Ok, I have stated many times I’m not having a funeral, and wouldn’t want to put people through it. The ex wife can slaughter a baby and drink it’s blood to celebrate on her own if she wants, or whatever evil witches do these days .
Anyway it’s my aunt’s funeral tomorrow. Married to my mother’s brother, she was 80 so it’s not a tragedy or anything, especially as she was quite ill recently, with little quality of life. One issue is her warring family of course, my cousins, not my lot we’re fabulous company, and of course I simply detest funerals. They are nearly always religious to some extent, which never fails to boil my piss, though I have to admit that when they get too emotional I usually focus on the religious content for a little internal comic relief.
I also hate wearing a suit, and especially a collar and tie. At least I can have a drink, if my cousins families manage not to kick off. Well even if they do.
Come on, they’re an utter relentless excruciating expensive waste of time.
Funerals I mean, not my cousins, though some of them are as well of course. Ah well, I’m having a large glass of port, no reason I just like the stuff, l’chaim.
I won’t be attending any family funerals that are JWs including my mom.
I decided that looonnggg ago. I’d be welcome (it’s the rare time that an exception is made to talk to the disfellowshippped) BUT they can fucking bugger off. It’s been 25 years since they spoke to me and my mom stopped all contact when the the boys were 10-13 (age of “knowing”), so about 7 years.
The boys will be free to go, should they choose, but the rest can whine that I was such a worldly, hateful apostate that I wouldn’t even attend my mom’s funeral.
That’s awful, sorry to hear that. My aunt and uncle had two sons, and one was very close and looked after her, the other did not, and he and his wife and brood are avaricious cunts. The other cousin’s first wife was an utter cunt, stripped the house clean while he was in work, and left him with a shitload of debt. His children, their children, were from a sperm donor as he was infertile. When she slithered away his parents were devastated, and my aunt doted on those children, she and my uncle were unbelievably generous, she dripped in the poison and they all stopped going to see her when they fell out with their father.
I’m going to take a breath…I hate funerals anyway, and I love my aunt, she was not a sophisticated woman, but what you saw was what you got, and she had a heart the size of bus, my uncle as well. I will bite my tongue and keep my thoughts to myself, last Sunday we discussed it, the general consensus is that my brother is the family loose canon, so who can say what he will do or say. However this was mother’s sister in law, and my mother is 83, so it’s all hands on deck, as she will never be treated the way my aunt was some of her family, not while my arse points to the ground anyway.
Fuck I hate funerals. Time for an alternative I think…
The thing I’ve never understand is an open casket funeral. The first service I had to attend was when a family friend’s husband died of a massive heart attack. It was right after school had started during my sophomore year of high school.
It was a catholic ceremony of course, with an entire mass, plus the funeral portion. It was open casket, and everyone filed past his dead ass for one last look. He looked more like a wax dummy than a living(dead) person to me.
I’d rather try to remember what they looked like during their lives, not after being embalmed. All I want is a grave site gathering so my family can wave goodbye(or flip me off) as they’re lowering my dead corpse 6 feet down.
That’s fine, but I’ve never visited a grave since I hit my late teens, my mother and sister go, they clearly get something from it, but it’s not for me. I definitely think those who cared for us while alive, deserve better than a funeral when we die, but that’s just my opinion of course.
We all gotta go, it’s the price of admission for this ride. Maybe I’ll leave some money for a massive bacchanal for those who want to celebrate rather than mourn. The wake after the funeral is definitely more my speed, that’s for sure.
I believe that funerals provide closure, and a sense of connection with the deceased. In their proper context under the right circumstances, funerals can be very beneficial.
One of the more disquieting funeral customs that I have trouble with involve the “cuddle cot”. . . see below:
If a baby dies (or is stillborn), the infant’s body can be placed in a refrigerated bassinet, which keeps the body from deteriorating too fast.
The family can interact with the dead body . . . sometimes for longer than a week . . . so that the family can grieve, take pictures, do foot prints, dress it up in baby clothes, and so forth.
The thing about this process that really fucking bothers me is when women try to go through the motions of nursing the dead baby.
Even so, the nursing field is supposed to be an “evidence-based” practice. New moms are already prone to post-partum psychosis and/or post-partum depression, and if the statistics show that this process lessens the degree of depression and/or psychosis following such a tragic loss . . . then I reluctantly support it.
