices

Every religion has traditions around burials and cremations. Christian denominations aren’t any different. Christian beliefs about death will inform the burial rituals and other practices.

Cremation and Burial Customs

In a Christian burial, the body of the deceased person is usually interred in a ground that’s consecrated. Cremation used to be forbidden to Christians because it was believed that it interfered with resurrection.

However, those rules have relaxed over time. For Catholic people, cremated remains are still buried. Other Christian denominations will allow for ashes not to be interred. However, some have rules against scattering ashes.

However, if you’re wondering what does the bible say about cremation, you might be surprised to learn that it doesn’t say a whole lot.

Attire

The proper funeral attire in the United States is all black. You should dress formally with men wearing dark suits and women wearing conservative dresses. Funerals in other cultures may dress differently.

The Importance of Knowing What Happens at a Christian Burial

Hopefully, after reading the above article, you now have a better understanding of what happens at a Christian burial. As we can see, while a lot might take place at a Christian burial, you really only have to participate as much as you feel comfortable with.

In the end, it is simply about respecting the traditions and mourning the deceased. If you do that, then you shouldn’t have any issues.

Are you looking for other helpful and interesting articles? If so, then check out the rest of our site today for more!

Misconceptions about dead bodies hold back Maine’s sustainable death practices

Jim Fernald, funeral director at Brookings-Smith, shows two different green funeral caskets. Wooden dowels are used rather than nails or screws in green caskets.

by Sam Schipani

Environmentally friendly treatment of a body after it dies is garnering more interest in Maine these days. There are some passionate advocates for new, less environmentally harmful practices, but there are political, cultural and logistical challenges that could stand in the way of widespread change in the funeral industry.

Across the country, public health policies are wary about practices such as green burials and liquid cremation.

Caitlyn Hauke of New Hampshire is the vice president and board member of the Green Burial Council, a California-based advocacy group for more sustainable death practices. She said that many of the policies that make green burials and other sustainable methods of final disposition more difficult are the result of an outdated or misinformed understanding of death.

“I serve on the board of cemetery trustees for [Lebanon, New Hampshire], and some of the hang ups in trying to change municipal bylaws to allow green burial are these misconceptions that dead bodies spread disease, there’s going to be contamination of the ground and water and things that aren’t true,” Hauke said. “It’s hard to convince people that are set in their ways [that these things aren’t true].”

As an added challenge, Maine crematoriums are required to be located in a cemetery, according to Jim Fernald, spokesperson for the Maine Funeral Directors Association and funeral director of Brookings-Smith in Bangor. Crematoriums are also subject to restrictions in terms of size and licensing.

Some want to see that change though, allowing for more flexibility in how a body is handled after death. There is currently a bill before the Maine state legislature to consider reforming the liquid cremation rules to allow them to happen off-site of a cemetery.

Policy is one thing, but there is also the more challenging issue of shifting culture — specifically how people think — to look at death differently.

“Americans tend to avoid talking about death, you know,” said Chuck Lakin, a volunteer with the Funeral Consumers Alliance of Maine. “When they do, they get a lot of misinformation or they’ve heard things and they keep passing them around.”

Lakin runs a website called Last Things that provides information about what is and isn’t legal and safe when it comes to funeral options in Maine.

Still, it can be difficult to spread the word when death is such a taboo topic. Katie Riposta is the funeral director at Direct Cremation of Maine in Belfast, which conducts liquid cremations. She sees continued challenges with spreading the word about the various options available for final disposition.

“It’s hard to advertise because you have to find a professional and tacit way of letting people know there’s new information without seeming sales-y,” Riposta said. “We think the process is a very nice process for end of life final disposition, but some people don’t like to talk about that in advance. I would say the consumer knowledge in and around Maine is limited, [but] people are certainly becoming more educated.”

Even if consumers are aware of the sustainable options, these methods for final disposition require a significant amount of advance planning and advocating for your specific after-death wishes — much more so than a conventional funeral. If there is a sudden death and people don’t have the chance to plan a sustainable burial, their families will likely default to a more conventional, less sustainable option.

“When someone dies suddenly, people just stop thinking. They really need the help of professionals to guide them through,” Fernald said. “Making the green the default would be a much larger culture shift.”

