16 ms·

Always go to the funeral (2005)

571 points by NaOH 2y ago

elvis10ten 2y ago
Personal opinion: I find funerals to be a waste of time and money. Especially, coming from a culture where they are a big event. People spend enormous money on funerals —- money that they wouldn’t help you with while you are alive and struggling. Maybe attending one in a less flamboyant culture will change my mind. But I wish more people in general don’t wait for terminal events to do or say nice things.
- consf 2y ago
  [dead]
- litenboll 2y ago
  I shared your opinion until I attended my first funeral as an adult. They are very important for the grieving process, at least to me. That doesn't mean much money needs to be spent, I've only been to scaled down funerals where there's a short ceremony and a meal afterwards.
  - throwaway346434 2y ago
    Eh. For children of less than stellar parents, a funeral is: - A bad person gets celebrated in a way that is not aligned to your understanding - A bunch of people who don't know about the less than stellar bits offering what feels like performative grief - Others who enabled the less than stellar bits angry their applecart has been upset, looking to lash out at a scapegoat. Obviously not everyone has this negative experience, but narcissism is in about 6.2-7.7% of the population; other "dark traits" are also around in a long tail. So it's not unreasonable to expect around 12-15%? of people risk a potential increase to trauma at an already complex time of their lives.
    - wvlia5 2y ago
      [flagged]
- bananatype 2y ago
  It probably depends on one's culture. In the Philippines, it's customary for funeral visitors to give a small donation to the bereaved family members (typically, around 20-40 USD). And since funerals are considered a big social event, it's not uncommon to hear of fmilies who were able to recoup (or pay off) their funeral expenses through the donations alone.
- DHPersonal 2y ago
  I feel much the same. I hope that when I die, the people around me will remember the many times that I have asked to have my body disposed of as quietly and cheaply as possible, and to not perform a funeral for me, and if they wish to use my death as an excuse to gather, to make the event as joyful as possible and as little about me as they can.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  The funeral industry is also very predatory. They know full well they have people in grief making decisions and they end up getting pressured into buying a casket that's just going to be buried in the ground in a few days, but they will be paying for for the next 10 years. That a family can come out of a funeral tens of thousands of dollars in debt is just absurd.
- mmooss 2y ago
  Memorial rituals are universal to every human culture. It's a need in (almost) all of us. > ... I wish more people in general don’t wait for terminal events to do or say nice things. I agree, but whatever you did earlier, that's not a reason to not do something now.
begueradj 2y ago
Totally agree. In my culture (Berber), each time any of your relatives gets sick, you also must visit him/her and bring something with you for him/her (usually nice food/fruits and/or money).
sneak 2y ago
Alternately; this anachronistic idea that not going to a religious ceremony is “the wrong thing” can be disregarded. I never attend funerals, and I rarely attend weddings. I skipped my father’s funeral. It simply doesn’t matter if you go or not.
- colanderman 2y ago
  It matters a lot to those who are grieving. Consider that funerals may have developed over millennia as a component of the grieving process. There is nothing necessarily religious about them.
- throw_pm23 2y ago
  Reminded me of the famous quote by Twain: "When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."
consf 2y ago
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Neil44 2y ago
Every time you go to a funeral you sit a bit closer to the front.
- Mali- 2y ago
  Church pews are the conveyor belt into the box
ludwigvan 2y ago
A corollary of this is “Always visit when a baby is born.” (In the first few months, if not at the hospital) I have noticed my love and respect for my friends who never visited after our newborn declined significantly, and it has never been the same. Does anyone have a similar experience?
- mettamage 2y ago
  Thanks, this teaches me quite a bit. I will be more mindful of this
- JansjoFromIkea 2y ago
  How much of this is due to them not visiting and how much is due to the change in dynamics though? Think it's conceivable them not wanting to see the baby early on or in the hospital might suggest a fairly critical divergence of interests
- xandrius 2y ago
  Well, if you don't see someone for over a span of a year then probably you're not too close anymore? Then I'd assume that if 1 person had a really good reason not to be physically around for the first few months, you wouldn't think less of them if they make it up afterwards.
sgt101 2y ago
I had a friend who died young, I was young as well. I went to his funeral and there was an opportunity to speak about him and our memories of him. No one stood up to speak. It was awful. I wanted to stand up and say he was a good friend, and to say I would miss him, but I didn't. I've regretted that ever since - 30 years now, and I think about it frequently.
- wvlia5 2y ago
  But it's a somewhat odd custom no? Funerals. Probably no one stood up to talk because it felt awkward, as it is. It's not like you hurt your friends feelings for not speaking up.
  - sgt101 2y ago
    It was my failure that hurt me, I think.
    - wvlia5 2y ago
      I don't get why it is a failure.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - Tistron 2y ago
        I see it as a strong example of what happens often. We have an impulse from what I will call our authenticity and we decline and suppress it because of some sort of fear. As I've learned to pay attention to this, I've found that it always leads to slight disconnection, and following instead tends to lead to more connection and aliveness. Every time we avoid the alive impulse is a failure of sorts, but usually we don't notice it like in this story above.
        wvlia5 2y ago
        Interesting. Do you think this other thing might be related? I usually supress emotions in order to perform, solve problems. I ignore all frustration, sadness, boredom and just focus or executing the steps to solve the current problem. Convinced that good performance is what leads to good quality of life. It's like the kid who jumps and cries around the father saying "I want to play". The father ignores him and says "go away, don't bother me please, I'm working", thinking "what he really needs is a nice house, food and clothes, that's why I work". But this has lead me to a pervasive state of unsatisfaction, even though I now have many shiny things to enjoy.
p2detar 2y ago
As a kid, I went to so many funerals, I remember I started somewhat liking it. I grew up in Eastern Europe. My grandmother was a devoted christian with a lot of community work around church events. As a kid my parents would leave me often with her for the holidays. She took me with her to pretty much every funeral that was happening in the town, since she had to attend. It sounds crazy but these events were large social gatherings, people bringing food, chatting. Often other kids would be there as well. Someone had died, but it wasn't necessarily a sad event. It was people being there for the deceased one and their relatives. There was also something like the "crying group" - that would be old ladies crying for the deceased one as an act of support of the relatives rather than expressing genuine feelings. The coffin would sometimes be placed on a trailer towed by a tractor to the graveyard. The "crying group" would hop onto the trailer and they would cry around the coffin. They were really good. I realize how strange this may sound, but it was just the way it was back then. None of these funerals could prepare me for the loss of my 2 grandmothers. Still, without meaning it in a disrespectful way, death is an important part of our life-experience, and even as a kid, I'm thankful to have had seen it that often and in a non-violent way.
- kulahan 2y ago
  As I understand it, there are a number of cultures where funerals are somewhat celebrations, rather than sad moments. Of course, everyone is sad to lose a friend, but you can change your perspective a bit, you can make a big difference in how things feel
wvlia5 2y ago
I think I won't go to my parents funeral (when the time comes). I don't see the value of standing next to their corpses. I didn't go to my grandma funeral, I don't regret it. I regret not having had deeper relationship with her. Same with my parents. Will have many regrets, but I believe not saying goobye to their corpses won't be one.
- bowsamic 2y ago
  Can you really not think of the situation beyond your personal immediate material experience?
  - wvlia5 2y ago
    Think in what specifically, example? I don't see what else I should think of.
    - bowsamic 2y ago
      Socially, i.e. about other people?
      - wvlia5 2y ago
        A yes, but it's odd to me that other people want me to be at a funeral with them. If we have a great relationship, I can lend you money, share my house, get you a date, do some errands for you, take you to a party, listen to your thoughts and give you feedback. All valuable things I can do for you regardless of my funeral attendance. But just standing at a funeral? I don't see how is that valuable. Maybe for the chat, but we can have the chat anywhere else, like staring at the stars in a park, a superior setting. And if we don't have a good relationship, well, then it doesn't matter what you want.
        bowsamic 2y ago
        Do you have a social disorder of some kind? I feel that to most humans this is just immediately obvious and socially natural
shever73 2y ago
This is a very Irish thing. Funerals in Ireland are always well-attended and going to a funeral - even of someone you don't know - is important in the community (see this recent news article, for example[0]). I notice the author's surname is Sullivan. As my grandmother liked to repeat: "If you don't go to someone's funeral, they won't come to yours." [0] https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/crowd-shows-up-to-funeral-of-woman-in-carlow-after-social-media-appeal-by-funeral-director-1703373.html https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/crowd-shows-up-to-funera...)
- io84 2y ago
  I was raised like this and find it heart warming to see funerals filled with wider community. I did misjudge it once: I was living in a different country with two fellow Irish people and the relative of a good friend died. In Ireland it would have been expected that we attend the funeral, in this case we showed up and there were only six closest relatives there, and our presence just felt inappropriate. I now know your place at a funeral is about your place in a wider community. That often overlaps with being a connection-of-a-connection, but not always.
  - nytesky 2y ago
    We had a similar issue. We ended up at a funeral for our daughter’s teacher (we brought the kids as she knew all of them), and somehow ended up in the family greeting line intended for close friends and family. It felt so intrusive and they were like “why are you here”. The cherry on top was our youngest started getting restless during service and we had to leave early and we didn’t sit in the back. I had only been to my parents funerals at this point, and never experienced a more formal religious service, but we were the worst in so many ways. I still regret it 10 years later.
    - jll29 2y ago
      To ask "why are you here?" suggests these people were poorly raised or just plain rude. Attendees of a funeral make an effort to pay their respects to the deceased and to express their condolences to the family left behind.
wvlia5 2y ago
Losing relationships to death feels strangely not bad to me. Losing relationships for other reasons that shouldn't happen, like fights, feels bad. It's like eating a cake. You eat and at some point there will be no more cake, and you can rest content. But if the cake falls to the floor while you are eating, it's sad.
- wvlia5 2y ago
  I remember my first death. My mum came and said: "your cousin died". I felt nothing, I different. I had a great relationship with him. Seeing my non-reaction, my mum said : "you can cry". So I thought: "oh, so I should cry now, that's the appropiate thing to do in these situations", then I started crying.
