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wrap-up
thank you all for your support, kind thoughts, etc. in the loss of my aunt. it's been very much appreciated. in particular, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
datlowen made me smile last monday with "since you have hugs coming out of your arse", and deftly deflected the most annoying man alive from trying to be my friend when i had a Moment at curling friday night; jgesteve kept me laughing through the whole eight-end match; and darthrami took good care of me when i got back and didn't have anything to take my mind off it any more.
the funeral was friday morning. my uncle hugged me for longer than he ever has before -- poor guy, i've never known him to be very demonstrative -- but he and my cousins said they were (and seemed to be) doing okay, all things considered. my father and his brother (who have also buried both their parents in the past ten years, before their time) also held up well. my brother doesn't cry much, but he was somber and didn't say much, which i guess is how he deals. my mother was weepy, but trying to be strong. it's harder for me to hear her voice crack than my father's, i think. i wonder why that is. my aunt -- my father's brother's wife -- was a total mess.
also in attendance, among the family and friends, were four of my father's cousins, two from each side, and my grandmother's younger sister and brother. seeing them caused me to break up all over again each time i thought i'd managed to pull myself together. ever since i was a little girl, when the fact of my baby brother crying made me cry (and drove away at least one young babysitter who couldn't handle both of us at once), i've had a hard time with other people in tears. and coming in to the church and seeing my father's aunt and uncle ... there's a particular kind of expression you see on the faces of people who outlive their grown children. you can see it in queen mary's eyes in this picture from the funeral of george vi, and it's a detail i've always particularly admired in four weddings and a funeral. and i saw it on their faces on friday; they hadn't survived their own children, but they'd survived one of their sister's children, and that was bad enough.
related note: open casket. what's that all about? i couldn't go. i was in the second row from the back for the brief service-thing at the funeral home before we went to the church, and i only realized the casket was open when i caught a glimpse between people's shoulders in front of me. i had to look away. when we were invited up -- to, as they said, pay our final respects -- i freaked out. quietly, but it was freaking out all the same. my mother went up, and my brother and his fiancee went up, and my father and i went out the side entrance. good lord. there must be some logic behind it, but why in the world would you want your last memory of a person to be of the dead body lying there waiting to be buried? it's not peaceful; it's gruesome. she didn't look like she was sleeping. she looked still and grey and dead. even her hair looked dull and awful. the brief moment i saw her was enough for me to see all that -- i couldn't go closer and engrave that image more firmly on my memory (and i don't understand how on earth my cousins sat there looking at their mother and didn't go bananas), and what's more i don't think she'd especially have wanted me to. this was a woman who couldn't go with the rabbi before her own mother's funeral and confirm that the body in the casket was in fact the right one. none of them could do it; my mother was the one who went. so i can't think of it as disrespectful to my aunt to refrain from approaching her casket and getting a clear look at her corpse -- god, just the idea makes me shake -- as a means of paying my last respects to her. (and for that matter, i don't think that respect should be final; the fact that she's gone doesn't mean she's no longer worthy of respect.)
had a long nap this evening, so it'll be tough for me to get to sleep tonight. but i must, because i have a lot of work to do tomorrow to get back in the swing of things. assignment due monday; papers to read for a meeting on monday; statement of purpose, which i've been intending to write for weeks; should make some progress on at least one of the three major papers i have to write in the next month; papers to grade and lesson plans to make for monday and tuesday, which i especially have to do because last week i bagged it. sigh.
datlowen made me smile last monday with "since you have hugs coming out of your arse", and deftly deflected the most annoying man alive from trying to be my friend when i had a Moment at curling friday night; jgesteve kept me laughing through the whole eight-end match; and darthrami took good care of me when i got back and didn't have anything to take my mind off it any more.the funeral was friday morning. my uncle hugged me for longer than he ever has before -- poor guy, i've never known him to be very demonstrative -- but he and my cousins said they were (and seemed to be) doing okay, all things considered. my father and his brother (who have also buried both their parents in the past ten years, before their time) also held up well. my brother doesn't cry much, but he was somber and didn't say much, which i guess is how he deals. my mother was weepy, but trying to be strong. it's harder for me to hear her voice crack than my father's, i think. i wonder why that is. my aunt -- my father's brother's wife -- was a total mess.
also in attendance, among the family and friends, were four of my father's cousins, two from each side, and my grandmother's younger sister and brother. seeing them caused me to break up all over again each time i thought i'd managed to pull myself together. ever since i was a little girl, when the fact of my baby brother crying made me cry (and drove away at least one young babysitter who couldn't handle both of us at once), i've had a hard time with other people in tears. and coming in to the church and seeing my father's aunt and uncle ... there's a particular kind of expression you see on the faces of people who outlive their grown children. you can see it in queen mary's eyes in this picture from the funeral of george vi, and it's a detail i've always particularly admired in four weddings and a funeral. and i saw it on their faces on friday; they hadn't survived their own children, but they'd survived one of their sister's children, and that was bad enough.
