Meaningful Funerals

By Dr. Alan D. Wolfelt

Paradox 3: Mourners must go backward before they can go forward.

A paradox is a seemingly self-contradictory statement or situation that is in fact often true. The paradox of mourning we will consider together in this article might, at first glance, seem self-contradictory, but as I will reveal, it is actually a forgotten Truth with a capital T. It’s a Truth we must rediscover because it is essential to understanding how mourners begin to heal in the aftermath of significant loss.

After someone they love dies, well-meaning but misinformed friends and family members often tell mourners:

• “[He/she] would want you to keep living your life.”
• “Time heals all wounds.”
• “Just keep putting one foot in front of the other.”
• “You need to put the past in the past.”

Not only do these oft-offered clichés diminish mourners’ significant and unique losses, they also imply that moving forward – in life and in time – is what will ease their suffering. The truth, paradoxically, is that in grief, we have to go backward before we can go forward. Our cultural misconception about moving forward in grief stems in part from the concept of the “stages of grief” popularized in 1969 by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ landmark text, On Death and Dying. In this important book, Kübler-Ross listed the five stages of grief that she sometimes saw terminally ill patients experience in the face of their own impending death: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. However, she never intended for her five stages to be interpreted as a rigid, linear sequence to be followed by all mourners.

Grief is not a train track toward acceptance. It’s more like “getting lost in the woods” and almost always gives rise to a mixture of many thoughts and feelings at once. A feeling that predominates at any given time – anger, say – may dissipate for a while but later return full force. Grief is not even a “two steps forward, one step back” kind of journey; it’s often one step forward, two steps in a circle, then one step backward. It takes time, patience and, yes, lots of backward motion before forward motion occurs.

Going Backward Through Ritual

Throughout history, when the import of an event or transition in our lives is more profound than everyday words and actions can capture, we’ve had the wisdom to turn to ritual. And in our rituals, we often looked backward first – to our ancestors, our holy or touchstone texts, our traditions – before we celebrated what would come next. In contemporary times, as we pare down and even abandon more and more of the rituals that have long imbued our lives with meaning and purpose, we seem to be forgetting the need to go backward before going forward during rites of passage, including the death of a loved one.

Here and there, though, backward-looking rituals persist. In New York, a stream of police cars pulls up to the 9/11 terrorist disaster site early every morning. They flash their emergency lights but do not turn on their sirens. The officers park, get out of their cars and stand shoulder to shoulder in silence for a moment before returning to their vehicles and beginning their day of public service. What the officers seem to subconsciously understand is that this simple, quiet, backward-looking mourning ritual grounds their presents and their futures.

When it comes to grief and mourning, we would all be well served to resurrect old rituals, sustain existing rituals and create new rituals that honor the natural and necessary need to look backward before going forward.

Going Backward Through Memory

For the survivors, the loss created by death is the loss of the physical presence of the person who died. In the physical plane, their relationship with the person has ended, and so they grieve. But on the emotional and spiritual planes, their relationship with the person who died continues because they will always have a relationship of memory. Precious memories, dreams reflecting the significance of the relationship and objects that link them to the person who died are examples of some of the things that give testimony to a different form of continued relationship.

Funeral directors have a special opportunity to help families learn how to look backward through the lens of memory. During the arrangement conference, allow time for talking about favorite memories. Encourage families to gather up special belongings and photos of the person who died to display at the visitation, funeral and gathering. Share ideas of how other families have incorporated memories into funerals.

In my experience, remembering the past is the very thing that eventually makes hoping for the future possible. Mourners’ lives will open to renewed hope, love and joy only to the extent that they first embrace the past. Those who fail to go backward before marching forward after a loss often find themselves stuck in the morass of carried grief.

Going Backward to Tell the Story

A vital part of mourning is often “telling the story” over and over again, and the story of a family’s love and loss is a backward-looking process. Funeral directors know families often feel a need to tell the story of the death. They also often tell the story of their relationship with the person who died.

