I'm 45. I come from a big Irish Catholic family in New Jersey.
There were always funerals.
For my entire adult life there has been a funeral every week or two that warranted a family representative attending the viewing and maybe the whole shebang, mass card in hand, maybe even the food stuff, and bringing condolences from all of us.
There's some kind of unwritten and really unspoken formula based on who died and their relation ... as to what we do for the funeral.
When our own family dies, it is always the same with the others. They show up. It's a ritual. We all know what to do. We mobilize.
I didn't realize how important the funerals were until they stopped.
We've been through a ton of loss this year. We've had a few COVID deaths, many overdoses, a liver failure, a kidney failure, a brain aneurysm ... there's a long list but it has been a brutal year with so many family friends and even family members dying.
How awful is it to not be able to have a proper funeral if you want one? I can't explain why, but I feel like it's pretty awful.
We just found out another family friend died yesterday, and she had been ill but only let her sisters and mother know.
She is having a funeral. Thank goodness. It's a great thing.
It's weird, but there's a lot of joy that comes from a proper funeral, on top of all the other things.
A year without funerals ... there's a backlog. There are so many whose wishes didn't get fulfilled.
Odd as it sounds, a return to funerals is a very good and much needed thing.
When the shit hits the fan and the end is just nigh, will you cry out to Heaven? Will you lie down and die? Not me, my dear one - THIS IS MY SACRED LIFE - to no one nor no thing I'll surrender. For how does one know where when dead she will go, or if sweet Mother Earth he'll remember? - Sug
United States