  - throw4847285 2y ago
    Sure, there's nothing special about that. Many people are too young to understand the finality of death when they first encounter it. Death becomes harder the older you get. When my grandmother died this year I felt a much heavy series of emotions than just sadness. It's the finality of it that gets you.
- smeej 2y ago
  This sounds like you're only thinking of people who die very old. When my 99yo grandmother died, it felt natural, like it was the time for such things. She'd eaten all her cake. When my 29yo sister died, it was completely different, even though her death was also natural and did not involve suffering (sudden cardiac death, because invariably someone will ask). Sure, she'd had some cake, but it seemed like most of it was ahead of her, and the cake didn't fall to the floor, it just sat there, uneaten and uneatable, which feels both sad and wrong. At least if there had been a fight, there would be hope for reconciliation, or even if that weren't possible, we could still be glad to hear good news about each other's life. (Rarely does so much hatred endure forever that you can't ever be glad when good things happen to somebody.) Death is worse.
- pessimizer 2y ago
  Be careful, or they'll lock you up. The appropriate reaction to death has been determined, and deviations are considered at best a form of mental illness, and at worst a form of terrorism. The appropriate reaction is the wailing and gnashing of teeth, an enormous amount of discussion, imitating as closely as possible the dress and decor of previous death gatherings that you have references to, varnishing, buttressing, and putting makeup on the corpse so that it looks alive, then looking at it longingly. If you don't do this you're a psychopath.
JansjoFromIkea 2y ago
"By the time I was 16, I had been to five or six funerals" May be an Irish specific thing but I probably had been to 16 by the time I was five or six.
- bananatype 2y ago
  I'd say it's also likely an Asian thing. In my country (the Philippines), it's not uncommon for people to bring their children with them to funerals. I've been to the wakes of almost every elderly family member. It was also a good opportunity, however morbid the circumstances, to connect with the rest of the extended family, even those people who I didn't realize---until then---were my relatives after all.
- Aachen 2y ago
  I'm 30 and haven't been to 5 funerals. Not that many people that I know died, or at least not that I know of (maybe a primary school teacher did in the meantime but I'm not living in the same area anymore). Might going to so many be a village culture thing, where everyone knows everyone and so you know of a lot more deaths?
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  I think I'm the most sheltered person I've ever known. 1 funeral, mid-30s. I'm expecting 1 more regular one when my dad dies, then a horrible one when my brother dies, and then my cohort will be called.
gwbas1c 2y ago
I pretty much always go. The only time I missed a funeral was during the pandemic for one of my teachers, and my wife was due at any moment. His funeral was well attended. For one particular funeral, it was for a childhood friend who I had lost touch with. One of the photos, in the rotation, was from a bus trip where I said, "hey, give me your camera." It was touching. His brother showed up at my mother's funeral a few years later.
block_dagger 2y ago
I declined to attend one of my grandfathers’ funerals. I did not consider him a good man and did not feel love for him while he was alive. I have never regretted it.
- qup 2y ago
  It's not about attending in spite of disdain or contempt. I think you would be advised to skip that one.
rralian 2y ago
> In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn't been good versus evil. It's hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing. Wow. This part really resonated with me. I will try to keep this in mind.
- wes-k 2y ago
  I literally just copied and pasted that exact part into my notes. Something about "versus doing nothing" really hits hard. I can do more than nothing! And also, sometimes, I need grace and time.
ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
A slight modification for my own philosophy: I always go to the wake/memorial. The funeral (burial/internment) is usually for close family only. I will go, if it is appropriate, but usually, not. Sometimes, the funeral mass is more open than the actual burial. I had a friend propose that we hire a woman and a child to stand a hundred yards away from the burial of a [male] friend, and leave before anyone can approach them, to add some mystery to the event.
cobbaut 2y ago
Please visit people when they are still alive. My aunt was alone for the last three years of her live, up to 94 years old. She had almost no visitors, and was not able to go out by herself. I went there about every week, and was always the only visitor. Then came the funeral, with well over 400 people there, and around 200 people at the coffee table after the funeral. And I was like: Where the hell were you guys the past three years? She was alone (after her husband died) and most of you never visited her since (and no they were not living far away or unable to visit). Go to the funeral yes, but don't wait until.
- seanhunter 2y ago
  ^ this. Also, don't allow yourself to be put off by the idea that you don't know what to say or whatever. Just go. If you think it's hard for you it's doubly hard for the person who is dying and noone is visiting them because they don't know what to say. My cousin was in hospital dying of cancer. I spoke to my mum and she said she wasn't sure what to say etc, so she ended up not going. I went. I said to him "hey this situation really sucks". We had a great conversation. He died. I'm really glad I went. Fast forward a few years and my uncle (his dad) was in hospital dying of cancer. I spoke to my mum and she said she wasn't sure what to say etc. I said "you remember what happened last time. Just go." She went[1]. It was a good way to bring finality and say goodbye to her brother and she was really glad she went. [1] I also went separately but that's slightly beside the point
  - smugma 2y ago
    So much humanity in this. Thank you for sharing and for advocating.
  - ljf 2y ago
    I so heartily agree - when my brother was dying I was at a loss to know what to say - we didn't share a lot of history as he 'joined' the family later in life - but just chatting rubbish helped him hugely. Later a friend was dying and when she could no longer talk, I'd head out for a walk and just describe what I could see, what my plans were, and great things I remembered from our past - I wasn't able to visit, but her parents said she really enjoyed the voice notes she got - almost as much as the visitors. But if you can see people, just do it. Not long ago my mum decided to try and visit a whole heap of friends across England, just as she realised after my dad died, that she never knew the last time she'd see these people - and wanted it to be occasions they both enjoyed, before too much time had passed. I loved the idea.
colanderman 2y ago
I'm surprised in all this discussion not to see the distinction between a wake and a funeral. The advice I've heard is, go to a wake to support those who are grieving, go to a funeral to grieve yourself. (For this reason, the wake is held at more "convenient" hours.) Do others make this distinction? Is the practice of holding a separate wake a regional/cultural thing?
- mattl 2y ago
  I think the wake is more of a Catholic thing perhaps?
  - colanderman 2y ago
    Maybe (I was raised Catholic), but I also attended a wake of a teacher of mine who was Jewish (culturally if not religiously). Thinking more now, where I'm from (northeast US), "wake" and "calling hours" are synonymous, whereas they might not be in other parts of the world. So I may be perpetuating some confusion of terms.
    - mattl 2y ago
      I think in parts of the US that's certainly true. Northeast US is predominantly Catholic too.
- deleted 2y ago
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- seanhunter 2y ago
  I think the naming varies. In the UK for example, the funeral typically indicates a religious thing and the wake is the reception thing you go from the funeral to .It's usually in a pub. There's usually bad food. You have a drink. You have a good conversation with all the people you haven't seen for ages. You remember your friend/family member/colleague whatever who is dead.
  - colanderman 2y ago
Eumenes 2y ago
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deleted 2y ago
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nlavezzo 2y ago
HN has never made me cry before, but here I am crying. This is really a wonderful article and discussion. Makes me appreciate this community even more.
fraserphysics 2y ago
I agree with the article, and I find many of the comments here insightful. Relationships with some of my old school adversaries were healed when they attended my son's funeral. The movie Charade is sort of about the bad effects of a poorly attended funeral. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8FA5zBHiFA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8FA5zBHiFA
crabbone 2y ago
Idk. Nobody ever invited me and I don't know anyone closely enough for even knowing if anyone in their family died. I'll be fifty soon, and, I have an impression that the only funeral I'll ever attend will be my own, if there even will be a funeral :|
JKCalhoun 2y ago
That was a beautiful piece. Well written, concise. My grandmother was the only relative of that generation that lived in the same city when I was young — the only funeral I went to. But as an adult, having my mother recently die, it was my turn to more or less head up the funeral. I too was touched by, in this case, relatives of my wife that showed up. They didn't know my mom from Adam but came anyway.
a3w 2y ago
I will not attend any more funerals, unless I get the church to stay out of it. The priests at the last events I attended to did not know the diseased. Even the wedding speeches I heard took place with nothing concrete on the people in questions. As for mostly church funerals in my significant others or my family: - Boring while overwhelming, - a farce since everyone planning it is either fighting or not caring enough to start a fight, - and not at all about dealing with death in a good way (grief, laughter, moving on. Something cultural should happen, but no one at the events ever found it. Only jealousy and nepotism were present if you heard any discussion about real values of having those funerals. And those came up behind closed doors.)
ilamont 2y ago
The best arrangement I've witnessed (for family friends from my hometown) was a private funeral for the close family members, followed 6 weeks later by a memorial service in a nice rented space with a slideshow going, drinks, and a general air of a big reunion. The large amount of time between the two events was better for the family, who didn't feel the same sting of fresh grief. There was no awkwardness, either. Everyone could remember the deceased in a way that she would have appreciated - old memories, laughter, and positivity.
keybored 2y ago
> "Always go to the funeral" means that I have to do the right thing when I really, really don't feel like it. I have to remind myself of it when I could make some small gesture, but I don't really have to and I definitely don't want to. I'm talking about those things that represent only inconvenience to me, but the world to the other guy. You know, the painfully under-attended birthday party. The hospital visit during happy hour. The Shiva call for one of my ex's uncles. In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn't been good versus evil. It's hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing. This hinges on your level of self-importance.
encoderer 2y ago
For many of us here a corollary is: Always get on the plane. Make the trip. Weddings. Baptisms. Graduations. Funerals. All of it. Even if going home is hard.
kulahan 2y ago
People don’t think about death enough. Be ready to go at any moment. Are you at work? Take a moment, and pretend your partner, mom, dad, or child’s last time speaking to you forever was the last time you chatted. What comes to mind? Do you wish you had said/done something? Take action before it’s too late.