related note: open casket. what's that all about? i couldn't go. i was in the second row from the back for the brief service-thing at the funeral home before we went to the church, and i only realized the casket was open when i caught a glimpse between people's shoulders in front of me. i had to look away. when we were invited up -- to, as they said, pay our final respects -- i freaked out. quietly, but it was freaking out all the same. my mother went up, and my brother and his fiancee went up, and my father and i went out the side entrance. good lord. there must be some logic behind it, but why in the world would you want your last memory of a person to be of the dead body lying there waiting to be buried? it's not peaceful; it's gruesome. she didn't look like she was sleeping. she looked still and grey and dead. even her hair looked dull and awful. the brief moment i saw her was enough for me to see all that -- i couldn't go closer and engrave that image more firmly on my memory (and i don't understand how on earth my cousins sat there looking at their mother and didn't go bananas), and what's more i don't think she'd especially have wanted me to. this was a woman who couldn't go with the rabbi before her own mother's funeral and confirm that the body in the casket was in fact the right one. none of them could do it; my mother was the one who went. so i can't think of it as disrespectful to my aunt to refrain from approaching her casket and getting a clear look at her corpse -- god, just the idea makes me shake -- as a means of paying my last respects to her. (and for that matter, i don't think that respect should be final; the fact that she's gone doesn't mean she's no longer worthy of respect.)
had a long nap this evening, so it'll be tough for me to get to sleep tonight. but i must, because i have a lot of work to do tomorrow to get back in the swing of things. assignment due monday; papers to read for a meeting on monday; statement of purpose, which i've been intending to write for weeks; should make some progress on at least one of the three major papers i have to write in the next month; papers to grade and lesson plans to make for monday and tuesday, which i especially have to do because last week i bagged it. sigh.
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I've never actually been to a funeral with an open casket. With my grandmother, it wasn't such a big thing, since we had been with her when she died. Also, as she had been sick, we had been able to bolster ourselves, and it wasn't so much that "ohmygod I need to see her again." Well, it was, but in a different way.
With my brother, he hadn't been sick, per say, and nobody was with him, and so when the funeral home offered us the chance to have a closed viewing and to see him before he was cremated, we all went. All 19 of us. And yes, it's horrible and gruesome. But there's something to be said for being able to see the body, being able to go up and try to say whatever goodbyes you can to them.
With my uncle (for whom I don't even know if there was an official funeral - if there was, I wasn't informed of it) and my good friend (for whom there was a memorial service, much like that for my grandmother and my brother, but they didn't have a viewing, open or closed), it's very different. It really doesn't feel like they're gone - just that they're MIA. Perhaps they'll be back someday. (and perhaps they will, but that's a different thing altogether)
So, while I don't think I would ever choose to have an open-casket funeral for somebody I love, I can understand why people do.
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Your thoughts on the viewing - this is why I refused to have viewings for either of my folks. I'd seen them in the hospital after they passed, and that was enough. Better to remember people laughing and moving, I think.
Many many ((((HUGS))).
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(Anonymous) 2003-11-09 07:05 am (UTC)(link)Funerals are for barbarians. Yes, I know that it's supposed to supply closure or some such nonsense, but what it does is replaces the happy memory with a gruesome one.
why in the world would you want your last memory of a person to be of the dead body lying there waiting to be buried? it's not peaceful; it's gruesome. she didn't look like she was sleeping. she looked still and grey and dead. even her hair looked dull and awful.
When Granpa died, I firmly declined the opportunity to 'kiss him goodbye.' When mom freaked (of course) Gramma told her to shut the hell up, though not in so many words. When I go, I want NO funeral, a quick cremation and one hell of a party for all my friends and other loved ones, where everyone gets plastered and has a rotten hangover the next day.
Remember your aunt as the laughing, cheerful woman in the picture you displayed. Remember her alive and celebrate her life, not her death. In that, at the very least, you'll honor her.
terri
(sorry to have turned this into a soapbox, Fox, but I hope it helped.)
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It really doesn't feel like they're gone - just that they're MIA.
i don't have that feeling even a little bit, so it must be a thing. probably depends on the tradition you're brought up in. i didn't feel like saying goodbye to the body would be saying goodbye to her; that wasn't her, anymore, to me. i didn't see my grandparents after they died, either -- i'd seen my grandmother about a year before, and my grandfather probably the day before, and my aunt not for the past three years, but it doesn't feel like any of them is not really gone. to me.
i had more thoughts, but they're probably more of the same, so off i go to have breakfast and put my contacts in and have a day ...
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I was as fine with the open casket thing as I was with the funeral thing at all for my grandfather. I mean, I wasn't happy about approaching the casket but, well, he actually looked better dead than he had looked two months earlier and if I have to have one of those images stuck in my head, I'd actually rather have the dead one. (It's really strange how people feel they have to comment on the good craftsmanship.) But I guess that just tells you how bad things got in the last few months, not how good it is to look into an open casket. But what really bothered me? My grandfather died of lung cancer. The man smoked himself to death. My cousin went out during the wake, bought a cigar, and put it in the casket (in his jacket pocket) because Grandpa would have wanted to be buried with some of the things he loved, she reasoned. That was too much. But we all just sort of let her do it, which I guess was the right thing to do but it didn't feel right.
I guess what I'm saying is we all have different ways....
When my great-grandmother died, my father told me in no uncertain terms that I didn't have time to come home in the middle of the semester for her funeral. That was harder. And it will never happen again. I hope. I fear being on another continent when someone goes....
More hugs!
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Irish Catholic. So not only do you get the funeral, but there's the wake, where you basically all hang out with the body for hourse, while people come pay their respects, and the family (esp. immediate) has to stand around and talk to them and such.
Now, the AFTER the wake part, where we all went back to my grandmother's hosue and the adults started doing shots of vodka and reminiscing? That was cool. And sounds like it used to be PART of the wake. But these days, since it was held in the funeral home, NSM with the drinking and carousing in the funeral home.
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Ooh! You posted the stories! Squee!