Miscellaneous
When My Son Confessed to Murder
Today’s guest post is written by Tim Kreider:
I had thought I had found a path to healing and wholeness, but then, in May of 2007, one of my oldest son’s best friends and his parents were murdered in their home. It was a gruesome crime that instilled fear into our home and the entire community. Nothing was stolen. There were no clues and no leads.
Approximately 30 days later my oldest son, who was 16 at the time, was admitted to a local mental health facility because of threats of suicide. I feared the loss of his friend had been too much for him. Unfortunately, this was just the beginning.
During a family counseling session my son confessed to his mother and me that he was the one responsible for the death or his friend and his parents! Thus began the darkest and most devastating period of my life. The wholeness I thought I had obtained was shattered into a life consumed by pain and brokenness. There was a time when I thought I would drown in the wave of despair that washed over me.
Fortunately, I was eventually able to rise above the despair and find my way to healing and wholeness. This doesn’t mean I’m perfect and never have a “bad” day. I’m human. Events and people sometimes chip away at me. I have moments where I feel sad or down. I get angry at things I know shouldn’t bother me. I say things that shouldn’t be said.
But I respond totally differently today. I don’t stay there. The peace and joy I’ve found soon return. I recognize when my past hurt and brokenness rears its ugly head and I now am able to acknowledge it, respond to it and not allow it to derail my day, my relationships, my life and ultimately the joy I’ve found in life.
I believe that if I can do it, everyone can do the same thing. Their lives can be joyful. My intense conviction is that no one needs to be or deserves to be lost in the wasteland of pain and brokenness. If I can help just one person heal and become whole again, then I will have spared one person the continued pain of being hurt and broken. In doing so, I’ll improve not only their life but also the lives of everyone they touch. What a gift to bring to the world.
People ask me how did I do it? How did I find joy? How did I find a way to give myself permission to be happy again?
I wish I had an easy answer. I remember at one point in time asking a therapist, “Just tell me what to do to get better and I’ll do it.” He smiled and told me it doesn’t work that way. Unfortunately, there isn’t a simple 1 -2 -3 step to healing and becoming whole. Each of us needs to find our own path.
We may need to change our view of the world. Is our view negative and angry or do we find the best in a situation and approach each “obstacle” with hope? How do we change our view of the world? Start by filling your mind and environment with positive words, books and people. This may sound harsh, but if it doesn’t lift you up, it tears you down. Remove what tears you down and replace it with what lifts you up. I’ve read many books by self-help gurus and spiritual leaders that reinforced positive and life-altering ways of thinking and approaching life.
I went to counseling, seeing a psychologist and having a safe place to be broken and honest was incredibly valuable. He helped me understand the process I was going through and how events and people in life influenced my attitudes and actions. It enabled me to respond differently and in a healthier fashion.
I realized the incredible liberation of forgiveness – accept God’s forgiveness given to you, no matter what you have done. Forgive yourself for all of the “mistakes” you have ever made. Forgive those who have “wronged” you – parents, siblings, spouses, co workers, leaders, strangers on the street – it doesn’t matter who – forgive – let go of the anger and the pain. It only damages you!
When I was asked to share my passion for healing and wholeness, the task seemed overwhelming to me. Our search for healing and wholeness has been a quest of mankind since the fall of Adam and Eve. There have been lives dedicated to this quest. Volumes and volumes of writings have attempted to show us the way. Jesus came, taught, died and rose to share with us how to become healed and whole. Yet we ALL remain hurt and broken.
Yes, everyone is hurt or broken in some way. You’re broken just like the rest of us. But that’s okay. There is always a way back to healing and wholeness.
*****
Ode to the Professional Mourner
Some are fair weather friends, who are there when you’re buying the beer. There to watch the game on your new plasma, but always “busy” when you’re moving that big piece of furniture or “stuck in traffic” when you need someone to pick you up from work when you happen to lock the keys in your car.
Fair weather friends, take notice of the Professional Mourner. Oh, Sultan of the Sulk. Helper of the Hurting, you’re there when the sky turns grey. You’re the wiping horse of the long day. You may not be around to celebrate a birthday or a wedding, but you’re the first one in line at a viewing, even beating the immediate family to the funeral home door. You’re the first one to shed a tear and the last one to leave the post-funeral luncheon.
You own stock in the Vatican’s Mass cards, and used all your vacation days to attend weekday funerals. The new BMW that the florist drives is single-handedly financed by the funeral flowers you purchase on a weekly basis. You may not even know the name of the deceased whose funeral you are attending, but you’re on a first name basis with all the morticians in the area. You collect memorial cards and prayer cards like they’re money and habitually ask the funeral director if that third story apartment in the funeral home is up for rent.
You, my friend, out dress the funeral directors with your gold cuff-links and silk color coordinated tie and handkerchief combo. Your greatest pleasure is when someone mistakes you for an undertaker. Sometimes, you don’t correct them. You just let them assume that you ARE an undertaker. You’ve attended more funerals than many funeral directors, so why not?