beardedwizard 2y ago
I seriously regret not seeing my aunt when she was dying, though I went to the funeral. A memory ill never forget though is the time I went to a funeral for a childhood friends sister - it was extremely sad as you would expect, but her brother (my childhood friend) saw a big group of us there and he said "I cant believe it, everyone came out" and I could see he was really happy. When the article said "do it for the family" it really hit me, and in hindsight its obvious - we were there for them, not the deceased, and it meant A LOT to them to see us there.
abhayhegde 2y ago
In my opinion, matters of respect and kindness are given more than due consideration at death and perhaps only then for most people. Sure, go to the funeral and pay your respect, show how much they meant to you, but perhaps, do it much before. Do it way before death is even a thing.
deanCommie 2y ago
It is crushingly disappointing to me how many of the comments here are about funerals. When the point of the article has nothing to do with funerals. The thesis is this paragraph and I think it's quite striking and important > "Always go to the funeral" means that I have to do the right thing when I really, really don't feel like it. I have to remind myself of it when I could make some small gesture, but I don't really have to and I definitely don't want to. I'm talking about those things that represent only inconvenience to me, but the world to the other guy. You know, the painfully under-attended birthday party. The hospital visit during happy hour. The Shiva call for one of my ex's uncles. In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn't been good versus evil. It's hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing.
strict9 2y ago
I agree with this completely. A small but important suggested addition: if it's someone who's funeral you would go to, tell that person now what they mean to you. Then they can hear it while they are still alive. It is not a given that you will have enough time to tell them later.
- dylan604 2y ago
  sometimes, not going to the funeral is the message to be said and saying it to them "now" is considered rude. clearly, the message of not attending is being said to others not to the person, but you get the gist
  - elzbardico 2y ago
    The person died, what message can you want to send to a dead person. He/She is dead. He can't hear it. But you can forgive and believe me, feel better about whatever happened that made you want to send a message that would never be received.
    - dylan604 2y ago
      > what message can you want to send to a dead person you ask me that after I said "clearly, the message of not attending is being said to others not to the person, but you get the gist" so clearly, you didn't get the gist. not attending says something to the other friends/family that did attend. the knee jerk reaction is "what an asshole to not attend" typically followed by "I wonder what happened that would make them not attend". then the gossiping begins and the person sending the message smiles a wry smile
      - elzbardico 2y ago
        Yeah, I got that. It is just that I think it is now pointless. Like, he/she is dead.
        dylan604 2y ago
lordnacho 2y ago
Big life events are always worth a visit if you get invited, and you always learn something from the mix of people who attend. Whether it's a funeral, wedding, baptism, and so on. Does this person have friends from childhood? Do his friends come from the same place, or all sorts of places? Do they know each other, or does he have a lot of singletons there? Who considers themselves close family? Second cousins? Or did their cousins not even come? How well represented are various social classes? I always find these things super interesting when I go to one of these.
- consf 2y ago
  [dead]
santoshalper 2y ago
Do the right thing even when you really don't want to is a valuable lesson, but I'm not sure I believe that the right thing to do is attend funerals for people who you were not actually close to. It feels extremely insincere.
- massysett 2y ago
  It's not just whether you were close to the deceased; it's do you know the survivors. I've attended funerals where I never met the deceased but knew a survivor.
  - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    Yeah. Went with my cousin-in-law to his grandmother's funeral. I had maybe met her twice. It wasn't for her. Meant a lot to him, though.
- sellmesoap 2y ago
  I've gone to the funeral of a community leader who I only met a couple of times, but the stories of their life and seeing how they had touched the people around them was inspiring and I hold those stories dearly and feel the loss of the community. Hardly insincere.
- bloodyplonker22 2y ago
  I've attended the funerals of my enemies just to pay my respects for the rivalry that we had.
  - tivert 2y ago
    > I've attended the funerals of my enemies just to pay my respects for the rivalry that we had. What? You have enemies? Like the Joker and Batman or Lex Luthor and Superman? Honestly, to me, that word describes a kind of relation that mainly exists in comic books and between nation states.
    - 2y ago
einpoklum 2y ago
A valid point and a good approach. But it's quite a bad pun when used as a title here on HN - and with the capitalization, too.
- lupire 2y ago
  What pun/title?
  - einpoklum 2y ago
    "Always Go", like the programming language. But - I see the editors changed the capitalization, so it's good that you didn't notice.
mooreds 2y ago
Wholeheartedly agree with both the nominal and underlying advice here. Doing the right thing all the time is painful, tedious and can cost you. But doing the wrong thing will cost you too. Both compound. The literal advice about going to the funeral is about showing up for people who meant something to you. There are only a few special times in your life when you get to see a large chunk of other people's important people: * graduations * coming of age ceremonies * weddings * funerals Being there gives you a special chance to know the person better. Just do it.
- coldpie 2y ago
  > Just do it. I've tried, man. I'm deeply uncomfortable in social situations, and events with lots of wacky, nonsense traditions and rules that I don't understand makes things exponentially worse. Going to events like weddings and graduations makes me utterly miserable. I feel like shit for days before & afterwards, and I always regret going for months & years afterwards. I guess there's a chance someone there is glad I'm off being miserable in a corner, but I doubt it. So I've mostly stopped going to these things.
- aziaziazi 2y ago
  I'd love too but a crowd -even mostly loved ones- is for some the hardest way to engage with others. Last weddings I tried to attempt were disasters. Funerals are obviously easier as no/weirdly-interacting is accepted so at least there's less self esteem to loose. I feel the more confortable in one or one to one, three is already to much possible micro-ostracisms to deal with. To end with a lighter note loosely related, a funny citation of the marshal Foch: > "An assembly must have an odd number of members in order to make a decision, but three is already too many."
- antonchekhov 2y ago
  "other people's important people" is a very astute phrase - one has to see the value in that concept in order to understand the deceased's survivors that you think you already know. I've been to a few events where some folks were flabbergasted to discover different fresh aspects of the deceased - "what the...? He/she was tight with that crowd?!"
smitty1e 2y ago
Ecclesiastes 7:4 "The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth." https://bible.com/bible/1/ecc.7.4.KJV https://bible.com/bible/1/ecc.7.4.KJV
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  My dad is an atheist but he believes in that. He hates seeing other people happy
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  The House of Mirth would be a great name for a bar, or a theater. Or anything, really. Come to think of it, so would The Heart of Fools.
  - antonchekhov 2y ago
    Coincidentally there is literally the novel "The House of Mirth" by Edith Wharton - published in 1905, it's an excellent late-Victorian/Gilded-Age period novel about the slow downfall of Lily Bart, a woman who was in New York's high society, then through a series of unfortunate events and social reproaches, descended into lonely poverty. It was quite influential at the time, portraying the materialism and shallowness of the moneyed crowd.
aantix 2y ago
There's been a lot more reflective, humanity stories on HN. Or maybe I'm just noticing more. I've been on HN since 2007. There was that story a few weeks ago with the aging parents and their daughter that took a picture of them waving goodbye, each year she visited. I like these stories. It gives me pause and to wonder what it's all been for. Probably for my kids. My second oldest (9) loves creating levels in Geometry Dash. He'll probably be an engineer. He asks great questions. He can teach himself new tricks from YouTube videos. He asks for critical feedback on his levels. That's a good start. I'm just rambling.
- anal_reactor 2y ago
  There are three groups of people on HN: - kids who just graduated and realize that they've been told lies and need some life advice - midlife crisis - retirees who can see the death slowly approaching and reevaluate their lives in panic
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - jjw1414 2y ago
    Which group are you in?
    - anal_reactor 2y ago
      First one
  - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
    Personally I intend to have as many midlife crises as I can afford
- khoo 2y ago
  I feel like the major life events always put our life span into a perspective that otherwise might be missed or overlooked. It makes life feel shorter than it is. Btw, which post are you referring to? I am curious to read it as well.
lambdaphagy 2y ago
Sound advice. Conversely: always have a funeral. I know several people who expressed a wish not to have a funeral. Sometimes this wish stems from a desire not to be an inconvenience, or a sense of guilt or shame that one's life was not well-lived. Sometimes, simply the view that funerals don't matter, so why bother. In every case, I think this desire is mistaken. The need to mourn the dead is an instinct older than our species itself, and in dismissing it we wound the people closest to us. If you're the sort of person to whom the idea of skipping your own funeral sounds tempting, I kindly ask you for the sake of your loved ones that you reconsider.
- Baeocystin 2y ago
  I (politely) disagree. My father did not wish a funeral, and, per his wishes, we did not hold one for him. And honestly, standing at his gravesite paying my respects, I do not have the painful memories that I had with my mother's funeral, trying to organize, trying to handle everyone and everything, and not being able to grieve in the way that I wanted until long after. Instead, I am able to simply talk to him, and not have such a frustrating coda. They say that funerals are for the living. Sure. But going to funerals of loved ones has never made me feel better in the long run compared to more private goodbyes, and I am not the only one to feel this way.
  - cheema33 2y ago
    I am in this camp. I have been to the funerals of loved ones and once helped arrange one for a close family member. It was a very stressful affair. But I also recognize that other people got more out of it than did I. They cried and hugged and shared memories. That experience I am assuming was very valuable to them. But not to me. I was stressed the entire time. The lesson I learned was that funerals are valuable to some while not others.
- lupire 2y ago
  I don't think a significant number of people have ever written a will that actively prevented a funeral. A funeral doesn't require the deceased. It's fine to skip it.
o11c 2y ago
> By the time I was 16, I had been to five or six funerals. Is it just me or does this actually seem kind of low? They say your social cluster is 150 people, so you should be going to about 2 funerals every year (this ignores age-clustering, but that's counterbalanced by the fact that you often go to funerals slightly outside your cluster and the fact that the cluster changes over time).
- Spooky23 2y ago
  Depends on your relative age and family size. For me, my 40s are for funerals like my late 20s were for weddings. Nowadays many families have just one or two kids and everyone is spread over all of country and world.