It is still very, very hard for me to accept this practice, but I acknowledge the sacred obligation of separating my personal feelings from my professional priorities.
The cost is the absolute foolishness that sways me for even wanting to consider a funeral. Look, you wheel the body into the furnace. 10 minutes later it is ashes. It takes you 30 minutes to clean out the ashes and stick them in a plastic bag. Funeral over. All I am doing paying a guy $100 for a little clean up and 30 minutes rent in the sauna. That would be fair.
Kudos, I am asking for people’s opinions in one (personal) direction, but of course there are other opinions that are valid.
Fair play, kudos to you, I’m not sure I could handle that. Just spent 4 very awkward hours trying to rein my nephew, who seemed determined to involve himself in my cousins feuding families. Not the same obviously, but another reason for me to hate funerals.
Though I actually had a few beers and a laugh, but then I am pretty good company, and could make everyone laugh at an Amish funeral.
Ultimately, I don’t think we’re the ones who decide funeral arrangements for ourselves. Heck, we would be dead at that point! . We can make our wishes known but, in the end, it’s the folks still alive who choose to do so or not. If figure if they need/want one they can go for it; if they don’t, I won’t have the capacity to care.
I try to visit our mom’s grave a few times a year, if anything just to remember the time we all had together. Neither one of my younger sisters have been back since we buried her. They both say it’s too hard, which I can understand.
Our daughter was very close to her grandma and was devastated when she died, so she hasn’t been able to visit her grave, even though the cemetery is less than 2 miles from their home.
I’ve assumed the responsibility of keeping her marker as clean as you can, my wife and I visit and scrub her marker every spring after the 6 months of shitty weather we get here every year.
I also put a lit jack-o-lantern on her grave every year for her birthday, October 28th. It’s my way of remembering her.
I can understand someone not wanting to visit a loved one’s grave after they’re gone, we’re all different. I hope to visit more often after we move back into the town she’s buried in.
I don’t visit the graves of any family members, my mother and sister go, and get something from it. I just don’t that’s all, and since I don’t believe the dead can benefit, the idea I am not showing them proper respect makes no sense to me. Ultimately they’re gone, such visits would be for my benefit or for family members still alive. I respect their right to indulge this if they want, and they respect mine not to, I guess that’s the right way to go about it.
Our son and his wife went through something similar in 2017. They already had 2 daughters, Sadie and Zoey, and when they found out that it was another girl, they decided to name her “Piper”.
8 months into her pregnancy, Sara noticed that she hadn’t felt her moving in the womb, so she went to her doctor, who discovered that she was no longer alive.
They rushed her to the hospital, where they confirmed their worst fears, Piper was dead. The doctor recommended inducing labor instead of doing a cesarian section.
It took a few hours, bit Sara went through with giving “birth” to their stillborn little girl. Because she was so close to being full term, our son and his wife got to spend some time holding her and looking at what should have been their 3rd daughter. How anyone can endure this is beyond me.
The nurses’ took her and made a cast of her footprints for our son and family. She was cremated, and they have her ashes in their home. They made copies of Piper’s footprints for the rest of the family, and I used it to have them along with her name and date of “birth” tattooed on my chest.
It’s one of 3 memorial tattoos that I’ve gotten, for our mom and my older sister as well.
The whole 'cuddle cot" is something that I’ve never heard before, and I wouldn’t want any part of something like that.
Now that I think about it, I have never been to a funeral. I have been to funeral homes, I have assisted in embalming a body. I provided the embalming fluid to the morgue when I worked as the Hazmat HR rep for Chugach Alaska Corporation on Yongsan Air Base in Korea. Mostly it was the old retired guys who lived in Korea that died. Not a lot of job-related casualties. Occasionally something strange would happen. LOL The mortician did his best to freak me out, but I had a lot of emergency experience and had seen lots of dead people by that time. No freak out here… Brings me to another issue. These guys can be really weird while preparing bodies for burial. The solemn, sorrowful, emotional bullshit is just an act from all I have seen. (I have not seen a lot - more than many.) I am speaking from personal experience. Emergency rooms and my few times with the mortician. I am not an expert. (Fuck! I am going to have to start adding disclaimers to all my hyperbolic bullshit.) I don’t trust Morticians any more than I trus the clergy.
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. We can make our wishes known but, in the end, it’s the folks still alive who choose to do so or not. If figure if they need/want one they can go for it; if they don’t, I won’t have the capacity to care.