Tag: Funerals and Memorials

Make Time to Mourn

Though the pandemic has posed obstacles to funerals, delaying memorial services has also opened up unexpected opportunities for reflection and creativity.

After the death of a loved one, the grief of each survivor is often different — but the ritual of holding a funeral is shared.

“One of the big things that a memorial service does is it’s a collective acknowledgment,” said Megan Devine, a therapist specializing in grief and the author of the book “It’s OK That You’re Not OK.” “Acknowledgment really is one of the only medicines we have for grief.”

Yet because of social-distancing mandates and prohibitions on large-group gatherings, those group traditions have been upended these past 15 months. Instead, the families and communities surrounding those who have died have had to come up with new and creative ways to celebrate lives lost.

Some have opted to hold memorial services over Zoom, where they observe religious rites like sitting shiva or reciting the janazah prayer, or having virtual brunches or dance parties. Others have decided to postpone, holding a larger, in-person memorial months or even a year following a loved one’s death. Now, as restrictions are lifted and vaccinations become more widespread, some funeral directors are beginning to have conversations about services that had previously been delayed.

The postponements and some lingering constraints can take an emotional toll on families who feel left in limbo, but at the same time, they may also provide an opportunity to reframe the roles funeral rituals play.

“There’s that belief, which is a myth, that you get closure and then you go back to life really quickly,” Ms. Devine said. “Memorials and funerals are not the end of the grieving process. They’re part of the beginning.”

Here are some ways individuals and experts are thinking about holding memorial services after a delay.

Consider the themes of your memorial.

The raw grief that immediately follows a death can make it challenging to come up with a clear plan for a service. “I hear from a lot of people who were like, the funeral was a blur to me,” Ms. Devine said. As time passes, you may be better equipped to map out how you’d like to memorialize a loved one, and the role a service will play in your grieving.

“You’re able to give some real thought to, ‘What does this service need to look like to honor and celebrate that life? What does my participation need to look like?’” said Bryant Hightower, president of the National Funeral Directors Association. “You begin to understand your needs a little more than you would have initially.” Think about the tone and substance of your program and eulogies, and talk openly with other family members and friends about your plans.

Or perhaps what’s needed is more depth. In February of last year, Christina Mevs’s uncle, a professor and activist, died suddenly from complications of AIDS. It wasn’t until the end of last month, some 14 months later, that Ms. Mevs, 32, an advertising strategist, and her family held an in-person service for her uncle, as well as for her grandfather and aunt who had recently died of Covid-19, in their hometown Niagara Falls, N.Y.

During the intervening period, she gathered a wealth of information about her uncle’s past, particularly his work with the AIDS advocacy group Act Up. She read interviews and news articles, watched archival videos and interviewed his friends and students — research that ended up playing a central role in how she wanted to eulogize him. “I was really able to glean so many new insights for how he tirelessly worked for the AIDS community,” she said.

Take your time.

Earlier this year, Janice Marie Johnson, a director of ministries and faith development for the Unitarian Universalist Association, began planning a large online memorial service for her twin sister, Hope, who died of lung and heart disease at the end of November. She hoped for it to take place on March 28 — Palm Sunday, a day Hope had loved. But sifting through old photos and mementos, alone, at the beginning of this year “became too difficult, too painful,” Dr. Johnson said. She, her daughter and her niece decided to delay the memorial service until the summer, and instead, at the end of March, they gathered in Baltimore to look at photos, talk and raise a toast to Hope. In the meantime, Dr. Johnson has also been collecting her thoughts in a journal.

“Had the service been earlier, I wouldn’t have remembered some of the nicknames, some of the twin language, so many memories that I’m taking the time to explore,” Dr. Johnson said.

Consider selecting a day that means something to you or your loved one. But as restrictions are lifted and demand increases for officiants and venues, it may get more challenging to book, so don’t sweat the date too much. And remember there’s no such thing as preparing too far in advance, according to Sarah Chavez, the executive director of the Order of the Good Death, an organization that provides education and resources about death. She likened planning a memorial service to other major life events: a birthday, childbirth, wedding or new job.