Green death options in Maine are still very limited. Currently, there are only two designated green cemeteries in the state of Maine: Rainbow’s End Natural Cemetery in Orrington and Cedar Brook Burial Ground in Limington. Other cemeteries have designated areas for green burials.

Meanwhile, Direct Cremation of Maine is the only provider of liquid cremation for human remains, though policy shifts might open the door for more to open in the future.

“Green cremation is definitely an interesting process,” Riposta said. “We’ll see in the future how crematories are regulated as a whole and see where it goes from there.”

Funeral industry professionals are divided as to whether the green funeral movement will continue to grow in Maine. Fernald thinks that it will remain niche.

“Death and ritual is so individual based on previous death experiences and how you’re raised,” Fernald said. “When people are in an emotional part of their life, they go to things that are natural to them. If they were always raised to live off the land and all that, I would think [green burial] would be what they gravitate to during a time of loss.”

Awareness may be the most challenging element of the movement towards more sustainable funeral practices, but Hauke said that “the more people hear about it, the more interested they become.”

“The movement is growing thanks in part to the increased attention to the death positive movement that this is sort of opening doors to conversations about death that Americans have shied away from,” Hauke said.

Complete Article HERE!

In Ghana, Funerals Are A Party.

But My Dad’s Couldn’t Hold My Grief.

Leonie Owiredu lost her father when she was young. His funeral was a loud celebration, full of family and friends, in keeping with Ghanaian custom. But in all that noise, she didn’t have the space she needed to grieve him.

By

When I was four years old, I turned up to school in uniform on a day I wasn’t supposed to. I went to the school’s front desk and asked to call my dad to have him bring me my favorite outfit, a can of 7UP, and some sausage rolls. It was a brazen request that came from an assurance that my dad would always be there for me. When I was a bit older, and he fell ill, I believed that he would survive. My dad wasn’t supposed to die. He was supposed to walk up to the front of the congregation at our church to give his testimony of his survival. Everyone would stand up and join in praising God for such a miracle. When my dad died, it didn’t feel real. At 14, I had no direct encounter with death, nor did I know the weight it held in my culture. As the 10-year anniversary arrives this year, I’m still trying to figure it out.

From custom caskets to pallbearers, Ghana is a nation that takes pride in honoring the dead.

I’d just come home from boarding school for half term, when word spread that my father had passed. I watched as people flooded my door, eager to relieve their grief. My living room became crowded with distant relatives spilling over into the kitchen, claiming offense when I said I didn’t recognize them. This being my first funeral, and as a 14-year-old, I learned as I went on that funerals are the events that bring Ghanaians together. From custom caskets to pallbearers, we’re a nation that takes pride in honoring the dead.

Our mourning involves wailing, dancing to highlife and drum beats that help shake off grief, eating pots of waakye and jollof,drinking and wearing red and black clothing from Friday to Saturday, and then white on Sunday, to celebrate the person who once was. I witnessed the bustle the adults created for the first time over the designated days of mourning. My siblings, cousins, and I were pushed out of the living room and instead spent this time trying to mirror a celebration of our own upstairs by watching Beyoncé’s Live at Roseland; hearing her sing “I Miss You” while wiping away her tears gave voice to the feelings I couldn’t quite place. That performance especially carried me through my grief.

A lot of my participation in the funeral was decided for me, removing my agency to navigate through grief in a way I could understand. Perhaps the way adults grieve required a certain physicality that I wasn’t able to possess as a child. But my father always involved my siblings and me, affirming our voices through holding family meetings and considering our suggestions. So to be excluded from his funeral was unfamiliar.

The way adults grieve required a certain physicality that I wasn’t able to possess as a child.

There was an unspoken understanding that I was to serve the adults around me and be silent as they mourned, as if their grief trumped my own. These rules arrived via orders of “Don’t cry, wear this, and be strong for your mother.” These customs were foreign to me—still are foreign. I recently spoke to my 50-year-old aunt who lost her father at 12. I asked her why the perspectives of children aren’t considered. She said, “There was so much going on, the plan was just to get you through the events. They tell you where to go, what to say, and then after, they may explain.” I also asked my eldest cousin why after-care for children of the bereaved isn’t considered. Her response was, “Obi nhwɛ obi ba”: Nobody should look after anybody’s child. It was incredibly isolating to be surrounded by so many people, searching for permission to express my grief but constantly being denied. When an adult’s grief is valued higher than the child’s, all the grief is repressed and becomes cyclical—the child’s right to grieve continually placed to the side. After the immediate shock of death passes, the funeral rites are complete, and the doorbell stops ringing, everyone has decided that mourning is over. These rituals demarcated it as so. But for me, it had barely begun.