You can help by actively listening and affirming this essential task. Because stories of love and loss take time, patience and unconditional acceptance, they serve as powerful antidotes to a modern society all too often preoccupied with getting mourners to hurry forward. Rushing through the planning process confuses efficiency with effectiveness. Taking time to bear witness to the telling of families’ unique stories is one way to help them go backward on the pathway to eventually moving forward.

Going Forward in Grief

I hope you are beginning to understand the necessity of going backward in grief before we can go forward. But as we’ve also explored, the going-forward nature of grief is itself a paradox. “Progress” in grief is difficult to pinpoint. Grief is something we never truly get over. Instead, it is an ongoing, recursive process that unfolds over many, many months and years.

Your funeral home’s aftercare program can help foster families’ hope for the future. Hope is an expectation of a good that is yet to be. Hope is about the future. Going forward in grief means, in part, fostering hope. And remember, as long as mourners are doing the work of grief – actively expressing their grief and living the paradoxes – they are going forward in grief even though it may not always feel that way. They may not notice they are going forward as it is happening, but one day, they will look up and find that they have indeed moved and changed.

To read Part 1 of this article, visit this page: The Paradoxes of Mourning Part 1 of 3: Creating Hello Opportunities

To read Part 2 of this article, visit this page: The Paradoxes of Mourning Part 2 of 3: The Dark Night of the Soul

About the Author:

Dr. Alan Wolfelt is a noted author, educator, grief counselor. Dr. Wolfelt believes that meaningful funeral experiences help families and friends support one another, embrace their feelings, and embark on the journey to healing and transcendence. Recipient of the Association of Death Education and Counseling’s Death Educator Award, Dr. Wolfelt presents workshops across the world to grieving families, funeral home staffs, and other caregivers. He also teaches training courses for bereavement caregivers at the Center for Loss and Life Transition in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he serves as Director. Dr. Wolfelt is on the faculty of the University of Colorado Medical School’s Department of Family Medicine. He is also the author of many bestselling books, including Understanding Your Grief, The Mourner’s Book of Hope, Creating Meaningful Funeral Ceremonies, and The Paradoxes of Grief: Healing Your Grief With Three Forgotten Truths, upon which this series is based. For more information, visit www.centerforloss.com

Printed by permission of Dr. Alan D. Wolfelt, all rights reserved.

By Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

Paradox 2: Mourners must make friends with the darkness before they can enter the light.

A paradox is a seemingly self-contradictory statement or situation that is in fact often true. The paradox of mourning we will consider together in this article might, at first glance, seem self-contradictory, but as I will reveal, it is actually a forgotten Truth with a capital T. It’s a Truth we must rediscover because it is essential to understanding how mourners heal in the aftermath of significant loss.

The International Dark-Sky Association is a nonprofit “fighting to preserve the night.” Recognizing that human-produced light creates “light pollution,” which diminishes our view of the stars, disrupts our circadian rhythms and ecosystems, and wastes significant amounts of energy, the association seeks to reserve the use of artificial lighting at night to only what is truly necessary. As you read about Paradox 2, I would like you to remember this mantra of “fighting to preserve the night.” During our times of grief, we are also well served to fight to honor and preserve the sanctity and restorative powers of the dark night of the soul.

The Dark Night of the Soul

One way in which we used to honor the need to make friends with the darkness of grief was to observe a period of mourning whose length and customs varied by era, religion and culture, as well as by a mourner’s specific relationship to the deceased. During this time, mourners essentially withdrew from society. When they did venture out, they wore clothing that outwardly represented their internal reality.

Such mourning “rules” or customs were a way of acknowledging loss and honoring the need for a period of darkness. They were superficial signs of a deeply profound, spiritual crisis. In fact, a significant loss plunges you into what C.S. Lewis, Eckhart Tolle and various Christian mystics have called “the dark night of the soul.”