Create alternative rituals.

Because so many funeral traditions involve the body — bathing, dressing and burying — it can be hard to envision what a service might look like in its absence. If a burial has already happened, Ms. Chavez recommended creating another centerpiece to structure a ceremony around. “It could be really helpful to create a focal point as a substitute for the body,” she said.

This might mean erecting an altar with photos and candles. Or, set aside a garden plot where friends and family can plant and tend to flora in a person’s memory. Memorials can also accompany the unveiling of a headstone or the scattering or burying of ashes. Though Dr. Johnson was unable to return her sister’s body to Jamaica — during the pandemic, repatriating the bodies of the deceased has proved difficult — she plans to bury Hope’s locs, which were cut off after her death according to tradition observed by her Jamaican and Ethiopian family, at their family plot in Kingston in June.

You may rethink the role an officiant or celebrant would usually play in a service, and instead have a friend or family member lead. Don’t hesitate to deputize friends and family to help plan. (Ms. Devine suggested assigning roles to individuals who said to reach out if you need anything.) Funeral homes and cemeteries might also no longer be obvious venues for memorial services occurring several months or a year after a death. Ms. Devine heard from individuals who were planning to embark on memorial road trips or hikes or to scatter ashes in a meaningful location or to visit the place where a loved one died; members of Ms. Chavez’s Latinx community often turn to car cruises. Or maybe it’s a sports field or park, outdoor spaces that have the advantage of permitting social distancing.

“It’s not that these things weren’t options before,” Ms. Devine said, “but I think being freed of the time constraint loosens something up in the creative mind about, ‘What do we really want?’”

Remember, there’s no script.

Many families who delay funeral services don’t end up holding them at all, Mr. Hightower observed. Often, this is because of concern that holding a service later on would refresh the grief they’d started to come to terms with. It doesn’t have to: “Take where you are today and let that dictate what the service needs to look like,” Mr. Hightower recommended. “Don’t take me back to ground zero of my loss.”

Sarah Wagner, a professor of anthropology at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and Tariq Adely, a Ph.D. student in the department of anthropology, are two members of a team researching how the pandemic has affected mourning rituals. Some individuals take comfort from the expected funeral rites that immediately follow a death, which offer a sense of collective belonging, and their absence has been confusing and challenging, Mr. Adely said.

“We saw creative and innovative ways but also underlying that, for the majority of folks, there’s a feeling that it’s been partial, it’s been constrained,” Dr. Wagner said.

Bill Keveney, a journalist in Los Angeles who recently published a story about the funeral he held for his brother Tom seven months after his death, echoed this. “Having it withheld for so long, I have a greater appreciation for these rituals,” Mr. Keveney said. “There’s nothing worse than the actual loss of the person. But you just feel you could be doing more.”

Even under non-pandemic circumstances, life doesn’t simply return to normal after a funeral or memorial service; commemorating a life lost is always an individual process — and an ongoing one. In addition to holding a service, Mr. Keveney and his sister have also visited locations dotted along the Connecticut coast that his brother, an avid fisherman, had loved. “I look forward to doing more of that,” he said. “If someone was important enough to you in your life, you’re always going to miss them. But you hold onto that because it matters that they’re not there anymore.”

We Weren’t Meant to Grieve Alone

We’ve been deprived of the last moments with loved ones and in-person gatherings to mourn together. What can we do to heal?

Swans do it, chimps do it; even elephants and whales do it. They fall in love and then after their beloved dies, they grieve. Human beings differ only to the extent that we have inherited rituals that help us deal with a shattering emotion. But what happens when those rites must be relinquished or reinvented during a plague year?