It was isolating to be surrounded by so many people, searching for permission to express my grief.

Children are deeply emotional creatures and are capable of far more depth and clarity than those around me would give them credit for. The adults wanted to fill their grief with celebrations. Their denial of my emotions at that time made me feel that they were something to hide; I could experience it only in short, and it had to be in private so as to not be an inconvenience to others. A happier child is easier than one who is sad. In attempts to deal with that internally, in my first year of grief, I denied myself of food. I stopped attending meals and began exercising more under the guise of pursing modeling, when my actions were in actuality an attempt to control feelings within my body. It was when other students at my boarding school noticed and kept inviting me to meals that one day I accepted, prompting a different dynamic with food as I grappled with the waves of grief.

A happier child is easier than one who is sad.

I lost the ability to experience the still silence that grief requires; I had to fill it with doing. What good was my hurt if I couldn’t help everyone process theirs? My grief was best in service, and I became really good at performing. I turned into a guru of sorts as friends and family piled in for support and advice. I knew exactly what to say and how to say it, because I longed for those things to be said to me.

As the years passed, I made three attempts at seeking counsel. It was my fourth and most recent therapist who helped me realize that I could navigate grief if I looked at what the experience was like for me. Now as a 20-something, I feel safe enough to move through grief and recognize those emotions with no shame. The weight of grief can be numbing at times, and then light; by giving myself permission to feel, it enables me to choose who to grieve with and how.

I lost the ability to experience the still silence that grief requires

In her poem “Taking Care,” Callista Buchen writes, “I sit with my grief. I mother it. I hold its small, hot hand. I don’t say, shhh. I don’t say, it is okay. I wait until it is done having feelings. Then we stand and we go wash the dishes.” I now know my feelings toward grief are neither good nor bad; they simply need to pass. A decade after my father’s death, I finally feel ready to honor those feelings.

Complete Article HERE!

Scientists Discover Oldest Known Human Grave in Africa

The unearthing of a tiny child suggests Africa’s Stone Age humans sometimes practiced funerary rites and had symbolic thoughts about death

A virtual reconstruction of the child’s remains found in Panga ya Saidi cave in Kenya

By Brian Handwerk

Modern humans might share little in common with the Stone Age hunter gatherers who, 78,000 years ago, curled a dead child into the fetal position and buried it in a shallow grave in a Kenyan cave. But the humanity of their grief, and the care they demonstrated for the child, can still be felt by looking at those tiny human remains, arrayed as if still sleeping. Scientists don’t know whether the child’s family or community connected its burial with thoughts of the afterlife. In a way, though, their actions guaranteed the child would have another life. Unimaginably far into their future, the child is not forgotten and it offers a fascinating glimpse into how some past humans coped with death.

The 2-and-a-half to 3-year-old toddler now dubbed Mtoto (‘child’ in Swahili) was found in a specially dug grave now recognized as the oldest known human burial in Africa. The team that discovered and analyzed the child published their findings in this week’s issue of Nature. Extensive forensic and microscopic analysis of the remains and grave suggest that the child was buried soon after death, likely wrapped tightly in a shroud, laid in a fetal position and even provided with some type of pillow. The care humans took in burying this child suggests that they attached some deeper meaning to the event beyond the need to dispose of a lifeless body.

When we start seeing behaviors where there is real interest in the dead, and they exceed the time and investment of resources needed for practical reasons, that’s when we start to see the symbolic mind,” says María Martinón-Torres, a co-author of the study and director of the National Research Centre on Human Evolution (CENIEH) in Burgos, Spain. “Thats what makes this so special. Were looking [at] a behavior that we consider ourselves so typical of humans—and unique—which is establishing a relationship with the dead.”

Panga ya Saidi cave, in the tropical uplands along the Kenyan coast, is a key site for delving into the lives of ancient humans. In 2013, excavations there revealed the side edge of a small pit, and researchers used a tube to retrieve a sediment sample for dating. The sample immediately revealed the presence of some degraded and unidentified bones. It wasn’t until four years later that scientists began to suspect they’d found more than a few random remains. They dug about ten feet below the cave floor and found a circular, shallow pit tightly filled with an array of bones. But this surprise was shortly followed by another—the bones were in such a state of decomposition that any attempts to touch or move them turned them to dust.