After the death of someone loved, the dark night of the soul can be a long and very black night indeed. Families struggling after a significant loss of any kind are inhabiting that long, dark night. It is uncomfortable and scary. It hurts. Yet if they allow themselves to sit still in the blackness without trying to fight it, deny it or run away from it, they will find that it has something to teach them.

The So-called Dark Emotions

Have you noticed that we tend to equate the dark with all things evil and bad, while light represents goodness and purity? Darkness is night, ghosts, caves, bats, devils and vampires. Darkness is also ignorance and void. And when we feel “dark” emotions, we mean that we feel sadness, emptiness, loss, depression, despair, shame and/or fear. Yes, the dark emotions are painful and challenging to experience. But are they really bad? No, they are not.

Feelings are not intrinsically good or bad – they simply are. They arise in us in response to what we are seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling in any given moment. They also emanate more abstractly from our thoughts. Feelings are essentially the bodily response to the existential experience of living and being.

And so it is normal and natural for mourners to turn to the dark emotions of grief. They must acknowledge them and allow themselves to feel them. In fact, I often say that we must befriend our dark emotions. Befriending pain is hard. It’s true that it is easier to avoid, repress or deny the pain of grief than it is to embrace it, yet it is in befriending our pain that we learn from it and unlock our capacity to be transformed by it.

Funeral directors can and do help by bearing witness to and normalizing expressions of this pain. When you create a safe, unhurried atmosphere for families to encounter the dark emotions in your presence, you are letting them know that their behavior – crying, keening, expressing anger or anguish, etc. – is normal and necessary.

The Darkness of Liminal Space

Grief lives in liminal space. Limina is the Latin word for threshold, the space betwixt and between. In funeral service, you help people who are in liminal space every day. They are unsettled. They are in limbo. Both their automatic daily routines and their core beliefs have been shaken, forcing them to reconsider who they are, why they’re here and what life means.

Yes, it’s uncomfortable being in liminal space, but that’s where grief takes mourners. Without grief, they wouldn’t go there. But it is only in liminal space that they can reconstruct their shattered worldviews and re-emerge as transformed people who are ready to live and love fully again.

The Light of Empathy in the Darkness

Funeral directors can help families cope during the dark night of the soul by employing empathy. But first, it’s important to understand the difference between sympathy and empathy. When people are sympathetic to you, they are noticing and feeling concern for your circumstances, usually at a distance. They are “feeling sorry” for you. They are feeling “pity” for you. They may be offering a simple solution, platitude or distraction. Sympathy is “feeling for” someone else.

Empathy, on the other hand, is about making an emotional connection. It is a more active process, one in which the listener tries to understand and feel your experience from the inside out. The listener is not judging you or your thoughts and feelings. She is not offering simple solutions. Instead, she is making herself vulnerable to your thoughts, feelings and circumstances by looking for connections to similar thoughts, feelings and circumstances inside her. She is being present and allowing herself to be taught by you. Empathy is “feeling with” someone else. In the time of darkness of the families you serve, your genuine empathy can be the candle they need to find their way through the early days of their grief.

Entering the Light

Paradox 2 says that mourners must make friends with the darkness before they can enter the light. But what is the light? There really is no set destination on the journey through grief. The light of healing in grief is not exactly like the light at the end of a tunnel. Reconciliation is the goal, but it is not a fixed end point or perfect state of bliss. At least here on earth, bittersweet is as sweet as it gets.

The Chinese yin-yang symbol represents the duality of many experiences in life. The shape of the symbol is a perfect circle – in other words, a unified whole. But making up the circle are two comma shapes – one black (the yin) and one white (the yang). And within each comma shape is a dot of the opposite color.

The symbol is a visual reminder that everything comprises both darkness and light. Yet the darkness and the light are not opposing forces. Rather, they are complementary twins that only together form a whole. What’s more, the drop of white in the black yin and the drop of black in the white yang remind us that nothing is purely dark or light, good or bad. Instead, life is made up of people, places, actions, things and experiences that are mixtures of both.