- dspillett 2y ago
  Sounds within the right range to me. By that time I think I'd have been to five that I remember (a great-grandparent, a grandparent, an uncle, a great aunt, a school friend who was skittled on his morning paper-round). There may have been others that I was too young at the time to remember now. For me, funerals and similar services are more for family and close (or at least close-ish) friends. My social cluster might number 150, but there are many in it for whom I'll pass on my regards & regrets from afar rather than attending a funeral or wake. Are you attending 2 funerals every year, even averaged over a couple of decades to allow for clustering? I can think of one year when there were three, but that nowhere near makes up for the years when there were none or just one.
  - o11c 2y ago
    I'm not sure I'm quite hitting 2, but it's pretty close. I just sat down and made a list purely from memory, and got 1 per year since I started persisting memories. And I have to be forgetting some. In fact, the actual number includes a significant decrease due to excluding "funerals I would've gone to if I didn't have a more important funeral to go to" and "people who moved away before they died". Thankfully in recent years remote recording is usually a thing in some form (live or not, video or just audio; the quality depends significantly on the funeral home).
- 2y ago
unholyguy001 2y ago
You should go to the funeral if you think the right thing is to go to the funeral You should do it for yourself, out of respect for the person who died and respect for the loved ones remaining. Not out of societal obligation The corollary to that is there are plenty of times where the right thing is to not go to the funeral. If you lack those things. There have been times I don’t go the funeral. Because the dead person was a horrible person. When people asked, I said exactly that and many times the response I got was “man I wish I had not gone”
- lambdaphagy 2y ago
  I recently had the occasion to visit the deathbed of a relative who died with much of his family deeply wounded by, and angry at, him. Had you known him, you might have called him a horrible person and not without some backing for that claim. But I went because I felt a duty to my relatives that isn’t released just because they didn’t hold up their end of the bargain: he had indirectly given me life, even if he had done much ill besides. And moreover I felt an obligation to the office of the head of my family that transcended the particular man. It would be a grim world in which comfort for the grieving is a service the deceased must have earned in advance, and we the comforters decide whether they have really earned it.
  - I-M-S 2y ago
    By being too lenient towards those who have not deserved it, we are being unjust towards those who have.
    - lambdaphagy 2y ago
      I guess I've just never felt as though my condolences for a grieving family were a prize to be earned.
- coldtea 2y ago
  >You should go to the funeral if you think the right thing is to go to the funeral. You should do it for yourself, out of respect for the person who died and respect for the loved ones remaining. Not out of societal obligation In 2024 it would be quite better if we did more things out of societal obligation, instead of each individual placing themselves (and their whims) as the moral authority.
kayo_20211030 2y ago
Always go to the funeral! It's not for you, and it's not for other people. It's just a thing. It's not an analogy about doing the right thing. It's just going to the funeral. That's what you should do, for lots of reasons. When you do it, you'll know why; maybe later, but you'll know.
- etskinner 2y ago
  It definitely is for you and for other people. I challenge you to describe what it's for if not those two things
steveBK123 2y ago
It’s also a matter of regret minimization. 9+ times out of 10 when I’m on the fence about going to a major life event and go, I’m glad I did. Can’t think of the last thing I regretted going to. I’ve certainly missed some like graduations I regret not making it to. Funerals are towards the top of the list of big life events and I’ve never regretted one.
- consf 2y ago
  [dead]
- pjmorris 2y ago
  About 25 years ago, a friend offered 'Prioritize things that only happen once in life' as an idea for helping me decide whether to go to my friend's wedding or an important work event. The wedding was great, and the idea has been useful in many other situations, none more so that funerals.
- XorNot 2y ago
  Conversely I went to one high school reunion I was feeling iffy about, had an okay time but was also completely happy just never going to anymore (and haven't). But there's definitely some other effects in play there: revisiting people from your past who you've lost touch with is a pretty fraught experience, at least for me because ultimately the relationship is at best frozen in time from whenever you last talked: high school is particularly bad IMO, because it tends to feel like just trying not to be who you were a decade ago as everyone remembers you, rather then getting to be who you are now.
  - cableshaft 2y ago
    My 10th reunion was kind of poorly put together and poorly attended. I almost didn't go to my 25th based on that experience. But it was the complete opposite. There was a committee of four students that planned it, they set up a tour of the building with the new principal in the morning, they rented out a venue that had an almost prom-like feel to it, there was a memorial to four students that had died (three of which I wasn't even aware of, one of which was my friend that shot and killed himself while we were still in high school, so it was nice to see him remembered). Tons of people were there (like at least 60 people), and I talked to people I barely talked to in high school because I was so shy (and realized my reputation seemed to be a bit higher than I had anticipated, I just thought I was the quiet weird kid), and I was able to remember and reconnect to some friendships I had mostly forgotten about in the years since, and see how these people had changed since up close instead of just some random posts on Facebook. It was really great for the most part. Only downer was seeing how many people had kids and how old those children were (a few people were nearly empty nesters already), since I still don't have children yet.
jaydeegee 2y ago
Funerals aren't for the one who passed they're for the ones left behind. Be there for the ones left behind and remember you are one of the ones left behind.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
Clever marketing by the funeral services industry. And no, I don't want my last act on Earth to be inconveniencing people.
- pessimizer 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Way_of_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Way_of_Death
- throw4847285 2y ago
  OK, so go to the wake or the shiva or whatever. You don't have to buy into the funeral industrial complex to believe it's important to honor the dead. In fact, I think you have it exactly backwards. The industry popped up in order to exploit a deep human need. It did not create that need.
- throw_pm23 2y ago
  Why do you think it is an inconvenience for people to meet other people they know and/or like? You could see it as a last gift from you to bring them together.
- ksenzee 2y ago
  > I don’t want my last act on Earth to be inconveniencing people. There’s no way around that. Death inconveniences the living. Your death will probably make a mess of some kind. Your dead body will have to be buried or cremated, or it will be an even bigger inconvenience. Your effects will have to be split up among the living in some way. And if you find funerals to be an inconvenience, don’t go. But don’t kid yourself into thinking that everyone will be happier if you insist on no funeral. Many of us want to gather with everyone else who cared about the person who died, and it feels strange and wrong to be denied the opportunity. Funerals are for the living anyway. Let the living make their own decisions about what events they want to hold and attend.
  - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
    >> There’s no way around that. But that could be minimized. For example, by not taking precious square meters of Earth surface from the living. >> Your effects will have to be split up among the living in some way. That's not inconvenience :)
jmbwell 2y ago
You gotta go to people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours — Yogi Berra
gaoshan 2y ago
Larger message about doing the thing you really should do aside, ever since my parents dissuaded me from going to my grandfather's funeral (a man that I loved and respected but who's funeral came at an "inconvenient" time in my life) I have greatly regretted it. Not going burned itself into my mind and since that time I have never missed a funeral. Even for someone I only knew a little or hadn't seen in many years. If I had a connection with them, thought fondly of them, I make every effort to go. It just feels like the right thing to do.
chairmansteve 2y ago
Yes. And always go to the wedding.
felixnm 2y ago
The only regret I have in life (I'm in my mid-50s) is not attending the funeral of my friend's Mom. I didn't know her, so I figured I didn't have to go (I was in my early 20's, not that my age excuses anything). Another friend made me realize that I should've been there for my friend. After that, my friend moved away and things were never the same, no matter how hard I tried to keep in touch. Ever since, I always go to the wake/funeral.
- anonymousDan 2y ago
  Yeah I'm the same, did it twice unfortunately.
- mgkimsal 2y ago
  Similar here. Good friend of many years - his mother passed a few years back, then his dad earlier this year. In both cases it was relatively sudden, but the compounding factor is I live 800 miles away. In both cases, I debated whether to go up for the funeral, but one case scheduling was near impossible. In the other... I rationalized that... he'd just be too busy with other family issues, and that was the case. I feel like I still should have gone, but we did catch up in person a couple months later, and he'd had time to process and reflect a bit more. Lots of drama was going on (and still is a bit) so being there in the moment might have been more about me trying to feel like I was doing something ("being there") instead of actually being of any real benefit for his family. I've only got a couple of other friends that close that I would consider attending their parents' funeral. One parent passed away during covid and there was no service. When that other parent passes, I think I will go, even though we've not seen each other in years. Several states away, again, but I will plan on going.
- ethagnawl 2y ago
  > Ever since, I always go to the wake/funeral. I was going to add a top-level comment adding that there's a bit of nuance here between _the wake_ (calling hours, as the author puts it) and _the funeral_. I actually have a similar regret about not attending the _funeral_ for a friend's mother, although I did attend the wake. In retrospect, I absolutely should have gone to the funeral but, at least in the US, the expectations around who should attend _the funeral_ vary between religions/backgrounds/etc. and it can sometimes be hard to tell what the most appropriate move is. This is especially true if you're no longer/not very close to the family in question. Some families want _the funeral_ to be a more intimate, private affair and will sometimes even mention that it will be in the announcement. But, to your and the author's point, I think as a general rule, _going_ is the better bet.
Etherlord87 2y ago
Luke 9:60 > Let the dead bury the dead
- bluGill 2y ago
  We don't know for sure, but it is often said that the father wasn't dead in that story. That is the person in question was really saying "I don't want to tell my family what I'm doing, once they are gone I'll follow you". (timelines are not clear, but Jesus likely died a couple years latter so the opportunity to follow Jesus would have ended long before the parents died)
searls 2y ago
As somebody whose dad died last night, this one hits hard.
- Sn0wCoder 2y ago
  Sorry for your loss. Hope they lived a great life, and you can make it to the funeral.
- demarq 2y ago
  That's terrible and I can't imagine how you feel, Sorry for your loss.

