Have funerals become a mere formality?

Why write about obituaries? Mourning rites in Canada have been reduced to a minimum in order that life may go on.

More than 50 per cent of all funerals are now direct disposal. Sorrow is becoming a formality.

The awkward demands of doing the right thing have to be followed — as quickly and as inexpensively as possible.

A service may be promised at a later date when the loss has gone out of the event. For others, the protective rituals may be set in motion, not so much for the dear departed as for the comforting of family and friends.

Nothing becomes the measure of our lives today so much as the way we die and are buried.

What if my entire life, my entire conscious life, simply was not the real thing?

But if this is the case, said Tolstoy’s dying Ivan Ilyich, and I am taking leave of my life with the awareness that I squandered all I was given and have no possibility of rectifying matters, what then?

Sickness before death is one of God’s mercies; where truth, humility and poverty have their finest hour together.

What makes a good eulogy work? Is it not some illumination in a person’s life, unlike any other, one which indicates where the real heart of a person lies.

Walker Percy, asks in his novels how do you find a moment that clarifies who you are and connects you with your true self and fellow humans?

How do you catch hold of yourself before its over?

He said in all my work the central character is dislocated and alienated from customary culture or environment. One of his more difficult books to read is aptly called Love In the Ruins.

A eulogy is a time and a way of saying something that cannot be said at any other time. Some measure of a character, who is unlike any other in a family, one which indicates where the real heart of the person lies.

It would have to be a story that was totally right, true and unexpected. It would have to be a story of rebirth that was in character with all that followed, a gesture that made contact with and welcomed mystery.

The great Mystery of God’s love that connects you to your moral and spiritual sense. As one of my dying acquaintances said; “God eventually found a wonderful way for my salvation.”