And so, as you help families create meaningful funeral experiences, think of the light as the thoughts and feelings you want to project as possibilities for their futures. While the time of the funeral is a natural and necessary time of darkness, you may have opportunities to reassure them that there is love and life in the months to come. A meaningful, elements-rich funeral also upholds hope, gratitude, joy, love and peace.

To read Part 1 of this article, visit this page: The Paradoxes of Mourning Part 1 of 3: Creating Hello Opportunities

To read Part 3 of this article, visit this page: The Paradoxes of Mourning Part 3 of 3: Backtracking on the Road to Healing

About the Author:

Dr. Alan Wolfelt is a noted author, educator, grief counselor. Dr. Wolfelt believes that meaningful funeral experiences help families and friends support one another, embrace their feelings, and embark on the journey to healing and transcendence. Recipient of the Association of Death Education and Counseling’s Death Educator Award, Dr. Wolfelt presents workshops across the world to grieving families, funeral home staffs, and other caregivers. He also teaches training courses for bereavement caregivers at the Center for Loss and Life Transition in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he serves as Director. Dr. Wolfelt is on the faculty of the University of Colorado Medical School’s Department of Family Medicine. He is also the author of many bestselling books, including Understanding Your Grief, The Mourner’s Book of Hope, Creating Meaningful Funeral Ceremonies, and The Paradoxes of Grief: Healing Your Grief With Three Forgotten Truths, upon which this series is based. For more information, visit www.centerforloss.com

Printed by permission of Dr. Alan D. Wolfelt, all rights reserved.

By Dr. Alan D. Wolfelt

Paradox 1: Families must say hello before they can say goodbye

A paradox is a seemingly self-contradictory statement or situation that is in fact often true. The paradox of mourning we will consider together in this article might, at first glance, seem self-contradictory, but as I will reveal, it is actually a forgotten Truth with a capital T. It’s a Truth we must rediscover because it is essential to understanding how mourners begin to heal in the aftermath of significant loss.

Love inevitably leads to grief. You see, love and grief are two sides of the same precious coin. One does not – and cannot – exist without the other. They are the yin and yang of our lives. From the moment we are born, we say hello to love in our lives by seeking it out, by acknowledging it when it unfolds, by welcoming it and by nurturing it so that it will continue.

It is essential for those in funeral service to understand that we must also say hello to loss and grief in our lives. To be sure, we do not seek it out, but when it unfolds, we must acknowledge it. I would even say that we must welcome our grief. We must say hello to it. The funeral, in fact, is an essential step in saying hello. Yes, we must simultaneously “work at” and “surrender to” the grief journey. This in itself is a paradox. As grievers come to know this paradox, they can, very slowly, discover the soothing of their souls.

Saying Hello to the Physical Reality of Death

In centuries past, our actions and rituals made it clear that we understood the necessity of saying hello to the reality of death. We have always – even from the time of Neanderthals, anthropologists suggest – honored the body of the person who died right up until the moment it was laid in its final resting place. The body of the person who died was the focal part of the entire funeral process – from the procession into the church to the procession out of the church to the procession to the cemetery through to the burial. The body never for a moment left the family’s sight – or heart.

In recent decades, as you know, the trend has been toward body-absent funeral ceremonies. Today, bodies are often cremated immediately, often without loved ones having spent time with them or even having looked at them beforehand. While historically we understood the essential, universal need to honor and affirm the life of the person who died with the body present throughout the entire funeral process, now the guest of honor is often missing in action.

People in funeral service understand that when you watch someone die, care for a dead body and/or visit the body of a loved one in an open casket, you are saying hello to the reality of that person’s death. In fact, I believe the more time families spend bearing witness to and even feeling the fact of a death with their own two hands, the more deeply they are able to acknowledge the reality of the death. That is why it is so critical to build in as many sacred opportunities as possible for families (when culturally appropriate) to spend time with the body before cremation or burial, even if there will not be a public visitation.

