She’s awake, outta bed and pissed off
Decided to call off sick today — I’m going to actually try to eat today, despite my case of ebola or typhoid or whatever I have, and would like to have a bathroom within barfing distance –but since I’m up, I thought I’d catch up on some blog reading. Just a thought — since my sickness started on Superbowl Sunday, does that mean I have the Super-E-bowl-a Virus? (kill me. …)
Krempasky had an interesting link that I followed, which led me to Hit & Run and eventually to the New York Times’ story Archbishop of Newark Bans Eulogies at Masses. Essentially, the Archdiocese of Newark, Archbishop John J. Myers has banned eulogies by relatives and friends during funeral masses, and it seems that the Hit & Run site supports this decision.
The article goes on to report that a single eulogy by a loved one of the deceased will be accepted, but that’s the limit, as well as that they are encouraged to do the eulogy thing during visitation rather than at services. “The new policy appears to be stricter than that called for by the Order of Christian Funerals, the national church’s Vatican-approved guidelines. The order says that a friend or family member can speak after communion and before the final procession.
“Archbishop Myers, who is known for his conservative approach to liturgical and social matters, said he was acting because of ‘growing abuse associated with eulogies at funerals.’
“News of the ban, first reported (Jan. 22) in The Record of Hackensack, N.J., was welcomed by priests who favor refocusing on the mysteries of the faith rather than on the deceased’s love of the Jets or penchant for domestic beer.”
Hit & Run noted his belief that, without such restrictions, “This attitude reduces the priest to a functionary whose job is to help cheer up mourning people, and they’d obviously prefer to be thought of as the gatekeepers of purgatory. But it’s the consumer who calls the shots.”
**climbing on soapbox, hoping it doesn’t cave in …**
Yer damn right the consumer calls the shots. Having attended more funerals (otherwise known as family reunions in my clan) than China has rice, I have seen entirely too many of my very non-religious departed family members being bashed into the ground with a Bible. That wasn’t them during their lives, so it was out-of-place at best. Yet, if that’s what made their kids feel better, then that’s what their kids did.
And as far as eulogies, I have given a eulogy at the last three funerals I’ve attended, and I’ve written every last one of them myself. If I loved somebody enough to want to express my love in one final, public way, don’t take that right away from me. Granted, if the family truly had to pick ONE person to deliver the final goodbye, it would undoubtedly be me, as I am descended from a number of Pittsburgh rednecks who (outside of my mom, grandfather and one cousin), pronounce my new homeland as Wa(r)shington, D.C., so you get the picture that I am the literate one of the bunch. heh.
At any rate, though, my beloved great-aunt Lenna passed away a few years ago this week, and you never heard so many people get up to speak about the way she touched their lives. And while oceans of tears were cried during that time, those eulogies (mine included) gave other guests a special glimpse at yet another side of this dynamic woman, with every speaker who approached the podium. As one of the youngest relatives in attendance, I got to hear decades-old stories told with affection and clarity, giving me an added perspective on how very blessed this dysfunctional family was to count her as its blood relative.
I guess my real chagrin would be if my grandmother’s funeral in 1999 would have been dictated by religion. Gram was a fallen-away Catholic, and was against the church as well as my Bible-thumping great-uncle Ronnie, who can’t form an original thought because he’s always quoting Scripture (this same man bashes homosexuals and interracial relationships, yet has a lesbian daughter and a white niece married to an African-American gentleman). At any rate, when my grandmother died, mom felt it would be best to introduce *some* form of religion to the services, so we found a Roman Catholic priest who was liberal and open to me writing the eulogy (I couldn’t deliver it — too devastated). Before he read it, he joked with the crowd that he hadn’t read it, so be prepared for anything. 🙂 The crowd knew me as the one who spent my life pushing everybody’s buttons, so everyone kinda braced themselves for anything. But what I wrote was acceptable … and appropriate … and I also buried her with the eulogy, as well as with several trinkets that were important to her during her final years of life.
And as far as religion, well, we invited religion to the service, but we didn’t ask it to be the guest star. And per Hit & Run, perhaps we did reduce the priest’s role to someone who “cheered up mourning people,” but guess what? That is what we needed him to do. We had a very small graveside service — no visitations except for immediate family — and no church. Guess what, kids — funerals are expensive. Every hour that you clock in the funeral home is charged. Every trip around the city with the casket costs time in the hearse. Every visitation is billed on the half-hour, so the more visitations you have (auspiciously to have your pre-burial eulogies) cost you more and more. Funerals today cost as much as the weddings of yesterday, and I can count on dying much more certainly than I can depend on ever getting married.
At any rate, I admit to being non-religious, so someone with religion may feel differently. I just have this weird conglomeration of Roman Catholic, Irish Catholic, pagan and atheistic influences from my family, which has resulted in agnosticism. I will tolerate religion, but I will not have it dictating the way I want to run my life or run a loved one’s funeral. If there is an afterlife, sure, I want to help my loved one get in, but if they spend half of their lives doubting that the Big Four (father, son, holy ghost and yes, Mary — once the boys add her to the club, I might revisit my Catholicism) exist, then I am not about to force it upon them in death.
One thing I got from the Irish side of me is the Irish wake — it is imperative to celebrate the person we once knew and loved. Death is a time to make us really appreciate the person we’ve lost, and to bond with people from near and far who loved that person just as much. Again, think “family reunions” — it’s sad but true that we don’t make enough time to see people while they’re alive, yet we drop everything to rush to their gravesides. But that also prevents us from mourning alone. And we get to see how the family has grown, and how the smallest member of the family has the deceased’s eyes or dimples or smile. And we see that the merry-go-round of life keeps on spinning, even if one member of the family has decided to ease off and let the younger ones keep the ride going.
But if I have to sit in a church and have some potential-child-molestor-in-a-robe preach to me for two hours about good and bad and the afterlife, well, that isn’t going to help me to celebrate my dearly departed. Sharing stories and memories — and even having a priest like the one we hired, with humor and understanding and without an answer to everything quoted from his big book with a cross on it — is the best way for me to say goodbye to their living bodies and to always feel their living spirits. And anyone who doesn’t have anything to say along those lines, well, won’t be invited to my funeral.