571 points by NaOH 2y ago

Personal opinion: I find funerals to be a waste of time and money. Especially, coming from a culture where they are a big event. People spend enormous money on funerals —- money that they wouldn’t help you with while you are alive and struggling. Maybe attending one in a less flamboyant culture will change my mind. But I wish more people in general don’t wait for terminal events to do or say nice things.

consf 2y ago
[dead]
litenboll 2y ago
I shared your opinion until I attended my first funeral as an adult. They are very important for the grieving process, at least to me. That doesn't mean much money needs to be spent, I've only been to scaled down funerals where there's a short ceremony and a meal afterwards.
- throwaway346434 2y ago
  Eh. For children of less than stellar parents, a funeral is: - A bad person gets celebrated in a way that is not aligned to your understanding - A bunch of people who don't know about the less than stellar bits offering what feels like performative grief - Others who enabled the less than stellar bits angry their applecart has been upset, looking to lash out at a scapegoat. Obviously not everyone has this negative experience, but narcissism is in about 6.2-7.7% of the population; other "dark traits" are also around in a long tail. So it's not unreasonable to expect around 12-15%? of people risk a potential increase to trauma at an already complex time of their lives.
  - wvlia5 2y ago
    [flagged]
bananatype 2y ago
It probably depends on one's culture. In the Philippines, it's customary for funeral visitors to give a small donation to the bereaved family members (typically, around 20-40 USD). And since funerals are considered a big social event, it's not uncommon to hear of fmilies who were able to recoup (or pay off) their funeral expenses through the donations alone.
DHPersonal 2y ago
I feel much the same. I hope that when I die, the people around me will remember the many times that I have asked to have my body disposed of as quietly and cheaply as possible, and to not perform a funeral for me, and if they wish to use my death as an excuse to gather, to make the event as joyful as possible and as little about me as they can.
SoftTalker 2y ago
The funeral industry is also very predatory. They know full well they have people in grief making decisions and they end up getting pressured into buying a casket that's just going to be buried in the ground in a few days, but they will be paying for for the next 10 years. That a family can come out of a funeral tens of thousands of dollars in debt is just absurd.
mmooss 2y ago
Memorial rituals are universal to every human culture. It's a need in (almost) all of us. > ... I wish more people in general don’t wait for terminal events to do or say nice things. I agree, but whatever you did earlier, that's not a reason to not do something now.

begueradj 2y ago

Totally agree. In my culture (Berber), each time any of your relatives gets sick, you also must visit him/her and bring something with you for him/her (usually nice food/fruits and/or money).

sneak 2y ago

Alternately; this anachronistic idea that not going to a religious ceremony is “the wrong thing” can be disregarded. I never attend funerals, and I rarely attend weddings. I skipped my father’s funeral. It simply doesn’t matter if you go or not.

colanderman 2y ago
It matters a lot to those who are grieving. Consider that funerals may have developed over millennia as a component of the grieving process. There is nothing necessarily religious about them.
throw_pm23 2y ago
Reminded me of the famous quote by Twain: "When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."

consf 2y ago

[dead]

Neil44 2y ago

Every time you go to a funeral you sit a bit closer to the front.

Mali- 2y ago
Church pews are the conveyor belt into the box

ludwigvan 2y ago

A corollary of this is “Always visit when a baby is born.” (In the first few months, if not at the hospital) I have noticed my love and respect for my friends who never visited after our newborn declined significantly, and it has never been the same. Does anyone have a similar experience?

mettamage 2y ago
Thanks, this teaches me quite a bit. I will be more mindful of this
JansjoFromIkea 2y ago
How much of this is due to them not visiting and how much is due to the change in dynamics though? Think it's conceivable them not wanting to see the baby early on or in the hospital might suggest a fairly critical divergence of interests
xandrius 2y ago
Well, if you don't see someone for over a span of a year then probably you're not too close anymore? Then I'd assume that if 1 person had a really good reason not to be physically around for the first few months, you wouldn't think less of them if they make it up afterwards.

sgt101 2y ago

I had a friend who died young, I was young as well. I went to his funeral and there was an opportunity to speak about him and our memories of him. No one stood up to speak. It was awful. I wanted to stand up and say he was a good friend, and to say I would miss him, but I didn't. I've regretted that ever since - 30 years now, and I think about it frequently.

wvlia5 2y ago
But it's a somewhat odd custom no? Funerals. Probably no one stood up to talk because it felt awkward, as it is. It's not like you hurt your friends feelings for not speaking up.
- sgt101 2y ago
  It was my failure that hurt me, I think.
  - wvlia5 2y ago
    I don't get why it is a failure.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - Tistron 2y ago
      I see it as a strong example of what happens often. We have an impulse from what I will call our authenticity and we decline and suppress it because of some sort of fear. As I've learned to pay attention to this, I've found that it always leads to slight disconnection, and following instead tends to lead to more connection and aliveness. Every time we avoid the alive impulse is a failure of sorts, but usually we don't notice it like in this story above.
      - wvlia5 2y ago
        Interesting. Do you think this other thing might be related? I usually supress emotions in order to perform, solve problems. I ignore all frustration, sadness, boredom and just focus or executing the steps to solve the current problem. Convinced that good performance is what leads to good quality of life. It's like the kid who jumps and cries around the father saying "I want to play". The father ignores him and says "go away, don't bother me please, I'm working", thinking "what he really needs is a nice house, food and clothes, that's why I work". But this has lead me to a pervasive state of unsatisfaction, even though I now have many shiny things to enjoy.

p2detar 2y ago

As a kid, I went to so many funerals, I remember I started somewhat liking it. I grew up in Eastern Europe. My grandmother was a devoted christian with a lot of community work around church events. As a kid my parents would leave me often with her for the holidays. She took me with her to pretty much every funeral that was happening in the town, since she had to attend. It sounds crazy but these events were large social gatherings, people bringing food, chatting. Often other kids would be there as well. Someone had died, but it wasn't necessarily a sad event. It was people being there for the deceased one and their relatives. There was also something like the "crying group" - that would be old ladies crying for the deceased one as an act of support of the relatives rather than expressing genuine feelings. The coffin would sometimes be placed on a trailer towed by a tractor to the graveyard. The "crying group" would hop onto the trailer and they would cry around the coffin. They were really good. I realize how strange this may sound, but it was just the way it was back then. None of these funerals could prepare me for the loss of my 2 grandmothers. Still, without meaning it in a disrespectful way, death is an important part of our life-experience, and even as a kid, I'm thankful to have had seen it that often and in a non-violent way.

kulahan 2y ago
As I understand it, there are a number of cultures where funerals are somewhat celebrations, rather than sad moments. Of course, everyone is sad to lose a friend, but you can change your perspective a bit, you can make a big difference in how things feel

wvlia5 2y ago

I think I won't go to my parents funeral (when the time comes). I don't see the value of standing next to their corpses. I didn't go to my grandma funeral, I don't regret it. I regret not having had deeper relationship with her. Same with my parents. Will have many regrets, but I believe not saying goobye to their corpses won't be one.

bowsamic 2y ago
Can you really not think of the situation beyond your personal immediate material experience?
- wvlia5 2y ago
  Think in what specifically, example? I don't see what else I should think of.
  - bowsamic 2y ago
    Socially, i.e. about other people?
    - wvlia5 2y ago
      A yes, but it's odd to me that other people want me to be at a funeral with them. If we have a great relationship, I can lend you money, share my house, get you a date, do some errands for you, take you to a party, listen to your thoughts and give you feedback. All valuable things I can do for you regardless of my funeral attendance. But just standing at a funeral? I don't see how is that valuable. Maybe for the chat, but we can have the chat anywhere else, like staring at the stars in a park, a superior setting. And if we don't have a good relationship, well, then it doesn't matter what you want.
      - bowsamic 2y ago
        Do you have a social disorder of some kind? I feel that to most humans this is just immediately obvious and socially natural

shever73 2y ago

This is a very Irish thing. Funerals in Ireland are always well-attended and going to a funeral - even of someone you don't know - is important in the community (see this recent news article, for example[0]). I notice the author's surname is Sullivan. As my grandmother liked to repeat: "If you don't go to someone's funeral, they won't come to yours." [0] https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/crowd-shows-up-to-funeral-of-woman-in-carlow-after-social-media-appeal-by-funeral-director-1703373.html https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/crowd-shows-up-to-funera...)

io84 2y ago
I was raised like this and find it heart warming to see funerals filled with wider community. I did misjudge it once: I was living in a different country with two fellow Irish people and the relative of a good friend died. In Ireland it would have been expected that we attend the funeral, in this case we showed up and there were only six closest relatives there, and our presence just felt inappropriate. I now know your place at a funeral is about your place in a wider community. That often overlaps with being a connection-of-a-connection, but not always.
- nytesky 2y ago
  We had a similar issue. We ended up at a funeral for our daughter’s teacher (we brought the kids as she knew all of them), and somehow ended up in the family greeting line intended for close friends and family. It felt so intrusive and they were like “why are you here”. The cherry on top was our youngest started getting restless during service and we had to leave early and we didn’t sit in the back. I had only been to my parents funerals at this point, and never experienced a more formal religious service, but we were the worst in so many ways. I still regret it 10 years later.
  - jll29 2y ago
    To ask "why are you here?" suggests these people were poorly raised or just plain rude. Attendees of a funeral make an effort to pay their respects to the deceased and to express their condolences to the family left behind.

wvlia5 2y ago

Losing relationships to death feels strangely not bad to me. Losing relationships for other reasons that shouldn't happen, like fights, feels bad. It's like eating a cake. You eat and at some point there will be no more cake, and you can rest content. But if the cake falls to the floor while you are eating, it's sad.