So the team extracted the entire pit, protected it with a plaster encasement and moved it to the National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi, and later to a specialized laboratory at CENIEH.

In the lab, scientists unleashed a toolbox of techniques and technologies to peer inside and analyze the bones and soils of the sediment block. Carefully excavating a bit of the block revealed two teeth whose familiar shape provided the first clue that the remains might represent a hominin burial. As the scientists delved further into the block they encountered more surprises. They found much of the well-preserved skull and face of the child, including some unerupted teeth still found within the mandible. These remains helped to ascertain that the team was exploring the remains of a very young member of our own species—Homo sapiens.

The group employed microtomography, a high-resolution X-ray based technique to determine that more bones were inside the block. But the bones were fragile and powdery; their low density made them very difficult to distinguish in images from the surrounding sediments. To solve this challenge, those cross-section scans were paired with software that sharpened them and eventually reconstructed 3-D images of the bones in the block. The image of a child, seemingly at rest, began to emerge.

Mtoto’s bones were articulated in nearly the same positions they would have been in life, anatomically connected at some points, with only small settling movements corresponding to those commonly seen as a body decomposes and flesh and muscle disappear. While the right ribs, on which the child was lying, are flattened, the spine and even rib cage curvature remain amazingly intact. This and other aspects of the skeleton’s condition provide a compelling line of evidence that the child had been buried soon after death, rapidly covered by soil and left to decompose peacefully in the grave. It stood in stark contrast to various animal bones of the same age found nearby—they had been broken, battered and scattered as a result of being left in the open.

The pit’s mix of sediment also differed in color and texture from surrounding sediments, revealing that it was dug and later filled in. And the dirt yielded still more clues. Geochemcial analysis of the soil showed elevated levels of calcium oxide and manganese oxide, chemical signals consistent with those expected to be produced by the purification of a body.

The child was lying on its right side, with knees drawn to its chest. The right clavicle (part of the shoulder) and the first and second ribs were rotated about 90 degrees, a state consistent with the upper body being wrapped or shrouded. The child may have been prepared and tightly wrapped with a shroud of large leaves or animal skins—an act that would make little sense for a body regarded as simply a lifeless corpse.

Finally, the position of the head suggests a tender touch. The first three cervical vertebrae, still attached to the base of the skull, were collapsed and rotated to a degree that suggests that the child was laid to rest with a pillow of biodegradable material under its head. When this pillow later decomposed, it appears that the head and vertebrae tilted accordingly.

Mtoto Drawing
An artist’s interpretation of Mtoto’s burial

Durham University archaeologist Paul Pettitt, an expert in Paleolithic funerary practices not involved with the research, called the study an exemplary exercise in modern forensic excavation and analysis. The totality of evidence seems to show that some person or persons cared for the child even after death. But what thoughts the ancient humans had about the dead is an intriguing question that may never be answered.

The point at which behaviors towards the dead becomes symbolic is when those actions convey a meaning to a wider audience, that would be recognized by other members of the community and may reflect a shared set of beliefs,” says Louise Humphrey, an archaeologist at the Centre for Human Evolution Research at the Natural History Museum, London. “Its not clear whether thats the case here, of course, because we dont know who attended the burial, whether it was the action of a single grief-stricken parent or an event for the larger community,” adds Humphrey, who wasn’t involved in the research.

Mtoto’s community was becoming increasingly more sophisticated. Surrounding soils in the cave from the same age as the grave are replete with an array of stone tools. The array of implements found suggests that Homo sapiens may have performed this burial during an era when they were gradually developing and using more advanced tool technologies.

Interestingly, the child wasn’t buried in some out of the way locale. It was buried at home. Panga ya Saidi cave is a key site inhabited by humans for some 78,000 years, until as recently as 500 years ago, and it also houses other, much younger burials. It remains a place of reverence for local humans to the present day, archaeologist Emmanuel K Ndiema of the National Museums in Kenya told reporters in a press conference unveiling the find.

The body was also found in a part of the cave that was frequently occupied by living humans. Martinón-Torres says this suggests a kind of relation between the dead and living, rather than the practical act of simply disposing of a corpse.

