Fancy dress, balloons, even vodka shots. Tacky modern funerals make it so hard to grieve . . .
THE FUNERAL, I expected, would be a sombre, dignified affair, so I’d dressed accordingly (or so I thought) in a dark silk dress, jacket and black straw hat.
This was the funeral of a close friend — I wanted to do him proud. But as I walked up to the prayer hall, I started to wonder if I’d got the right day — or even the right event.
Jazz blared from speakers and the place was lit up with garish flashing lights. Everyone seemed to be wearing what looked like beachwear: sun hats, matador pants, Hawaiian-style multi-coloured shirts and strapless tops. I felt over-dressed and self-conscious.
It is perhaps inevitable, now I am approaching my eighth decade, that I attend quite a few funerals nowadays. And I have spotted a move away from stark black, seen by many as a hangover from the Victorian age.
I’ve noticed, without irritation, the odd red cardigan or orange tie creeping into attire, and I’ve been to a funeral of a little girl where everyone was asked to wear pink, her favourite colour, which seemed comforting.
But this? I felt like I’d entered Disney World. Inside there was loud music and a slideshow playing on loop. It was meant to illustrate my friend’s commercial success in a range of creative fields, but felt like a sales promotion. It would have been fine, at a push, had this been a memorial event a few months after the funeral. But this was the funeral itself.
My FRIEND’S ceremony continued with songs, tributes, poems, guitar solos, balloons, floating candles and — can you believe this? — vodka shots on the way out.
The religious content, if there was any, was minimal. A lay preacher cracked unsuitable after- dinner-type jokes rather than reciting the 23rd Psalm, as the coffin was led out.
We mourners were left feeling… I don’t know. Cheated? Indifferent? I didn’t feel like I’d mourned the passing of a dear friend. If I had been given a goodie bag and a slice of cake, I don’t think I would have been surprised.
And yet these all- singing, alldancing funerals are becoming increasingly fashionable according to a survey by the Co-op out this week. It showed that with everything from fancy dress to novelty coffins, the modern individualistic funeral, just like weddings, is becoming more of a selfindulgent extravaganza rather than a dignified rite of passage.
It was perhaps inescapable, with commercial pressures and the decline of religion, that funerals would go the same way as traditional weddings, with ‘destination funerals’ now held in anything from sports halls to beaches, mountains and zoos.
Funerals have become tailormade — no option is ruled out as long as it’s a celebration of life rather than a marker of death and is, as that tired phrase says, ‘what they would have wanted’.
To some it may sound romantic: locating a funeral in a beauty spot or adding individual touches to illustrate the deceased’s life.
But I can’t help question whether this latest fad does anyone any favours, especially for the bereaved. I suspect they could inflict a lot of damage.
Failure to grieve can lead to physical and mental illness. When we admire someone for returning to work a few days after a funeral, it’s generally because it makes us more comfortable, but depression and anger will eventually surface — perhaps years later, as so many case histories show.
A bad back, insomnia, panic attacks — so often these can be traced back to unacknowledged grief, particularly when that person may have seemed to be coping exceptionally well in the early months. I’ve seen this too often.
I found the enforced, lighthearted atmosphere of my friend’s funeral jarring. It made things more difficult and prolonged the illusion that nothing had really changed, downgrading death to being no more lifechanging than buying a new car.
It made me think of my husband’s funeral 30 years ago; my shock at becoming a widow at 44, when Jacques died from cancer. How I dreaded that funeral. The thought of letting the world see my grief appalled me, but I knew it was necessary: not for Jacques, but for me, to apply a ‘full stop’ to the next chapter in my grief.
I followed the casket as if in a trance. I got through it as everyone gets through it, but it certainly was no fun day out. Of course it wasn’t. It couldn’t be.
Western societies are not good at mourning generally, except among a few minorities. The Jewish do it well with their ‘shiva’ — seven days of mourning where the community brings food in for the mourners who do nothing but sit on low stools. Then there are Indian communities with their loving hands-on approach to the body, and the Irish wake.
But nowadays we British tend to disparage extravagant displays of mourning, treating weeping and wailing largely as a weakness or self-indulgence instead of a psychological necessity.
With the increasing disregard for formal mourning, bereaved individuals get little support. Grieving takes time — something our busy, modern society doesn’t allow. The ‘good mourner’ now is the one who gets back to normal Celebrating life: Nowadays even superhero-themed funerals are an option as soon as possible. ‘Isn’t she marvellous,’ we say of the widow who returns to work a day later.
But as every good anthropologist knows from studying societies around the world with elaborate mourning rites, a set period of grieving must be recognised.
It used to be the case here. In the Victorian era there were defined lengths of time for stages of mourning. People virtually withdrew from society for a set period, or were recognised as being in ‘depressive withdrawal’.
This was not done purely in the name of propriety. I’d say it was as necessary as a period of rest after a physical illness. Now you see many families who can’t wait to get it all over with in one day, with the funeral-cum-memorial-cum ‘let’s have a party’.
WE MAY laugh at it, but the dark dress, sombre music or ban on dancing encourages the mourner to accept what the ‘fun funeral’ denies: someone loved has gone.
Forcing mourners into an ill-fitting state of jollity, ordering them to hold back tears and knock back vodka, doesn’t allow for adjustment and reflection.
We all know the widow will probably be left poorer, the widower lonelier, the child without a role model and the friend sadder. But is this acknowledged?
One should perhaps have seen it coming, with our increasing belief that death itself can somehow be avoided: that medicine or technology can allow us to live for ever. As one man put it: ‘This post-war generation has the idea none of us are going to die.’ This has led to a more shallow, consumerist approach to mourning.
Nobody would expect us to go back to a prolonged Victorian ritual, but I do feel this ‘stripping down’ has left many all at sea, staring at pictures on Facebook from a ‘dream funeral’ which feel neither fun nor comforting.
No one put it better than the Bard when he said: ‘Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak knits up the o’erwrought heart and bids it break.’
I’m not sure a romantic funeral in the woods or a themed party give sorrow the words, or the reflection, it properly deserves.
HAVE you been to an alternative funeral? Send us your thoughts: femailreaders@dailymail.co.uk.