You own the shirt, “Free hugs” and are brave enough to wear it to Wal-Mart. Your tactile nature makes you a boarder-line molester in normal life, but a real life hero at a funeral, hugging everyone you see with a smile and an empathetic “I know”. The viewing line stops when you reach the family as you give each member in the receiving line a full measure of the comfort platitudes you memorized from grief.com.
Some buy one newspaper for the comic strips, but you buy at least three a day for the obituaries. You cut them out and laminate them, filing them like your tax records, and mailing the extras to your mother in Michigan. If there were a doctorate degree in obituaries you would have graduated summa cum laude. Master of the mourning. Comrade of comfort. You would rather be a pall bearer than get a promotion. Pal of the pall. Chum of the casket. You are the professional mourner. A true gloomy weather friend.
Grief Online: The Dos and Don’ts of Internet Etiquette
Today’s guest post is written by Dr. Candi K. Cann
Everyone seems to be online these days, and even if you are not on much, odds are that you have a Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr or Instagram account. With so much of our socializing done virtually, it is no surprise that we are grieving and mourning the deaths of our loved ones online too.
Here are a few Dos and Don’ts for grieving online.
• Don’t announce the death of someone online unless you are sure that the family, friends and anyone that should know about the death, knows already.
The most recent example of this was Wall Street Journal’s breaking news tweet on Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death. Both the death and the details of how he died were tweeted before his family was aware that he had died.
• Once everyone knows about the death, it is okay to post details about the funeral, wake, celebration of life ceremony online so that everyone knows, but please don’t create an Evite for it.
Evites are great for invitations — they are convenient and quick, but they shouldn’t be used in this case for three reasons:
1) They depend on the regular checking of email, and since funerals and memorials are generally held somewhat quickly, those invited may not get the email in time.
2) Evites sometimes land in the invitee’s junk folder, which means they won’t receive them, and funerals and memorials are meant to be open to anyone the deceased knew.
3) Evites are only for those that receive an invitation.
• If someone is posting a picture of themselves with the deceased, they are doing so to let you know they are grieving, so don’t write snarky comments on that picture.
Don’t do it. Just don’t. It isn’t the right time or place.
• If a family decides to leave a Facebook page active, a Twitter feed open, or an Instagram account on so that you can write comments, post messages, etc., please think about your audience.
Yes, we know you were Tom’s last serious girlfriend before his marriage, and probably the reason he finally got his act together to be able to commit to his wife and have children, but that doesn’t mean you should post old love letters or pictures to his webpage. His wife and all the rest of his family just won’t find it appropriate, and it might make their grief worse.
And yes, your position as ex-girlfriend means that you have a right to grieve, and that there is really no place for you to do so, but you will need to stick to your group of girlfriends, or maybe on your own private social media. While the Internet is awesome for giving everyone a voice, sometimes we need to think about our audience.
• Don’t write negative things about the dead.
Yes, your neighbor was a jerk, but if you didn’t say it to his face before he died, then it’s too late now. If you did, then he already knows how you feel, and there’s just no point in making his family and friends feel worse.
• Along those lines, don’t say anything negative about the living posting about the dead.
Yes, we are all getting tired of Katie’s sappy (and badly written, I might add) poems that she keeps writing and posting to her deceased best friend’s page, but please don’t say anything. Remember the old adage — if you can’t say anything nice, then don’t say anything at all? Well, remember it. Or at least, if you must say something that’s not nice, then say it to a close friend who has never met Katie. That way you can be sure Katie won’t find out.
And last, but not least, those funeral selfies.
• If you insist on taking a funeral selfie, try to keep the dead out of the pictures.
There’s a reason some people don’t go to wakes or funerals — they simply don’t know what to do with that open casket. Or maybe they want their last memory of Grandma to be a living one. If you must take a funeral selfie, please make sure there are no glimpses of Grandma in her casket. It’s bad enough we have to see pictures of your cute cat five times a day, we really don’t want to see your dead grandmother before we’ve even had our morning coffee.
*****
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Candi K. Cann received both her A.M. and Ph.D. in Comparative Religion from Harvard University, and her research focuses on death and dying, and the impact of remembering (and forgetting) in shaping how lives are recalled, remembered and celebrated. An avid reader, traveler, and lover of poetry, her passions are spending time with her family and friends and living well.
You can follow Candi on Twitter and pre-order her upcoming book, Virtual Afterlives: Grieving the Dead in the Twenty-First Century.
Ash Wednesday: The Day We Doubt Our Immortality Projects
Today is Ash Wednesday. And whether or not you consider yourself apart of the Christian church, there’s value to be learned from “Ash Wednesday.”