The bones were securely dated to 78,000 years ago. Though the date places Mtoto as the oldest human burial known in Africa, the child is not the oldest burial in the archaeological record. Burials of Homo sapiens at Qafzeh Cave, Israel, some 100,000 years ago, included pieces of red ocher, which was used to stain tools and may have been employed in some type of burial ritual. Iraq’s famed Shanidar Cave, which saw burials by Neanderthals, suggests another way in which Homo sapiens and Neanderthals may have been more similar than scientists once believed.

But evidence for funerary practices among Paleolithic humans and Neanderthals alike remains thin on the ground. That’s especially true in Africa, where it may be that scientists simply haven’t looked enough, as much of the continent has yet to be investigated. Climate works against African preservation as well, and different humans in different regions may have practiced different types of mortuary rituals as indeed they still do today.

Pettitt notes that the majority of humans who lived in Pleistocene—from 2.5 million to 11,700 years ago—Africa or Eurasia are archaeologically invisible. “They could have been tucked away in vegetation, floated off down rivers, placed on hills and high places…or simply left behind when the group moved on,” he notes.

If burial wasn’t standard Pleistocene practice, it begs the question why humans sometimes went to greater lengths to inter contemporaries like Mtoto. Pettitt leans towards the idea that such deaths were outside the norm.

The death of a child may have tended to spur humans to undergo the rigors and ritual of burial. A high ratio of child graves exist among the few Pleistocene sites that survive, including both of the earliest African burials, Panga ya Saidi and South Africa’s Border Cave, and many sites of Europe and Asia. Pettitt adds that among some hunter-gatherer societies the death of infants or children is viewed as unnatural and disturbingly out of the norm. “I wonder if these reflect the distinct treatment of dead infants that reflects societies emerging horror at such abnormalities?”

If Mtoto’s death caused exceptional grief, the child’s careful burial and the grave’s unlikely survival to the present day somehow create an equally exceptional connection between modern and ancient humans. In the physical world, ancient humans had to confront death too, and might such burials suggest that they also had symbolic thought about those that died?

“Somehow these types of funerary rites and burials are a way humans have to still connect with the dead,” says María Martinón-Torres. “Although they have died, they are still someone for the living.”

Complete Article HERE!

Writing of death is private art and public therapy

Eulogy, newspaper article, novel, poem… the obituary epitomises communal mourning, another aspect of being human that has been wrenched from society by Covid-19 restrictions.

By: Percy Mabandu

At the heart of every culture’s funerary ceremonies lie rites meant to guide ritual accounting of the meaning, in death, of the deceased. The obituary and its cousin, the eulogy, is a literary document clearly conceived to be read out loud. It is often the central aspect of rituals of reckoning for gathering communities of bereaved audiences. The performance that is the reading of an obituary sets the tone for how shared memories of the dead unfold.

The onslaught wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic has occasioned death on a historic scale for humanity. Beyond the massive corporeal loss of life, the coronavirus is marking myriad cultural losses for mankind. This season of industrious dying is ironically denied much of the ritual usually associated with death. The funeral, central in every culture as a ceremony for communal mourning, and perhaps the commencement of a shared acceptance of healing, has been cancelled or at best curtailed by policies meant to curb the virus’ outbreak.

As a result, many families lose out on the chance to gather and remember their loved and departed members, barred as they are from sharing the crucial ritual of reminiscences.

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The obituary is a form of portrait, the reading of it performance art denied its customary audience by Covid-19 funeral restrictions. Those with means have found a way to connect with physically distanced mourners over social media platforms. The result is a new content regime in which private quarrels generated by grief become larger public spectacles as a result of streaming. In an earlier time, these would have been the preserve of gathered friends and family, at worst gossip fodder for the immediate community.

At the height of the initial strict lockdown, social media gave us an example of this kind of contentious occasion. The Rakgadi meme exploded on to our smartphones after Semati Moedi contradicted decorum at the memorial service for her brother, the tombstone king Lebohang Khitsane. Driven by grief, Rakgadi, the eldest aunt of the family, attacked his widow with accusations of infidelity. The farce and fervour that followed pried open age-old debates about decorum, trauma and the limits of righteous indignation. Close behind were questions about why obituaries always read like sanitised versions of the dead, deviant in life now made darlings after death.