This question started to haunt me when a member of my cancer support group, Barbara, dropped out of our Zoom meetings. Hospice nurses had been helping her at home and now she was actively dying from ovarian cancer. How could our group continue to connect with her? I left messages with my name and phone number on her answering machine. I sent an email with that information — perhaps her two adult sons would access her account — but received no response.

In the past, I had sat by the bedside of dying group members and later attended religious services or life celebrations. Now, I found myself grieving the sorry fact that I had not been able to say goodbye to Barbara. After news of her death reached us, I grieved that I did not even know how to reach her family to tell them what a compassionate companion she had been.

The experience made me appreciate if not the curative then at least the consoling value of vigils, wakes, burials, funerals and memorials, each in its own way an event staged to help us stay attached and then begin loosening our ties to the ever-receding dead person. While sitting by a deathbed holding a hand, while standing in a cemetery as a coffin or urn is lowered into the earth with a prayer or a poem, while hearing a memory recalled at a funeral, we treasure the person who had been and gain comfort from others who share our sorrow. Most of these ceremonies have been canceled during the past year.

A new book on grief by the psychologist Dorothy P. Holinger is useful in thinking about the impact of the termination of mourning rituals, although it was written before the pandemic. The book, “The Anatomy of Grief,” looks at how grief can wreck the brain, the heart and the emotions of the bereaved, a word that signifies those who feel robbed.

“Grief,” Dr. Holinger explains, “is the price we pay for love.” To be bereaved is to be robbed of the loved one and of the world and the self that had existed when they were alive.

Dr. Holinger’s book made me consider how normal or resilient grief differs from pandemic grief. The distinction reminded me of the bifurcation Sigmund Freud made between mourning — a healthy coming to terms with loss — and melancholia — a dysfunctional passage mired in misery. For in pestilent times, as Shakespeare put it, “grief lies all within.”

At any stage of history, to be sure, grief can destroy the world of survivors who cannot eat, sleep, think clearly, or go about their daily business. Grief can also obliterate identity. Who are we when we are no longer our parent’s child, our child’s parent, our sibling’s brother or sister, our partner’s partner, our friend’s friend? During a lockdown that isolates us by forbidding physical proximity, grief finds no outlet. We are deprived of the last moments in which we can see, touch, hear or speak to the beloved as well as subsequent days and months when we can cry, laugh, hug and reminisce with friends and family.

Dr. Holinger provides a taxonomy of different types of grief — some 17 varieties in all — many of which plunge the mourner into lingering preoccupation with the lost loved one. To use some of her terms about troubled forms of grieving, in a pandemic grief that cannot be made manifest may be “anticipatory” (death is expected), “disenfranchised” (mourners may not be acknowledged), “postponed” (sorrow remains unexpressed) and “forgotten” (loss goes unacknowledged).

When Judy Woodruff, the anchor of the PBS “NewsHour,” pauses each Friday night to memorialize five people killed by Covid-19, she acknowledges that she uses these individuals as representatives of a much larger population. In doing so, she encourages us to entertain the unimaginable fact that more than 500,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus, leaving innumerable widowed, orphaned and heartbroken survivors.

Those who mourn people who died during the pandemic but not from it are also affected. Like many survivors, the members of my cancer support group devised a way to communicate our grief over Barbara’s death. Each of us wrote a letter to her family that we collected and gave to Barbara’s oncologist, who forwarded the packet to her sons.

A few weeks later, I confronted a more fraught death. My former husband, a very dear friend, died unexpectedly, probably from a heart attack. It was a shock to his intimates but especially to our two daughters, neither of whom lives where he did. With travel an impossibility, how could we honor his memory? How could we find solace in each other? How could we bury his remains or sort through his things or close down his apartment?

These challenges have taught me how feeble and how effective electronic solutions can be. In an attempt to join together, the girls organized a series of Zoom shivas, the weeklong condolence calls in which many Jewish mourners engage. But our online meetings felt desiccated without an influx of visitors bringing food, drinks, flowers and a steady supply of embraces, kisses, jokes and tears. Yet a month or so later, the photographs, music and storytelling at a Zoom memorial arranged by the girls did console us as well as many of their father’s far-flung relatives and friends.

