Death
“Will You Help Me Pick Up a Body?”
This is a question I’ve had to ask a few of my friends ever once upon a busy day at the funeral home.
House pick ups are different than hospital and nursing home pick ups. “House calls” as we call them often involves obstacles (like stairs, furniture, etc.) that one person cannot overcome along.
While hospital and nursing home pick ups usually only require ONE person to make the removal, house calls require TWO.
There’s three of us at the funeral home who are capable of making house removals. When one out of those three is on vacation, leaving two behind, things can get sticky. Every once upon a busy day when we are picking up more bodies than our personnel can handle, I’ll have to randomly call in some back up … which usually ends of being one of my buddies.
Last year I called two separate friends on two separate occasions.
When I called both of them, I gave them this line:
“Do you want to make $150 dollars for an hour’s worth of work?”
“Sure!”, they said.
And when I told them HOW that $150 was to be made, both were still willing. After telling them what to wear, how the whole procedure would work and what they should expect, they both did a wonderful job. In fact, on one occasion, we arrived at the home of the deceased and the family feed us pizza. I paid my buddy $150 and he got free pizza too. Good deal.
This past Friday I was in the too-many-calls-with-too-little-personnel situation. Both of the friends I had called before were on vacation, so I called up another friend.
“Do you want to make $150 for an hours worth of work?”
“Sure”, he said. And then he asked, “Do I have to touch a dead body?”
“Yes.”, I said.
“Then $150 isn’t enough. I don’t want to touch a dead person.”, he stated.
I totally understood his position, told him I’d hold this over him forever and was able to find someone else who was willing to touch the dead.
How would your respond if your friendly funeral director asked you for help? Take my survey:
Tips for Helping Your Children Grieve
In the Western world, death is one of the last taboos. Death has become so sterile … so unspeakable … so frightful … so improper … that we assume we MUST protect the innocent souls from it’s darkness. In many parental minds, those “innocent souls” who need the most protection are our children.
Death, though, isn’t something that we CAN protect our children from. It is a part of life. A part of life that we can either ignore, or we can learn to find the life that exists in death.
Here are a few helpful tips that I’ve gathered from three separate Counseling journals about how to help your children grieve:
- When death happens, have a close relative, preferable a parent, tell the child about it immediately.
- Understand that children do indeed grieve, can comprehend loss and experience grief processes.
- Stay close to the child, giving them physical affection.
- Let the child see you grieve; it gives them permission to grieve on their own. “It will help the child to see the remaining parent, friends and relatives grieve. Grief shared is grief diminished…if everyone acts stoically around the child, he or she will be confused by the incongruity. If children get verbal or nonverbal cues that mourning is unacceptable, they cannot address the mourning task.”
- Avoid euphemisms such as, “passed on,” “gone away,” “departed”. In and of itself, the concept of death is difficult enough for a child to understand; using euphemisms will only add to the difficulty.
- Advise the child to attend the funeral, but do not force him or her to go.
- Gently help the child grasp the concept of death. Avoid vague explanations to the child’s questions, but answer each question as honestly as possible.
- Keep other stressing situations, such as moving or changing schools to a minimum; after the ceremonies, continue child’s regular routines.
- Be honest with the child about the depth of the pain he or she will feel. “You may say, ‘this is the most awful thing could happen to you.’ Contrary to popular belief, minimizing the grief does not help.
Based on the above tips, how would you answer the question, “Should I bring my child to a funeral?”
How Funeral Taboo Are You?
Answer these questions with a “yes” or “no”. If you answer all “yes”, you are 100% funeral taboo … in other words, you’re willing to try funeralization practices that aren’t generally accepted by society.
With each “no” your taboo goes down 10%.
(NOTE: these questions assume a disposition of burial)
1. Do you want to be buried/cremated in something other than dress clothes?
2. Does a house funeral appeal to you?
3. Would you like your pet to attend your funeral?
4. Are you more likely to spend money on a funeral meal than funeral merchandise?
5. Is burial in a traditional cemetery unappealing to you?
6. Would you rather have your funeral ceremony be more extemporaneous than structured … less preacher centered and more sharing centered?
7. Does having a photographer and/or videographer at a funeral appeal to you?
8. Do you want to incorporate aspects of a green funeral into your funeral?
9. Are you familiar with words like “Ecoffin” and “Ecopod“?
10. Have you considered that “DIY” can apply to funerals?
So, how taboo are you?
Disenfranchised Grief: The Unrecognized Mourners
Grief shared is grief diminished. When an individual dies, that death throws a web of relationships out of balance, causing the mourners to learn how to live in the new normal. That new normal is best found together in community.
When grief isn’t shared. When there is no community to share it. When it isn’t recognized by society, then grief becomes complicated.
There is grief that is produced by “death” (both literal and real) in our society that aren’t recognized. This kind of grief is a disenfranchised grief.