The obituary as newspaper feature

Beyond the funeral gatherings that make theatre of tributes, the obituary exists as a cherished newspaper feature. In this mode, it becomes a potentially polemical memorial. A public letter occasioned by the death of a notable figure to contest crucial social issues.

When larger-than-life American star Little Richard died in May last year, the world went into overdrive with debates about the Black roots of rock and roll, its appropriation by white America and the neglect of the real progenitors of the multibillion-dollar art form, Richard among them. Centrepieces of the debate were defined by the proliferation of newspaper obituaries published globally in the wake of his death.

In Mzansi, Bongani Madondo led the charge against culture vultures. “Richard died last Saturday at the age of 87 and the world lost its marbles. Lord ha’ mercy, what we gonna do? For one, we can all claim we loved him madly. That he was our darling queer avatar,” wrote Madondo, taking issue with the public’s propensity to posture fake care for the dead who suffer neglect in life. At once, the obituary campaigned against pop culture’s social hypocrisies, and dared to settle historic racial scores for the credit of Black creative genius.

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Following the death in 1964 of Sophiatown’s beer-beaten golden boy of letters, Can Temba, his friend and fellow writer Lewis Nkosi sat down to write his obituary. The article was headlined “The will to die” after one of Temba’s short stories. It opens with an epigraph composed of a statement Temba made at an unnamed friend’s funeral: “This son of bitch had no business to die… [sic].” What followed is a study of the horrible state of life in apartheid South Africa. Nkosi highlights the devastation borne by the suicides of creative people such as Nat Nakasa and Ingrid Jonker to understand the death of his friend Temba.

In less lofty instances, the newspaper obituary has been seen as an inconsequential space filler. This point was made by former Sunday Times newspaper editor Ken Owen in a brutal albeit memorable put-down of journalist Chris Barron. The pair were part of a larger media brawl with biographer Ronald Suresh Roberts.

Responding to what was then Barron’s latest op-ed attack against Roberts, Owen took his famous shot: “In his eagerness to smear Ronald Roberts, Barron has misquoted me … He should stick to writing obituaries – the subjects will not complain.”

In this way, Owen shored up the form’s propensity to be inconsequential content. To be balanced, though, Barron’s LinkedIn profile professes that “he turned what was a moribund and largely ignored obituaries section into one of the most eagerly read pages in the newspaper”.

A form and genre

There have been grand moments of glory for the form. The New York Times celebrated the newspaper obit as a genre in 2016 by sharing highlights from its archive. The editors noted proudly that since 1851, more than 200 000 people had been the subjects of obituaries in the paper.

Arguably the most notable was a piece announcing the death of Christopher McCandless. The account of McCandless’ fate stands as a monument to the power of the newspaper obit. McCandless died in the Alaskan wilderness during an ill-fated journey to sever ties with all he had known.

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The first paragraph cloaked him in mystery and tragedy, turning him into a folkloric figure: “No one is yet certain who he was. But his diary and two notes found at the camp tell a wrenching story of his desperate and progressively futile efforts to survive.” It was a short newspaper obituary. But it unleashed an industrious mining for meaning into the life and death of McCandless that would yield further feature articles internationally, at least two bestselling books and a Hollywood biopic called Into the Wild. The film starred Emile Hirsch and Kristen Stewart, with Sean Penn as the director. It was nominated for best editing and best supporting actor awards at the Oscars.

It is doubtful McCandless would have gained this posthumous fame and glory were it not for that compelling newspaper obituary. It launched him as a symbol of youthful renunciation of modernity in search of a lost, liberated, prehistoric purity of man.

The obituary in literature

American novelist Ann Hood published an aptly titled piece of historical fiction, The Obituary Writer, in 2013. Its plot zeroes in on the cathartic benefits of writing obituaries. In part, the book tells the story of Vivien Lowe, an obituary writer, who by telling the stories of the dead not only helps others cope with their grief but also begins to understand the ravages of her own losses.

The Obituary Writer shores up Hood as a discerning novelist who manages to magnify the underlying feature of the obit as a cultural artefact. It converges the needs of the individual with the requirements of community for mutual healing during times of death.

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There are few poets who’ve had to contend with the meaning of death and personal loss like Ted Hughes. His first wife and fellow poet Sylvia Plath killed herself after Hughes left her for another woman, Assia Wevill, who also killed herself along with their four-year-old daughter Shura. The tragedy of Plath’s death, for which Hughes was blamed, would become the subject of one of his most memorable poems. This in part because of the legend that surrounds its discovery more than a decade after he died.