Still, there is nothing virtual about death. Perhaps families like ours can gather together on future anniversaries of the death, what in Yiddish is called the yahrzeit.

If, as after other national catastrophes, public memorials are erected to commemorate the suffering inflicted by the pandemic, they will need to honor the dead as well as all the mourners bereft of their bereavement.

Covid Victims Remembered Through Their Objects

The special project “What Loss Looks Like” presents personal artifacts belonging to those who have left us and explores what they mean to those left behind.

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As the art director of the Well desk, I’ve spent the last year looking for images to reflect the devastation of the pandemic and the grief it has wrought. As the crisis has stretched on, I’ve thought of all the people who have lost loved ones to Covid-19 — not to mention those who have lost loved ones, period — and how they were cut off from the usual ways of gathering and grieving. Watching the numbers rise every day, it was easy to lose sight of the people behind the statistics. I wanted to find a way to humanize the death toll and re-establish the visibility of those who had died.

To help our readers honor the lives of those lost during the pandemic, we decided to ask them to submit photographs of objects that remind them of their loved ones. The responses were overwhelming, capturing love, heartache and remembrance. We heard from children, spouses, siblings, grandchildren and friends — people who had lost loved ones not only to Covid-19 but from all manner of causes. What united them was their inability to mourn together, in person.

Dani Blum, Well’s senior news assistant, spent hours speaking with each individual by phone. “It’s the hardest reporting I’ve ever done, but I feel really honored to be able to tell these stories,” she said. “What struck me the most about listening to all of these stories was how much joy there was in remembering the people who died, even amid so much tragedy. Many of these conversations would start in tears and end with people laughing as they told me a joke the person they lost would tell, or their favorite happy memory with them.”

The photographs and personal stories, published digitally as an interactive feature, was designed by Umi Syam and titled “What Loss Looks Like.” Among the stories we uncovered: A ceremonial wedding lasso acts as a symbol of the unbreakable bond between a mother and father, both lost to Covid-19 and mourned by their children. A ceramic zebra figurine reminds one woman of her best friend, who died after they said a final goodbye. A gold bracelet that belonged to a father never leaves his daughter’s wrist because she is desperate for any connection to his memory.

For those who are left behind, these items are tangible daily reminders of those who have departed. These possessions hold a space and tell a story. Spend time with them and you begin to feel the weight of their importance, the impact and memory of what they represent.

Museums have long showcased artifacts as a connection to the past. So has The New York Times, which published a photo essay in 2015 of objects collected from the World Trade Center and surrounding area on 9/11. As we launched this project, we heard from several artists who, in their own work, explored the connection between objects and loss.

Shortly after Hurricane Sandy, Elisabeth Smolarz, an artist in Queens, began working on “The Encyclopedia of Things,” which examines loss and trauma through personal objects. Kija Lucas, a San Francisco-based artist, has been photographing artifacts for the past seven years, displaying her work in her project “The Museum of Sentimental Taxonomy.”

“Saved: Objects of the Dead” is a 12-year project by the artist Jody Servon and the poet Lorene Delany-Ullman, in which photographs of personal objects from deceased loved ones are paired with prose to explore the human experience of life, death and memory. And the authors Bill Shapiro and Naomi Wax spent years interviewing hundreds of people and asking them about the most meaningful single object in their lives, gathering their stories in the book “What We Keep.”

As the pandemic continues to grip the nation, the Well desk will continue to wrestle with the large-scale grief that it leaves in its wake. Other features on this topic include resources for those who are grieving, the grief that’s associated with smaller losses, and how grief affects physical and psychological health. As for “What Loss Looks Like,” we are keeping the callout open, inviting more readers to submit objects of importance, to expand and grow this virtual memorial and provide a communal grieving space.