Ash Wednesday isn’t suppose to be comfortable. It’s a day when the Christian church takes repentance public. A day when something usually reserve for the private sphere gets pushed into the public sphere. It’s a day when repentance is there for all to see, with the sign of the cross inscribed in ash on one’s forehead.
It’s a public acknowledgement that we are mortal. That we — and all we stand for — are dust.
“Ash Wednesday” is a time of relinquishment … relinquishment of our project of immortality.
We are all — religious or not — seeking immortality in one way or another.
There are five main ways (per Robert Lifton) we pursue symbolic immortality:
Through our family heritage. Our children, grandchildren, etc.
Through our work. Our businesses, our job, our artwork, our discoveries, etc.
Through the well-being of nature. “So that our children can live better than we do”.
Through getting in touch with a higher power.
Through our involvement with a community larger than ourselves. Political party, religion, community service, the armed forces, etc.
Ash Wednesday is a day when we reflect on our immortality projects and acknowledge the fact that all our works will turn to dust. It’s a day when we stop denying death.
It’s good for us to remember that the works of our hands will not last forever. That our kingdoms will fall. That America will one day be no more. That our bodies will die. That our jobs, our business, our children, our name, our political ideals, and even our religion will one day find themselves in the annuls of history. And that history too will one day forget.
Ash Wednesday isn’t suppose to be comfortable. No, there’s nothing comfortable about this day. Today is a day that we repent of our immortality projects. Today is a day we remember that “from dust you were made and to dust you shall return.”
The value of Ash Wednesday is this: that in forgetting our immortality projects, we might strive for life now. That we forget ourselves and remember that today is all we have. And that love may be the only thing that makes today valuable.
Funeral Options
Today’s guest post is written by Patricia Fitchett.
*****
The funeral home that I work for is a big proponent of personalization. We even have the word “Options” right in our title. I have found from working in the funeral business for over 13 years that no funeral is exactly the same as another. Even if you use the same location, or the same officiant or the same prayers or readings, each person who is being honored/memorialized is a huge influence on the proceedings.
The best comment we get to hear is “It was exactly what he or she would have wanted!” (except of course in those situations where the LAST thing he or she would have wanted was to be dead.) It is a real pleasure to be able to help families make choices that make the service for their family member special and unique. That being said, we are often called upon to be the “bad taste police”; pointing out when an idea may not have the intended effect.
Let me give you an example. We’ve all heard Sarah McLachlan’s “In The Arms Of The Angels” song on the commercial where sad shelter dogs with their piteous eyes beg for a loving home. The song is beautiful and haunting and I have had people request it at funerals. From the snippet that you hear in the commercial, it sounds like it would be the perfect choice. But if you look a little farther into the lyrics you find phrases like this one: “everywhere you turn, there’s vultures and thieves at your back, and the storm keeps on twisting, you keep on building the lies that you make up for all that you lack”. Not really the heartwarming option that it seemed originally.
Another example is the song “Stairway To Heaven”. Although people of a certain age love this tune and it holds a special place in our hearts and minds, it is an exceedingly bad choice for a memorial service. Not only will your grandmother hate it, but she will hate it for about seven minutes (an eternity in “sitting in silence at a funeral while recorded music plays” time). The lyrics themselves do nothing to ameliorate the eternity spent listening to the uncut version and unless your loved one was actually killed by “finding a bustle in his or her hedgerow and becoming alarmed”, do not make this tune one of your options.
The funeral home that I work for is known for holding funeral services in places that are not a funeral home. For a lot of people it is their church. Some people don’t want a church at all, and we have been able to find several lovely options (most notably the KemperCenter) where people can be comfortable holding a memorable, elegant, personal service.
Some folks though are looking for an even more personal option. For some of these families, we have to think way outside the box. We have held services around a favorite tree in someone’s back yard. We have scattered cremated remains at Lake Michigan and on the 13th hole of a golf course where the deceased made a hole in one. (I will never tell which golf course though. I don’t think they really like that. Let’s just say that the sand trap may contain a cup of something that is not sand.)
As far as location “don’ts” go, I would tell people who want to hold services at a tavern to have the speaking part take place sooner rather than later in relation to the drinking part. Enough said…..
By far the most interesting location was chosen by a family we served last year. The gentleman had gone into the hospital while renovations were being made on the shed attached to the barn at his beloved farm. The man died before he could see the work finished. His family held his funeral (complete with casket) in the family’s barn.
The man’s family cleaned the barn and decorated it with all sort of wild flowers and plants from the property. Only his immediate family was in attendance. His children and grandchildren spoke and I sang his favorite hymns. It was a beautiful service and there was an unmistakable rightness to the location that I wouldn’t have thought was possible.
Options? Ask for them by name.
*****
Patti Fitchett is an Apprentice Funeral Director with Casey Family Options Funerals and Cremations of Racine Wisconsin. Patti came to the funeral business as a lay minister and found an affinity for being of service to the families of Southeastern Wisconsin.