Titled Last Letter, the poem is an account of the night Plath died. The various versions of the previously unknown poem were published in the New Statesman magazine, in part to report and register the historically unacknowledged torment Hughes lived with following the death of Plath and also to bear witness to his repeated attempts to perfect his poetic account of the night she died. 

In the poem, which was read live on BBC Channel 4 News by actor Jonathan Pryce, Hughes recalls the night of Plath’s suicide, even the phone call that delivered the dark news: 

What happened that Sunday night?
Your last night? Over what I remember of it… 
Then a voice like a selected weapon
or a carefully measured injection
coolly delivered its four words deep into my ear
your wife is dead.

In this way, the writing of the poem as a private obituary, along with the promise of a probable audience in some future, allowed Hughes to live productively with grief in a way that writing about dead loved ones makes possible. 

It is the singular power of the obituary, the making into artful verse the painful episodes in our personal universes. We write obituaries, read them out loud to gathered friends, to make certain that we are not alone in our hour of need. The legislated dearth of community in dealing with death during the Covid-19 pandemic denies us this connection. The omission of audiences for obituaries is central to the larger loss of our time.

Complete Article HERE!

A Virtual Memorial for Those We’ve Lost

The special project “What Loss Looks Like” presents personal artifacts belonging to those who have left us and explores what they mean to those left behind.

Readers submitted photos of items that reminded them of loved ones who died in the past year.

By Jaspal Riyait

As the art director of the Well desk, I’ve spent the last year looking for images to reflect the devastation of the pandemic and the grief it has wrought. As the crisis has stretched on, I’ve thought of all the people who have lost loved ones to Covid-19 — not to mention those who have lost loved ones, period — and how they were cut off from the usual ways of gathering and grieving. Watching the numbers rise every day, it was easy to lose sight of the people behind the statistics. I wanted to find a way to humanize the death toll and re-establish the visibility of those who had died.

To help our readers honor the lives of those lost during the pandemic, we decided to ask them to submit photographs of objects that remind them of their loved ones. The responses were overwhelming, capturing love, heartache and remembrance. We heard from children, spouses, siblings, grandchildren and friends — people who had lost loved ones not only to Covid-19 but from all manner of causes. What united them was their inability to mourn together, in person.

Dani Blum, Well’s senior news assistant, spent hours speaking with each individual by phone. “It’s the hardest reporting I’ve ever done, but I feel really honored to be able to tell these stories,” she said. “What struck me the most about listening to all of these stories was how much joy there was in remembering the people who died, even amid so much tragedy. Many of these conversations would start in tears and end with people laughing as they told me a joke the person they lost would tell, or their favorite happy memory with them.”

The photographs and personal stories, published digitally as an interactive feature, was designed by Umi Syam and titled “What Loss Looks Like.” Among the stories we uncovered: A ceremonial wedding lasso acts as a symbol of the unbreakable bond between a mother and father, both lost to Covid-19 and mourned by their children. A ceramic zebra figurine reminds one woman of her best friend, who died after they said a final goodbye. A gold bracelet that belonged to a father never leaves his daughter’s wrist because she is desperate for any connection to his memory.

For those who are left behind, these items are tangible daily reminders of those who have departed. These possessions hold a space and tell a story. Spend time with them and you begin to feel the weight of their importance, the impact and memory of what they represent.

Museums have long showcased artifacts as a connection to the past. So has The New York Times, which published a photo essay in 2015 of objects collected from the World Trade Center and surrounding area on 9/11. As we launched this project, we heard from several artists who, in their own work, explored the connection between objects and loss.

Shortly after Hurricane Sandy, Elisabeth Smolarz, an artist in Queens, began working on “The Encyclopedia of Things,” which examines loss and trauma through personal objects. Kija Lucas, a San Francisco-based artist, has been photographing artifacts for the past seven years, displaying her work in her project “The Museum of Sentimental Taxonomy.”

Saved: Objects of the Dead” is a 12-year project by the artist Jody Servon and the poet Lorene Delany-Ullman, in which photographs of personal objects from deceased loved ones are paired with prose to explore the human experience of life, death and memory. And the authors Bill Shapiro and Naomi Wax spent years interviewing hundreds of people and asking them about the most meaningful single object in their lives, gathering their stories in the book “What We Keep.”

