For my entire life, I’ve despised attending funerals. As a child, I assumed it was because I was sad that a loved one had passed on, but as an adult, I’ve discovered that it was never about my connection to the departed, but rather it was being surrounded by the intense overwhelming emotions of everyone else in the room that couldn’t make sense of the death.
The way we do funerals nowadays is disheartening. It’s filled with grief, sorrow, and a twisted opportunity to preach to the living a grotesque message of “fire and brimstone” awaiting them for not saying a specific prayer and sitting in a pew once a week to sing hymns.
For my entire life, I’ve despised attending funerals. As a child, I assumed it was because I was sad that a loved one had passed on, but as an adult, I’ve discovered that it was never about my connection to the departed, but rather it was being surrounded by the intense overwhelming emotions of everyone else in the room that couldn’t make sense of the death.
The way we do funerals nowadays is disheartening. It’s filled with grief, sorrow, and a twisted opportunity to preach to the living a grotesque message of “fire and brimstone” awaiting them for not saying a specific prayer and sitting in a pew once a week to sing hymns.
I couldn’t make sense of why I felt such intense emotions as a child—but now I understand that much of what I experienced and took on wasn’t my own. As a child, how do you rationalize feeling such a heavy burden as a wife of 40 years loses her spouse? How do you process the weight of a mother who lost her teenage daughter to mental illness? Those were never my feelings, but I didn’t know that back then.
More than anything, funerals confused me. They rarely celebrated the person’s life, they were chock full of lies about how the person lived, and they were often absent of the individual themselves. And you might say, “That’s silly, of course, the deceased person wasn’t at their funeral.” But I don’t mean in the physical—I mean their spirit.
In many cases, people’s spirits do linger or lurk at their funeral, curious about what might be said or to provide some comfort to their suffering loved ones. Often though, I find that they’re nowhere to be found because the funerals, like I said previously, are quite a buzz kill.
It’s especially hard on the spirit who has departed from the physical realm when they weren’t given ample time to make their transition to the other side. Sudden deaths, suicides, and the like, can often leave a person’s ghost confused, frustrated, and lost wondering what has happened to them. Humans naturally spend more time sleeping, dreaming, and transitioning as they near the end of their life but sudden deaths don’t allow for this.
One of my favorite memories as a child was spending time with my dear great-uncle as he neared the end of his life. Although he did pass away younger than most would’ve liked, he also had time to gracefully make his transition from this realm to the next. My grandmother was his only sibling, though, so his death was still particularly hard on her. One afternoon she took me with her to visit her brother. He had late-stage colon cancer and was on death’s door, and she was doing everything in her power to keep in comfortable in his final moments.
Against her wishes, I walked into his bedroom and said hello to him. I remember his sunken face and a body that was barely functioning. Sadness was all I felt, not because I was sad, but because I knew he was miserable and the way he was living was no life at all. He was laid up in a hospital bed with tubes, tape, and blankets, unable to speak or do anything for himself. My grandmother quickly shuffled me out of the room and to the kitchen to keep myself occupied while she took care of her brother.
To my surprise, I found my uncle instantaneously sitting at the oversized wooden table across from me. How did he get in here so fast? I smiled at him puzzled at how he’d disconnected himself from all the tubing, made his way through their maze of a home, and into the kitchen where I was so quickly, but I was so grateful to have someone to sit with me that I dismissed the perplexing circumstances.
“Would you like to help me build my puzzle?” He asked me. Giddy, I nodded in response, picked up an edge piece, and slid it toward him. “Ah yes, always start with the edges,” he chuckled and grinned at me in approval. For quite some time we worked on the puzzle. It was a photo of a steam train sailing past mountains and fields of flowers, something near and dear to his dad, my great-grandfather, who had worked on the railroads most of his life.
After what felt like hours, my grandma called for me to grab my things because it was time to leave. I waved goodbye to my great-uncle and headed to the car. After buckling my seatbelt, my grandma asked what I had been up to and I told her that I had been building a puzzle in the kitchen with my great-uncle while waiting on her. Dramatically, her head swiveled toward me, “Your uncle isn’t able to build puzzles right now, he’s very sick, remember?”
“Oh, I know he’s sick,” I responded, “I saw him in the bedroom. But then he decided he’d have more fun in the kitchen with me.”
My grandma’s expression to this day still makes me giggle because it was at this moment that she realized I wasn’t lying or being silly—I had been building a puzzle with my great-uncle. My great-uncle’s ghost that is. His final moments were spent learning how to acclimate to the spiritual realm and living without a material body, and I just so happened to be able to see and hear him during a window of time while he was practicing being on the other side before his official departure from this realm.
My grandmother was comforted despite her grief, and when the time came to attend my great uncle’s funeral weeks later, I once again remembered how much I hated having to sit through those. My great uncle actually was present for quite a bit of his service and even winked at me from across the funeral home causing me to do a double take as I looked back and forth between his still body in the casket at the front of the room and his lively dancing spirit near the corner.
He seemed happy and peaceful—and to me, that was something beautiful to celebrate and not grieve. With a subtle wave and a smile, I wished him well and after that, I never saw him again.