4 ms·

> 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,

• 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).
• sanderjd 2y ago
  I was going to write this at the top level because I hadn't seen anyone make this point yet: The thing that made me sad about this article is that it made me realize how lacking I am in community. My eldest child is six, and I can't think of more than a couple people who are likely to pass from natural causes by the time she is sixteen, who we are close enough with to definitely know about their funeral. And I have no idea how we would find out about the funerals of people we aren't so close to. It's not like there is a local paper with obituaries that we read... Of course the elephant in the room is that when I was a kid, the coordinating organization for this was my family's church. Without having that community fixture, I find myself unsure how this sort of thing actually works.
• Izkata 2y ago
  Seems high to me. Similar to another commenter, I'm in my 30s and I think I've only been to 3 - both grandmothers and maybe a cousin. But I only remember one, and I don't remember which of them it was for. For us it was only normal to go to funerals for family members, and my parents' generation is getting up there but still alive. So only your four grandparents are what you'd usually expect by that age. I never even heard about deaths in friends' families unless it was a reason they were missing school.
• dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
  >Is it just me or does this actually seem kind of low? Yes, it's low.
• lupire 2y ago
  Some of us had our family dispatched in bulk, but thanks.
  • zamadatix 2y ago
    E.g. the article is about their 5th grade math teacher.
• jfengel 2y ago
  I don't know if I'd go to the funerals of all 150 people in my set. Most of them are acquaintances rather than friends or family. I go to much fewer than 2 funerals per year. But now that I'm 55 it will likely start picking up.
• tivert 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? Not for someone who's young and mostly disconnected from their grandparents' generation. In my case, my family lived far away from pretty much all my relatives, which meant I'm not very close to any of them and going to a funeral meant lots of short-notice plane tickets. I think I've only gone to two funerals in my life: one grandparent who died geographically close to use when I was a kid, and the father (who I never met) of a friend of mine. I think it would have been better if it had been different, and I had gone to more funerals, because now my lack of exposure adds a whole extra layer of awkwardness onto dealing with death.
  • jerlam 2y ago
    Even if I was close to my grandparents' generation, I only have four of them and that number doesn't increase over time. I don't think I know 16 * 2 = 32 people of my grandparents' generation, especially not now, way past my teenage years.
    • tivert 2y ago
      > Even if I was close to my grandparents' generation, I only have four of them and that number doesn't increase over time. The scenario I was thinking of to get to more than "five or six" funerals by age 16, was to have "always go to the funeral" parents who took you to the funerals of grandparents and great aunts/uncles living nearby.
• seryoiupfurds 2y ago
  Really? I'm in my 30s and I've been to fewer than that. > They say your social cluster is 150 people Maybe yours is.
• blahedo 2y ago
  My sister and I were talking about this recently (at a funeral in our family). We're in our 40s, and people older than us had largely been to a dozen funerals or more by their teenage years, while people younger than us often went to their first in their 20s or later (or perhaps when their own parents or grandparents died and to no others). We have not-entirely-negative memories of growing up going to funerals, because that's where we saw and caught up with extended family, so funerals are... well, not exactly easy, but they're not traumatic in their own right. For some of our slightly younger friends, though, even attending the wake and funeral in our family, they were having a harder time than we were. And almost none of our cousins brought their kids. For the author, six by 16 probably was a lot more than any of her friends, yes. It's an interesting shift. A loss, I think.
  • smeej 2y ago
    I was forbidden from going to my great-grandmother's funeral with my parents even though I was 11 and an extremely well-disciplined child. "We want you to remember her as she lived, not as she died" was the reason given at the time, but leaving me out of the event where people were remembering her as she lived didn't make sense to me. When my grandfather died when I was 15, not only wasn't I allowed to go, but I had to stay home and watch my siblings as my parents traveled a thousand miles away for a week. We more than had the money for plane tickets. They just didn't want to bring us (youngest was 10, and also not troublesome). For my other older relatives, they've all insisted on not having services, and I can't help but feel it's both an effect and a cause of the fact that my extended family is very disconnected and fragmentary.
    • 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
      Okay, same here. It's not like I'm cutting people off because I'm a millennial. My parents are / were just very distant from their families, didn't make much effort to tie their children into their adult social networks, etc. I went to the only funeral I was ever invited to lol.
• D13Fd 2y ago
  Honestly that seemed really high to me. I went to my first funeral at 41. I did go to a couple of viewings/wakes before that. I’m not religious, and I guess I just don’t know enough people who would invite me to a funeral.
  • SoftTalker 2y ago
    I'm almost 60 and have only been to a handful of funerals. One or two as a kid for my grandparents who I don't even really remember, one in high school for a friend, and a few other relatives and friends on my wife's side of the family.
• michaelt 2y ago
  Generally the number of your friends who have funerals is heavily biased towards the end of your life. America's average lifespan is 77. When you're 16, your parents are perhaps 46, and their parents are maybe 76. And a lot of people live for 10+ years after retirement, so your teachers might all be alive too. If you've got a big extended family, or you're part of an organisation like a church where 16 year olds come are getting to know 70+ year olds, you might have gone to more than 6 funerals. But generally? At 16 your parents, their friends, your aunts and uncles, your 16 year old friends, their parents? Good chance they're all still alive. Your grandparents - maybe, maybe not.
  • bluGill 2y ago
    Your grandparents also have siblings, and your parents would drag you to those funerals. You should also have people of many different ages in your social group and some of them will die of old age (and once in a while someone young).
    • sanderjd 2y ago
      > You should also have people of many different ages in your social group "Should" seems right, but in practice, do young people have this? How? (Thinking of the US here.) When I was a kid, this came through church. But church attendance among the young has fallen off a cliff, with (to my knowledge) no replacement.
• wat10000 2y ago
  I’m in my 40s and I’ve been to four, for each of my grandparents. That age clustering thing seems very important to me. For most of my life, my grandparents were the only people I knew well who were around that age. Even now, there aren’t anywhere near 150 people whose funeral I’d attend.