As the pandemic continues to grip the nation, the Well desk will continue to wrestle with the large-scale grief that it leaves in its wake. Other features on this topic include resources for those who are grieving, the grief that’s associated with smaller losses, and how grief affects physical and psychological health. As for “What Loss Looks Like,” we are keeping the callout open, inviting more readers to submit objects of importance, to expand and grow this virtual memorial and provide a communal grieving space.

Complete Article HERE!

Last Responders Comfort Others, While Managing Their Own Grief

by Lindsay Wilson

When Tom Belford’s mother died in May, her family was faced with the impossible task of limiting her funeral to 10 people. Belford, who is the owner and funeral director of John. A Gentleman Mortuaries and Crematory, recalled the difficult months leading up to his mother’s death.

“From March until May nobody was allowed in the building, and she was on the second floor. So we couldn’t go up to the window or anything,” he said.

The end of a life is a difficult time under any circumstances, but COVID-19 has made grieving even more difficult.

“COVID is taking people suddenly, and it’s affecting the families that have suffered, that go through a death at a time where maybe they shouldn’t,” Belford said.

Belford said in many cases families are losing people who are in their 50s and 60s due to complications from the virus.

“We’re here to help them make that first step back to a normal life after suffering a loss,” he said.

Chapel, 1010 N. 72nd St location (Real Yellow Pages)

John. A Gentleman has seen a steady number of virus-related deaths since the beginning of the pandemic, from March or April through today. Though numbers in Omaha aren’t what New York City or cities in California are seeing, deaths have risen from this time last year, according to last responders such as Belford.

Though the increase in business has been a change, the way Belford and his staff handle virus-related deaths has stayed the same.

“We practice something called universal precautions. We treat everyone as if they had COVID.”

These precautions, which include personal protective equipment used for both funeral directors and the deceased they are working with, have kept Belford’s staff safe since the beginning of the pandemic.

“We don’t treat anybody differently because they had COVID,” he said.

While the practices in caring for the deceased haven’t changed, funeral services have changed, in some cases dramatically, due to the virus.

“The biggest changes we see in the services is the social distancing,” Belford said. “For a while, the services were limited.”

Casket selection, 7010 N. 72nd St location (Real Yellow Pages)

Many churches and chapels continue to limit the capacity of funerals for everyone’s safety. In response to this, John. A. Gentleman has broadened its focus to include videocasting of services for loved ones who are unable to make it to the service.

“Before this started, we had one or two cameras for filming services,” Belford said. “We have six or seven now.”

Recorded services are helpful to many family members, but one important aspect of support is still missing.

“The families,” Belford explained, “they can’t socialize and get the support from their friends. And that’s probably the biggest disappointment families will see. Our interactions are the same. The care we give them is the same. But the care they get from their friends is different.”

Limiting social contact in a time of grief also directly curtails the level of support families would normally receive at the funeral and beyond. John A. Gentleman had to pause its bereavement programs due to the virus, though they recently started back up.

Many families are postponing memorial services for their deceased loved ones until after the virus is under better control. In March and April, some families planned to postpone services until summertime. But then those were pushed back, too. Some families are now pushing memorial services to summer 2021.

“Everybody’s pushing things back,” Belford said. “Hopefully the shots will come in and everybody will get vaccinated.”

Fortunately, Belford and his staff are currently on a waitlist for vaccinations and hope to receive their first shots in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, Belford is more careful to protect himself and his family from the virus than the average person.

“I wouldn’t say I’m freaked out, but I would say that I’m cautious.” Belford said. “I’m very cautious about where I go and what I do. I have a big bottle of sanitizer in my car.”

Note of thanks, photo from John A. Gentleman

Being a funeral director is a tradition that has passed down for three generations in Belford’s family. While the virus has changed the way he conducts his services, one tradition that remains is the mortuary’s memorial plantings at Lauritzen Gardens, which Belford said is part of the service for every funeral. But even that has been altered slightly. The dedications are now posted online.

The coronavirus has rendered many aspects of life a moving target, and for last responders, more changes are likely to come. However, Tom Belford is prepared to continue to adapt to support families even as his own family mourns their loss. “No matter what happens to people, we’re here to help them,” he said.

Complete Article HERE!