wvlia5 2y ago
I remember my first death. My mum came and said: "your cousin died". I felt nothing, I different. I had a great relationship with him. Seeing my non-reaction, my mum said : "you can cry". So I thought: "oh, so I should cry now, that's the appropiate thing to do in these situations", then I started crying.
- throw4847285 2y ago
  Sure, there's nothing special about that. Many people are too young to understand the finality of death when they first encounter it. Death becomes harder the older you get. When my grandmother died this year I felt a much heavy series of emotions than just sadness. It's the finality of it that gets you.
smeej 2y ago
This sounds like you're only thinking of people who die very old. When my 99yo grandmother died, it felt natural, like it was the time for such things. She'd eaten all her cake. When my 29yo sister died, it was completely different, even though her death was also natural and did not involve suffering (sudden cardiac death, because invariably someone will ask). Sure, she'd had some cake, but it seemed like most of it was ahead of her, and the cake didn't fall to the floor, it just sat there, uneaten and uneatable, which feels both sad and wrong. At least if there had been a fight, there would be hope for reconciliation, or even if that weren't possible, we could still be glad to hear good news about each other's life. (Rarely does so much hatred endure forever that you can't ever be glad when good things happen to somebody.) Death is worse.
pessimizer 2y ago
Be careful, or they'll lock you up. The appropriate reaction to death has been determined, and deviations are considered at best a form of mental illness, and at worst a form of terrorism. The appropriate reaction is the wailing and gnashing of teeth, an enormous amount of discussion, imitating as closely as possible the dress and decor of previous death gatherings that you have references to, varnishing, buttressing, and putting makeup on the corpse so that it looks alive, then looking at it longingly. If you don't do this you're a psychopath.

JansjoFromIkea 2y ago

"By the time I was 16, I had been to five or six funerals" May be an Irish specific thing but I probably had been to 16 by the time I was five or six.

bananatype 2y ago
I'd say it's also likely an Asian thing. In my country (the Philippines), it's not uncommon for people to bring their children with them to funerals. I've been to the wakes of almost every elderly family member. It was also a good opportunity, however morbid the circumstances, to connect with the rest of the extended family, even those people who I didn't realize---until then---were my relatives after all.
Aachen 2y ago
I'm 30 and haven't been to 5 funerals. Not that many people that I know died, or at least not that I know of (maybe a primary school teacher did in the meantime but I'm not living in the same area anymore). Might going to so many be a village culture thing, where everyone knows everyone and so you know of a lot more deaths?
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
I think I'm the most sheltered person I've ever known. 1 funeral, mid-30s. I'm expecting 1 more regular one when my dad dies, then a horrible one when my brother dies, and then my cohort will be called.

gwbas1c 2y ago

I pretty much always go. The only time I missed a funeral was during the pandemic for one of my teachers, and my wife was due at any moment. His funeral was well attended. For one particular funeral, it was for a childhood friend who I had lost touch with. One of the photos, in the rotation, was from a bus trip where I said, "hey, give me your camera." It was touching. His brother showed up at my mother's funeral a few years later.

block_dagger 2y ago

I declined to attend one of my grandfathers’ funerals. I did not consider him a good man and did not feel love for him while he was alive. I have never regretted it.

qup 2y ago
It's not about attending in spite of disdain or contempt. I think you would be advised to skip that one.

rralian 2y ago

> In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn't been good versus evil. It's hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing. Wow. This part really resonated with me. I will try to keep this in mind.

wes-k 2y ago
I literally just copied and pasted that exact part into my notes. Something about "versus doing nothing" really hits hard. I can do more than nothing! And also, sometimes, I need grace and time.

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago

A slight modification for my own philosophy: I always go to the wake/memorial. The funeral (burial/internment) is usually for close family only. I will go, if it is appropriate, but usually, not. Sometimes, the funeral mass is more open than the actual burial. I had a friend propose that we hire a woman and a child to stand a hundred yards away from the burial of a [male] friend, and leave before anyone can approach them, to add some mystery to the event.

cobbaut 2y ago

Please visit people when they are still alive. My aunt was alone for the last three years of her live, up to 94 years old. She had almost no visitors, and was not able to go out by herself. I went there about every week, and was always the only visitor. Then came the funeral, with well over 400 people there, and around 200 people at the coffee table after the funeral. And I was like: Where the hell were you guys the past three years? She was alone (after her husband died) and most of you never visited her since (and no they were not living far away or unable to visit). Go to the funeral yes, but don't wait until.

seanhunter 2y ago
^ this. Also, don't allow yourself to be put off by the idea that you don't know what to say or whatever. Just go. If you think it's hard for you it's doubly hard for the person who is dying and noone is visiting them because they don't know what to say. My cousin was in hospital dying of cancer. I spoke to my mum and she said she wasn't sure what to say etc, so she ended up not going. I went. I said to him "hey this situation really sucks". We had a great conversation. He died. I'm really glad I went. Fast forward a few years and my uncle (his dad) was in hospital dying of cancer. I spoke to my mum and she said she wasn't sure what to say etc. I said "you remember what happened last time. Just go." She went[1]. It was a good way to bring finality and say goodbye to her brother and she was really glad she went. [1] I also went separately but that's slightly beside the point
- smugma 2y ago
  So much humanity in this. Thank you for sharing and for advocating.
- ljf 2y ago
  I so heartily agree - when my brother was dying I was at a loss to know what to say - we didn't share a lot of history as he 'joined' the family later in life - but just chatting rubbish helped him hugely. Later a friend was dying and when she could no longer talk, I'd head out for a walk and just describe what I could see, what my plans were, and great things I remembered from our past - I wasn't able to visit, but her parents said she really enjoyed the voice notes she got - almost as much as the visitors. But if you can see people, just do it. Not long ago my mum decided to try and visit a whole heap of friends across England, just as she realised after my dad died, that she never knew the last time she'd see these people - and wanted it to be occasions they both enjoyed, before too much time had passed. I loved the idea.

colanderman 2y ago

I'm surprised in all this discussion not to see the distinction between a wake and a funeral. The advice I've heard is, go to a wake to support those who are grieving, go to a funeral to grieve yourself. (For this reason, the wake is held at more "convenient" hours.) Do others make this distinction? Is the practice of holding a separate wake a regional/cultural thing?

mattl 2y ago
I think the wake is more of a Catholic thing perhaps?
- colanderman 2y ago
  Maybe (I was raised Catholic), but I also attended a wake of a teacher of mine who was Jewish (culturally if not religiously). Thinking more now, where I'm from (northeast US), "wake" and "calling hours" are synonymous, whereas they might not be in other parts of the world. So I may be perpetuating some confusion of terms.
  - mattl 2y ago
    I think in parts of the US that's certainly true. Northeast US is predominantly Catholic too.
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seanhunter 2y ago
I think the naming varies. In the UK for example, the funeral typically indicates a religious thing and the wake is the reception thing you go from the funeral to .It's usually in a pub. There's usually bad food. You have a drink. You have a good conversation with all the people you haven't seen for ages. You remember your friend/family member/colleague whatever who is dead.
- colanderman 2y ago

Eumenes 2y ago

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nlavezzo 2y ago

HN has never made me cry before, but here I am crying. This is really a wonderful article and discussion. Makes me appreciate this community even more.

fraserphysics 2y ago

I agree with the article, and I find many of the comments here insightful. Relationships with some of my old school adversaries were healed when they attended my son's funeral. The movie Charade is sort of about the bad effects of a poorly attended funeral. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8FA5zBHiFA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8FA5zBHiFA

crabbone 2y ago

Idk. Nobody ever invited me and I don't know anyone closely enough for even knowing if anyone in their family died. I'll be fifty soon, and, I have an impression that the only funeral I'll ever attend will be my own, if there even will be a funeral :|

JKCalhoun 2y ago

That was a beautiful piece. Well written, concise. My grandmother was the only relative of that generation that lived in the same city when I was young — the only funeral I went to. But as an adult, having my mother recently die, it was my turn to more or less head up the funeral. I too was touched by, in this case, relatives of my wife that showed up. They didn't know my mom from Adam but came anyway.

a3w 2y ago

I will not attend any more funerals, unless I get the church to stay out of it. The priests at the last events I attended to did not know the diseased. Even the wedding speeches I heard took place with nothing concrete on the people in questions. As for mostly church funerals in my significant others or my family: - Boring while overwhelming, - a farce since everyone planning it is either fighting or not caring enough to start a fight, - and not at all about dealing with death in a good way (grief, laughter, moving on. Something cultural should happen, but no one at the events ever found it. Only jealousy and nepotism were present if you heard any discussion about real values of having those funerals. And those came up behind closed doors.)

ilamont 2y ago

The best arrangement I've witnessed (for family friends from my hometown) was a private funeral for the close family members, followed 6 weeks later by a memorial service in a nice rented space with a slideshow going, drinks, and a general air of a big reunion. The large amount of time between the two events was better for the family, who didn't feel the same sting of fresh grief. There was no awkwardness, either. Everyone could remember the deceased in a way that she would have appreciated - old memories, laughter, and positivity.

keybored 2y ago

> "Always go to the funeral" means that I have to do the right thing when I really, really don't feel like it. I have to remind myself of it when I could make some small gesture, but I don't really have to and I definitely don't want to. I'm talking about those things that represent only inconvenience to me, but the world to the other guy. You know, the painfully under-attended birthday party. The hospital visit during happy hour. The Shiva call for one of my ex's uncles. In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn't been good versus evil. It's hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing. This hinges on your level of self-importance.

encoderer 2y ago

For many of us here a corollary is: Always get on the plane. Make the trip. Weddings. Baptisms. Graduations. Funerals. All of it. Even if going home is hard.