Here are a couple forms of grief that simply aren’t validated by society:
1. Grief from miscarriages. This is a silent grief. A grief that few people share; and when they do share, few people show compassion. And while the mother may have the greatest form of disenfranchised grief, the father can also be the silent sufferer as he is sometimes thrust in the supporting role, being unable to deal with his own emotions.
2. Death of a pet. Pets become part of the family; and when they die it’s almost like losing a family member, except no one in the community recognizes your loss. “It’s just a dog” is both true and false.
3. Grief from abortions. This topic has become so political that it has lost its human element. Abortions hurt. And the mothers who choose abortions will often grieve. Even if they don’t grieve at the time of the abortion, there is something lost … and that loss can hurt.
4. Grief of the supporter. When death occurs, roles quickly play out. There’s the main mourner(s) and there’s the supporting cast. That supporting cast — those who take care of the main mourner (the spouse of the deceased, the children of the deceased) — are often very close to the deceased themselves. But because they are the supporters, they simply aren’t allowed the time to grieve. They are the strong ones.
5. Grief from suicide. Suicide is such a difficult, tragic and complicated death that those who are left behind are often not sure how to grieve … or if they should even grieve at all. To complicate the issue, outside society can often look at suicide as such a taboo that they don’t recognize the grief of those surrounding the suicide.
6. Grief from the death of an Ex. Whether it’s the death of an ex-spouse, ex-lover or ex-boyfriend/girlfriend, if the deceased is the “ex” there’s an assumption that you aren’t allowed to grieve, because that relationship “has already been severed.” Just because someone is an “ex” doesn’t mean that you don’t have the permission to grieve.
7. Grief over a loss that isn’t a person.
Have you ever experienced disenfranchised grief?
Have you even been the one who has disenfranchised someone else’s grief?
Unmet Expectations and Grief
The problem is that you, the grieving person, don’t know what you need and your loved ones don’t know how to help. This disparity often leads to a lot of conflict and unmet expectations, on both sides.
Throughout our experiences with my cancer and our child-loss, we have experienced a lot of unmet expectations and conflict in our relationships with others. We have wrongly expected that people should only use the words that are helpful and encouraging, while providing the exact support that we need from them, even though we, ourselves, had no clue what we needed.
Part of the struggle is that when people are in the middle of processing grief, their emotions are all over the place. And sometimes, the very last discussion we ever want to have is to confront someone on how they have hurt us through their words, actions, or inactions. Imagine how much more difficult this is for the grieving person. The reality is that all too often, a grieving person will allow these hurts to build up because these issues become secondary to the pain that caused their grief to begin with. When this happens, it can take weeks, months, even years, to sort through the myriad of pain and hurt caused from the lack of support they felt while they were grieving!
My encouragement to anyone who is grieving is that when you are hurt by words, action, or inaction, to discuss your hurt as soon as you can with the person who hurt you. If your loved one doesn’t know how you are feeling, they will likely continue using similar words, actions, or inactions, which will likely lead to more conflict in your relationship, and cause a bigger divide.
To help you do this, here are 4 steps I use to communicate my hurt with others because of unmet expectations:
1. Discuss what the unknown expectation was to begin with. I didn’t realize how important it was for me to have people acknowledge the first year of our daughter’s Birth and Death Day, until only a few people contacted us on “Kylie’s Day” to let us know they were thinking about our family.
2. Get to the heart of why the expectation was unmet. I was hurt because it seemed like people either didn’t remember this day that was so tragic for our family, or didn’t care, neither of which felt very good.
3. Figure out if the expectation needs to be adjusted or if the unmet expectation was simply a learning experience. For me, in this circumstance, I needed to do both – adjust my expectation and learn from it. When we brought up our hurt with people we thought would have remembered to call or write to us on Kylie’s Day, some of them remembered, but were afraid to call for fear of bringing up a hurtful memory. They didn’t know if we wanted people to call, if we wanted to be left alone, if we wanted to talk, or if we wanted to be reminded. We were able to talk immediately about our hurt and move forward in our relationships with a better understanding of where the other person was coming from.
4. Adjust your actions in the future. This is where I took what I learned from this unmet expectation. I now do my best to make sure that when someone I know experiences the death of a child that I write down important dates for them on my calendar. Sometimes, there are separate birth and death days, sometimes what is important is the original due date of their child, the day they miscarried, the day they had to give back a child they were intending to adopt, or the day the family buried their child. Then, I do my best to connect with these family and friends on these days, because the truth is that families hurting over the loss of a child, DO want family and friends to remember and acknowledge these milestones because it helps them feel like their child is loved.
Question: When you were grieving, did you have expectations of other people that were unmet? If so, how did you deal with this hurt?
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Author of Good Grief!, Erica McNeal is a three-time cancer survivor, who has also experienced the loss of five children. With sixteen years of experience in Youth, Marriage, and Women’s Ministries, Erica is passionate about equipping people to love others well through difficult times. She uses her experiences to teach people what not to say, what to say, and how to help when people are hurting. You can follow her on twitter: @toddanderica, or visit her website: www.ericamcneal.com.