Saying Goodbye

Grief never truly ends because love never ends. People do not “get over” grief because they do not “get over” the love that caused the grief. After someone we love dies, we step through a doorway into a new reality, but we never fully close and lock the door behind us. People often think of the funeral as a time of saying goodbye to the person who died, but that’s largely inaccurate. You see, the funeral takes place so soon after the death that grief and mourning have just started. At that point, grieving families are just saying hello to their grief. At the time of disposition, on the other hand, they are also saying goodbye to the precious body of the person who died, and as I mentioned above, it is so important, when culturally appropriate, to foster and encourage spending time with the body in the days or hours before disposition.

Eventually, though, people who find ways to say hello to their loss, grief and mourning, over time and with the support of others, will more and more come to find that they have ultimately said a kind of final goodbye to the person who died. No, they do not forget, get over, resolve or recover from the death – there is never true “closure,” but they become reconciled to it. Reconciliation literally means “to make life good again.” In reconciliation, they come to integrate the new reality of moving forward in life without the physical presence of the person who died. With reconciliation comes a renewed sense of energy and confidence and a capacity to become re-involved in the activities of living. There is also an acknowledgment that pain and grief are difficult yet necessary parts of life.

Along the road to reconciliation, if they are openly, honestly and actively mourning, they will be saying lots of hellos. Oh hello, this death. Oh hello, this thought. Oh hello, this feeling. Oh hello, this change. Oh hello, this me. Oh hello, this doubt. Oh hello, this new belief. But they will also be saying many goodbyes. Goodbye, this voice, this kiss, this body. Goodbye, this routine. Goodbye, this me. Goodbye, this belief. Goodbye, this ever-present pain. Their hellos and goodbyes will overlap one another, with more hellos needed at the start of the journey and more goodbyes in the later days.

Still, remember that saying goodbye is not the same as “closure.” As I said, you never fully close the door on the love and grief you feel for someone who has died. But you can achieve a sense of peace. The days of intense and constant turmoil can be replaced by serene acceptance as well as days of love, hope and joy.

In funeral service, you can strive to help create as many hello opportunities for families as possible. The more they are educated about and engaged in the entire process and the more they avail themselves of all of the possible elements of ritual, the more they will be saying hello to their normal and necessary grief. In turn, this will help set them on the path to continuing to embrace and openly mourn their many thoughts and feelings in the coming weeks and months.

I challenge you to think of the funeral as an opportunity for families to say hello as much as or more than an opportunity to say goodbye. Embracing this essential paradox has the power to transform your customer service strategy and your funeral home’s role in your community.

To read Part 2 of this article, visit this page: The Paradoxes of Mourning Part 2 of 3: The Dark Night of the Soul

To read Part 3 of this article, visit this page: The Paradoxes of Mourning Part 3 of 3: Backtracking on the Route to Healing

About the Author:

Dr. Alan Wolfelt is a noted author, educator, grief counselor. Dr. Wolfelt believes that meaningful funeral experiences help families and friends support one another, embrace their feelings, and embark on the journey to healing and transcendence. Recipient of the Association of Death Education and Counseling’s Death Educator Award, Dr. Wolfelt presents workshops across the world to grieving families, funeral home staffs, and other caregivers. He also teaches training courses for bereavement caregivers at the Center for Loss and Life Transition in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he serves as Director. Dr. Wolfelt is on the faculty of the University of Colorado Medical School’s Department of Family Medicine. He is also the author of many bestselling books, including Understanding Your Grief, The Mourner’s Book of Hope, Creating Meaningful Funeral Ceremonies, and The Paradoxes of Grief: Healing Your Grief With Three Forgotten Truths, upon which this series is based. For more information, visit www.centerforloss.com

Printed by permission of Dr. Alan D. Wolfelt, all rights reserved.