kulahan 2y ago

People don’t think about death enough. Be ready to go at any moment. Are you at work? Take a moment, and pretend your partner, mom, dad, or child’s last time speaking to you forever was the last time you chatted. What comes to mind? Do you wish you had said/done something? Take action before it’s too late.

beardedwizard 2y ago

I seriously regret not seeing my aunt when she was dying, though I went to the funeral. A memory ill never forget though is the time I went to a funeral for a childhood friends sister - it was extremely sad as you would expect, but her brother (my childhood friend) saw a big group of us there and he said "I cant believe it, everyone came out" and I could see he was really happy. When the article said "do it for the family" it really hit me, and in hindsight its obvious - we were there for them, not the deceased, and it meant A LOT to them to see us there.

abhayhegde 2y ago

In my opinion, matters of respect and kindness are given more than due consideration at death and perhaps only then for most people. Sure, go to the funeral and pay your respect, show how much they meant to you, but perhaps, do it much before. Do it way before death is even a thing.

deanCommie 2y ago

It is crushingly disappointing to me how many of the comments here are about funerals. When the point of the article has nothing to do with funerals. The thesis is this paragraph and I think it's quite striking and important > "Always go to the funeral" means that I have to do the right thing when I really, really don't feel like it. I have to remind myself of it when I could make some small gesture, but I don't really have to and I definitely don't want to. I'm talking about those things that represent only inconvenience to me, but the world to the other guy. You know, the painfully under-attended birthday party. The hospital visit during happy hour. The Shiva call for one of my ex's uncles. In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn't been good versus evil. It's hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing.

strict9 2y ago

I agree with this completely. A small but important suggested addition: if it's someone who's funeral you would go to, tell that person now what they mean to you. Then they can hear it while they are still alive. It is not a given that you will have enough time to tell them later.

dylan604 2y ago
sometimes, not going to the funeral is the message to be said and saying it to them "now" is considered rude. clearly, the message of not attending is being said to others not to the person, but you get the gist
- elzbardico 2y ago
  The person died, what message can you want to send to a dead person. He/She is dead. He can't hear it. But you can forgive and believe me, feel better about whatever happened that made you want to send a message that would never be received.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    > what message can you want to send to a dead person you ask me that after I said "clearly, the message of not attending is being said to others not to the person, but you get the gist" so clearly, you didn't get the gist. not attending says something to the other friends/family that did attend. the knee jerk reaction is "what an asshole to not attend" typically followed by "I wonder what happened that would make them not attend". then the gossiping begins and the person sending the message smiles a wry smile
    - elzbardico 2y ago
      Yeah, I got that. It is just that I think it is now pointless. Like, he/she is dead.
      - dylan604 2y ago

lordnacho 2y ago

Big life events are always worth a visit if you get invited, and you always learn something from the mix of people who attend. Whether it's a funeral, wedding, baptism, and so on. Does this person have friends from childhood? Do his friends come from the same place, or all sorts of places? Do they know each other, or does he have a lot of singletons there? Who considers themselves close family? Second cousins? Or did their cousins not even come? How well represented are various social classes? I always find these things super interesting when I go to one of these.

consf 2y ago
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santoshalper 2y ago

Do the right thing even when you really don't want to is a valuable lesson, but I'm not sure I believe that the right thing to do is attend funerals for people who you were not actually close to. It feels extremely insincere.

massysett 2y ago
It's not just whether you were close to the deceased; it's do you know the survivors. I've attended funerals where I never met the deceased but knew a survivor.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  Yeah. Went with my cousin-in-law to his grandmother's funeral. I had maybe met her twice. It wasn't for her. Meant a lot to him, though.
sellmesoap 2y ago
I've gone to the funeral of a community leader who I only met a couple of times, but the stories of their life and seeing how they had touched the people around them was inspiring and I hold those stories dearly and feel the loss of the community. Hardly insincere.
bloodyplonker22 2y ago
I've attended the funerals of my enemies just to pay my respects for the rivalry that we had.
- tivert 2y ago
  > I've attended the funerals of my enemies just to pay my respects for the rivalry that we had. What? You have enemies? Like the Joker and Batman or Lex Luthor and Superman? Honestly, to me, that word describes a kind of relation that mainly exists in comic books and between nation states.
  - 2y ago

einpoklum 2y ago

A valid point and a good approach. But it's quite a bad pun when used as a title here on HN - and with the capitalization, too.

lupire 2y ago
What pun/title?
- einpoklum 2y ago
  "Always Go", like the programming language. But - I see the editors changed the capitalization, so it's good that you didn't notice.

mooreds 2y ago

Wholeheartedly agree with both the nominal and underlying advice here. Doing the right thing all the time is painful, tedious and can cost you. But doing the wrong thing will cost you too. Both compound. The literal advice about going to the funeral is about showing up for people who meant something to you. There are only a few special times in your life when you get to see a large chunk of other people's important people: * graduations * coming of age ceremonies * weddings * funerals Being there gives you a special chance to know the person better. Just do it.

coldpie 2y ago
> Just do it. I've tried, man. I'm deeply uncomfortable in social situations, and events with lots of wacky, nonsense traditions and rules that I don't understand makes things exponentially worse. Going to events like weddings and graduations makes me utterly miserable. I feel like shit for days before & afterwards, and I always regret going for months & years afterwards. I guess there's a chance someone there is glad I'm off being miserable in a corner, but I doubt it. So I've mostly stopped going to these things.
aziaziazi 2y ago
I'd love too but a crowd -even mostly loved ones- is for some the hardest way to engage with others. Last weddings I tried to attempt were disasters. Funerals are obviously easier as no/weirdly-interacting is accepted so at least there's less self esteem to loose. I feel the more confortable in one or one to one, three is already to much possible micro-ostracisms to deal with. To end with a lighter note loosely related, a funny citation of the marshal Foch: > "An assembly must have an odd number of members in order to make a decision, but three is already too many."
antonchekhov 2y ago
"other people's important people" is a very astute phrase - one has to see the value in that concept in order to understand the deceased's survivors that you think you already know. I've been to a few events where some folks were flabbergasted to discover different fresh aspects of the deceased - "what the...? He/she was tight with that crowd?!"

smitty1e 2y ago

Ecclesiastes 7:4 "The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth." https://bible.com/bible/1/ecc.7.4.KJV https://bible.com/bible/1/ecc.7.4.KJV

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
My dad is an atheist but he believes in that. He hates seeing other people happy
pavel_lishin 2y ago
The House of Mirth would be a great name for a bar, or a theater. Or anything, really. Come to think of it, so would The Heart of Fools.
- antonchekhov 2y ago
  Coincidentally there is literally the novel "The House of Mirth" by Edith Wharton - published in 1905, it's an excellent late-Victorian/Gilded-Age period novel about the slow downfall of Lily Bart, a woman who was in New York's high society, then through a series of unfortunate events and social reproaches, descended into lonely poverty. It was quite influential at the time, portraying the materialism and shallowness of the moneyed crowd.

aantix 2y ago

There's been a lot more reflective, humanity stories on HN. Or maybe I'm just noticing more. I've been on HN since 2007. There was that story a few weeks ago with the aging parents and their daughter that took a picture of them waving goodbye, each year she visited. I like these stories. It gives me pause and to wonder what it's all been for. Probably for my kids. My second oldest (9) loves creating levels in Geometry Dash. He'll probably be an engineer. He asks great questions. He can teach himself new tricks from YouTube videos. He asks for critical feedback on his levels. That's a good start. I'm just rambling.

anal_reactor 2y ago
There are three groups of people on HN: - kids who just graduated and realize that they've been told lies and need some life advice - midlife crisis - retirees who can see the death slowly approaching and reevaluate their lives in panic
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- jjw1414 2y ago
  Which group are you in?
  - anal_reactor 2y ago
    First one
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  Personally I intend to have as many midlife crises as I can afford
khoo 2y ago
I feel like the major life events always put our life span into a perspective that otherwise might be missed or overlooked. It makes life feel shorter than it is. Btw, which post are you referring to? I am curious to read it as well.

lambdaphagy 2y ago

Sound advice. Conversely: always have a funeral. I know several people who expressed a wish not to have a funeral. Sometimes this wish stems from a desire not to be an inconvenience, or a sense of guilt or shame that one's life was not well-lived. Sometimes, simply the view that funerals don't matter, so why bother. In every case, I think this desire is mistaken. The need to mourn the dead is an instinct older than our species itself, and in dismissing it we wound the people closest to us. If you're the sort of person to whom the idea of skipping your own funeral sounds tempting, I kindly ask you for the sake of your loved ones that you reconsider.

Baeocystin 2y ago
I (politely) disagree. My father did not wish a funeral, and, per his wishes, we did not hold one for him. And honestly, standing at his gravesite paying my respects, I do not have the painful memories that I had with my mother's funeral, trying to organize, trying to handle everyone and everything, and not being able to grieve in the way that I wanted until long after. Instead, I am able to simply talk to him, and not have such a frustrating coda. They say that funerals are for the living. Sure. But going to funerals of loved ones has never made me feel better in the long run compared to more private goodbyes, and I am not the only one to feel this way.
- cheema33 2y ago
  I am in this camp. I have been to the funerals of loved ones and once helped arrange one for a close family member. It was a very stressful affair. But I also recognize that other people got more out of it than did I. They cried and hugged and shared memories. That experience I am assuming was very valuable to them. But not to me. I was stressed the entire time. The lesson I learned was that funerals are valuable to some while not others.
lupire 2y ago
I don't think a significant number of people have ever written a will that actively prevented a funeral. A funeral doesn't require the deceased. It's fine to skip it.

o11c 2y ago

> By the time I was 16, I had been to five or six funerals. Is it just me or does this actually seem kind of low? They say your social cluster is 150 people, so you should be going to about 2 funerals every year (this ignores age-clustering, but that's counterbalanced by the fact that you often go to funerals slightly outside your cluster and the fact that the cluster changes over time).

Spooky23 2y ago
Depends on your relative age and family size. For me, my 40s are for funerals like my late 20s were for weddings. Nowadays many families have just one or two kids and everyone is spread over all of country and world.
dspillett 2y ago
Sounds within the right range to me. By that time I think I'd have been to five that I remember (a great-grandparent, a grandparent, an uncle, a great aunt, a school friend who was skittled on his morning paper-round). There may have been others that I was too young at the time to remember now. For me, funerals and similar services are more for family and close (or at least close-ish) friends. My social cluster might number 150, but there are many in it for whom I'll pass on my regards & regrets from afar rather than attending a funeral or wake. Are you attending 2 funerals every year, even averaged over a couple of decades to allow for clustering? I can think of one year when there were three, but that nowhere near makes up for the years when there were none or just one.
- o11c 2y ago
  I'm not sure I'm quite hitting 2, but it's pretty close. I just sat down and made a list purely from memory, and got 1 per year since I started persisting memories. And I have to be forgetting some. In fact, the actual number includes a significant decrease due to excluding "funerals I would've gone to if I didn't have a more important funeral to go to" and "people who moved away before they died". Thankfully in recent years remote recording is usually a thing in some form (live or not, video or just audio; the quality depends significantly on the funeral home).
2y ago

unholyguy001 2y ago

You should go to the funeral if you think the right thing is to go to the funeral You should do it for yourself, out of respect for the person who died and respect for the loved ones remaining. Not out of societal obligation The corollary to that is there are plenty of times where the right thing is to not go to the funeral. If you lack those things. There have been times I don’t go the funeral. Because the dead person was a horrible person. When people asked, I said exactly that and many times the response I got was “man I wish I had not gone”

lambdaphagy 2y ago
I recently had the occasion to visit the deathbed of a relative who died with much of his family deeply wounded by, and angry at, him. Had you known him, you might have called him a horrible person and not without some backing for that claim. But I went because I felt a duty to my relatives that isn’t released just because they didn’t hold up their end of the bargain: he had indirectly given me life, even if he had done much ill besides. And moreover I felt an obligation to the office of the head of my family that transcended the particular man. It would be a grim world in which comfort for the grieving is a service the deceased must have earned in advance, and we the comforters decide whether they have really earned it.
- I-M-S 2y ago
  By being too lenient towards those who have not deserved it, we are being unjust towards those who have.
  - lambdaphagy 2y ago
    I guess I've just never felt as though my condolences for a grieving family were a prize to be earned.
coldtea 2y ago
>You should go to the funeral if you think the right thing is to go to the funeral. You should do it for yourself, out of respect for the person who died and respect for the loved ones remaining. Not out of societal obligation In 2024 it would be quite better if we did more things out of societal obligation, instead of each individual placing themselves (and their whims) as the moral authority.

kayo_20211030 2y ago

Always go to the funeral! It's not for you, and it's not for other people. It's just a thing. It's not an analogy about doing the right thing. It's just going to the funeral. That's what you should do, for lots of reasons. When you do it, you'll know why; maybe later, but you'll know.

etskinner 2y ago
It definitely is for you and for other people. I challenge you to describe what it's for if not those two things

steveBK123 2y ago

It’s also a matter of regret minimization. 9+ times out of 10 when I’m on the fence about going to a major life event and go, I’m glad I did. Can’t think of the last thing I regretted going to. I’ve certainly missed some like graduations I regret not making it to. Funerals are towards the top of the list of big life events and I’ve never regretted one.

consf 2y ago
[dead]
pjmorris 2y ago
About 25 years ago, a friend offered 'Prioritize things that only happen once in life' as an idea for helping me decide whether to go to my friend's wedding or an important work event. The wedding was great, and the idea has been useful in many other situations, none more so that funerals.
XorNot 2y ago
Conversely I went to one high school reunion I was feeling iffy about, had an okay time but was also completely happy just never going to anymore (and haven't). But there's definitely some other effects in play there: revisiting people from your past who you've lost touch with is a pretty fraught experience, at least for me because ultimately the relationship is at best frozen in time from whenever you last talked: high school is particularly bad IMO, because it tends to feel like just trying not to be who you were a decade ago as everyone remembers you, rather then getting to be who you are now.
- cableshaft 2y ago
  My 10th reunion was kind of poorly put together and poorly attended. I almost didn't go to my 25th based on that experience. But it was the complete opposite. There was a committee of four students that planned it, they set up a tour of the building with the new principal in the morning, they rented out a venue that had an almost prom-like feel to it, there was a memorial to four students that had died (three of which I wasn't even aware of, one of which was my friend that shot and killed himself while we were still in high school, so it was nice to see him remembered). Tons of people were there (like at least 60 people), and I talked to people I barely talked to in high school because I was so shy (and realized my reputation seemed to be a bit higher than I had anticipated, I just thought I was the quiet weird kid), and I was able to remember and reconnect to some friendships I had mostly forgotten about in the years since, and see how these people had changed since up close instead of just some random posts on Facebook. It was really great for the most part. Only downer was seeing how many people had kids and how old those children were (a few people were nearly empty nesters already), since I still don't have children yet.

jaydeegee 2y ago

Funerals aren't for the one who passed they're for the ones left behind. Be there for the ones left behind and remember you are one of the ones left behind.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago

Clever marketing by the funeral services industry. And no, I don't want my last act on Earth to be inconveniencing people.

pessimizer 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Way_of_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Way_of_Death
throw4847285 2y ago
OK, so go to the wake or the shiva or whatever. You don't have to buy into the funeral industrial complex to believe it's important to honor the dead. In fact, I think you have it exactly backwards. The industry popped up in order to exploit a deep human need. It did not create that need.
throw_pm23 2y ago
Why do you think it is an inconvenience for people to meet other people they know and/or like? You could see it as a last gift from you to bring them together.
ksenzee 2y ago
> I don’t want my last act on Earth to be inconveniencing people. There’s no way around that. Death inconveniences the living. Your death will probably make a mess of some kind. Your dead body will have to be buried or cremated, or it will be an even bigger inconvenience. Your effects will have to be split up among the living in some way. And if you find funerals to be an inconvenience, don’t go. But don’t kid yourself into thinking that everyone will be happier if you insist on no funeral. Many of us want to gather with everyone else who cared about the person who died, and it feels strange and wrong to be denied the opportunity. Funerals are for the living anyway. Let the living make their own decisions about what events they want to hold and attend.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
  >> There’s no way around that. But that could be minimized. For example, by not taking precious square meters of Earth surface from the living. >> Your effects will have to be split up among the living in some way. That's not inconvenience :)

jmbwell 2y ago

You gotta go to people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours — Yogi Berra

gaoshan 2y ago

Larger message about doing the thing you really should do aside, ever since my parents dissuaded me from going to my grandfather's funeral (a man that I loved and respected but who's funeral came at an "inconvenient" time in my life) I have greatly regretted it. Not going burned itself into my mind and since that time I have never missed a funeral. Even for someone I only knew a little or hadn't seen in many years. If I had a connection with them, thought fondly of them, I make every effort to go. It just feels like the right thing to do.

chairmansteve 2y ago

Yes. And always go to the wedding.

felixnm 2y ago

The only regret I have in life (I'm in my mid-50s) is not attending the funeral of my friend's Mom. I didn't know her, so I figured I didn't have to go (I was in my early 20's, not that my age excuses anything). Another friend made me realize that I should've been there for my friend. After that, my friend moved away and things were never the same, no matter how hard I tried to keep in touch. Ever since, I always go to the wake/funeral.

anonymousDan 2y ago
Yeah I'm the same, did it twice unfortunately.
mgkimsal 2y ago
Similar here. Good friend of many years - his mother passed a few years back, then his dad earlier this year. In both cases it was relatively sudden, but the compounding factor is I live 800 miles away. In both cases, I debated whether to go up for the funeral, but one case scheduling was near impossible. In the other... I rationalized that... he'd just be too busy with other family issues, and that was the case. I feel like I still should have gone, but we did catch up in person a couple months later, and he'd had time to process and reflect a bit more. Lots of drama was going on (and still is a bit) so being there in the moment might have been more about me trying to feel like I was doing something ("being there") instead of actually being of any real benefit for his family. I've only got a couple of other friends that close that I would consider attending their parents' funeral. One parent passed away during covid and there was no service. When that other parent passes, I think I will go, even though we've not seen each other in years. Several states away, again, but I will plan on going.
ethagnawl 2y ago
> Ever since, I always go to the wake/funeral. I was going to add a top-level comment adding that there's a bit of nuance here between _the wake_ (calling hours, as the author puts it) and _the funeral_. I actually have a similar regret about not attending the _funeral_ for a friend's mother, although I did attend the wake. In retrospect, I absolutely should have gone to the funeral but, at least in the US, the expectations around who should attend _the funeral_ vary between religions/backgrounds/etc. and it can sometimes be hard to tell what the most appropriate move is. This is especially true if you're no longer/not very close to the family in question. Some families want _the funeral_ to be a more intimate, private affair and will sometimes even mention that it will be in the announcement. But, to your and the author's point, I think as a general rule, _going_ is the better bet.

Etherlord87 2y ago

Luke 9:60 > Let the dead bury the dead

bluGill 2y ago
We don't know for sure, but it is often said that the father wasn't dead in that story. That is the person in question was really saying "I don't want to tell my family what I'm doing, once they are gone I'll follow you". (timelines are not clear, but Jesus likely died a couple years latter so the opportunity to follow Jesus would have ended long before the parents died)

searls 2y ago

As somebody whose dad died last night, this one hits hard.

Sn0wCoder 2y ago
Sorry for your loss. Hope they lived a great life, and you can make it to the funeral.
demarq 2y ago
That's terrible and I can't imagine how you feel, Sorry for your loss.