A small but important suggested addition: if it's someone who's funeral you would go to, tell that person now what they mean to you. Then they can hear it while they are still alive.
It is not a given that you will have enough time to tell them later.
sometimes, not going to the funeral is the message to be said and saying it to them "now" is considered rude. clearly, the message of not attending is being said to others not to the person, but you get the gist
The person died, what message can you want to send to a dead person. He/She is dead. He can't hear it. But you can forgive and believe me, feel better about whatever happened that made you want to send a message that would never be received.
> what message can you want to send to a dead person
you ask me that after I said "clearly, the message of not attending is being said to others not to the person, but you get the gist"
so clearly, you didn't get the gist. not attending says something to the other friends/family that did attend. the knee jerk reaction is "what an asshole to not attend" typically followed by "I wonder what happened that would make them not attend". then the gossiping begins and the person sending the message smiles a wry smile
why do you keep referring to the dead person like that's the point of the not going? you're sending a message to those that do go by not going. the subject of the message is the deceased not the recipient.
Big life events are always worth a visit if you get invited, and you always learn something from the mix of people who attend. Whether it's a funeral, wedding, baptism, and so on.
Does this person have friends from childhood? Do his friends come from the same place, or all sorts of places? Do they know each other, or does he have a lot of singletons there?
Who considers themselves close family? Second cousins? Or did their cousins not even come?
How well represented are various social classes?
I always find these things super interesting when I go to one of these.
Do the right thing even when you really don't want to is a valuable lesson, but I'm not sure I believe that the right thing to do is attend funerals for people who you were not actually close to. It feels extremely insincere.
It's not just whether you were close to the deceased; it's do you know the survivors. I've attended funerals where I never met the deceased but knew a survivor.
I've gone to the funeral of a community leader who I only met a couple of times, but the stories of their life and seeing how they had touched the people around them was inspiring and I hold those stories dearly and feel the loss of the community. Hardly insincere.
I have a few folks who I felt wronged me significantly in my life's travels, and they take a bit of rent-free space in my head every once in awhile.
I don't actively search for their obits or anything, but if I learned about a funeral, I'd make the time to visit, stand quietly, and reflect.
Probably not the healthiest thing, but not my unhealthiest quality either. At the moment it is only theoretical. But I can think of 3 or 4 I'm now likely to google up and see what they're up to and assess who is closer to the pine box. :)
> I have a few folks who I felt wronged me significantly in my life's travels, and they take a bit of rent-free space in my head every once in awhile.
Do you have grudge against those people, such that put effort into trying to undermine or defeat them? I feel the word "enemy" has connotations of a kind of direct, sustained opposition that just seems like it'd be really unusual (and unhealthy) in real life.
Wholeheartedly agree with both the nominal and underlying advice here.
Doing the right thing all the time is painful, tedious and can cost you. But doing the wrong thing will cost you too. Both compound.
The literal advice about going to the funeral is about showing up for people who meant something to you. There are only a few special times in your life when you get to see a large chunk of other people's important people:
* graduations
* coming of age ceremonies
* weddings
* funerals
Being there gives you a special chance to know the person better. Just do it.
I'd love too but a crowd -even mostly loved ones- is for some the hardest way to engage with others. Last weddings I tried to attempt were disasters. Funerals are obviously easier as no/weirdly-interacting is accepted so at least there's less self esteem to loose. I feel the more confortable in one or one to one, three is already to much possible micro-ostracisms to deal with.
To end with a lighter note loosely related, a funny citation of the marshal Foch:
> "An assembly must have an odd number of members in order to make a decision, but three is already too many."
"other people's important people" is a very astute phrase - one has to see the value in that concept in order to understand the deceased's survivors that you think you already know. I've been to a few events where some folks were flabbergasted to discover different fresh aspects of the deceased - "what the...? He/she was tight with that crowd?!"
I wonder how many people have lived a secret side of their life and finally get outed at their funeral, to the shock of the people who only knew one side.
I've tried, man. I'm deeply uncomfortable in social situations, and events with lots of wacky, nonsense traditions and rules that I don't understand makes things exponentially worse. Going to events like weddings and graduations makes me utterly miserable. I feel like shit for days before & afterwards, and I always regret going for months & years afterwards. I guess there's a chance someone there is glad I'm off being miserable in a corner, but I doubt it. So I've mostly stopped going to these things.
Coincidentally there is literally the novel "The House of Mirth" by Edith Wharton - published in 1905, it's an excellent late-Victorian/Gilded-Age period novel about the slow downfall of Lily Bart, a woman who was in New York's high society, then through a series of unfortunate events and social reproaches, descended into lonely poverty. It was quite influential at the time, portraying the materialism and shallowness of the moneyed crowd.
I feel like the major life events always put our life span into a perspective that otherwise might be missed or overlooked. It makes life feel shorter than it is.
Btw, which post are you referring to? I am curious to read it as well.
I like seeing these on HN. Occasionally the hyper focus on tech makes me feel inhuman. Stories like these remind me not to forget how much else there is beyond my narrow world as a web dev.
I know several people who expressed a wish not to have a funeral. Sometimes this wish stems from a desire not to be an inconvenience, or a sense of guilt or shame that one's life was not well-lived. Sometimes, simply the view that funerals don't matter, so why bother.
In every case, I think this desire is mistaken. The need to mourn the dead is an instinct older than our species itself, and in dismissing it we wound the people closest to us.
If you're the sort of person to whom the idea of skipping your own funeral sounds tempting, I kindly ask you for the sake of your loved ones that you reconsider.
I don't think a significant number of people have ever written a will that actively prevented a funeral. A funeral doesn't require the deceased. It's fine to skip it.
Yes, agreed. My dad said he didn't want a wake or funeral---I think he didn't want to put anyone out---but we overruled him, because the services weren't for him. Once he thought about that, he agreed (and gave some input on their planning, which was interesting). In the end it brought together a lot of people who hadn't seen each other in a very long time, which I appreciated, and I got to hear some stories I'd never heard before, which I also appreciated, and it made the whole process just feel a lot easier to deal with.
I (politely) disagree. My father did not wish a funeral, and, per his wishes, we did not hold one for him.
And honestly, standing at his gravesite paying my respects, I do not have the painful memories that I had with my mother's funeral, trying to organize, trying to handle everyone and everything, and not being able to grieve in the way that I wanted until long after. Instead, I am able to simply talk to him, and not have such a frustrating coda.
They say that funerals are for the living. Sure. But going to funerals of loved ones has never made me feel better in the long run compared to more private goodbyes, and I am not the only one to feel this way.
I am in this camp. I have been to the funerals of loved ones and once helped arrange one for a close family member. It was a very stressful affair.
But I also recognize that other people got more out of it than did I. They cried and hugged and shared memories. That experience I am assuming was very valuable to them. But not to me. I was stressed the entire time. The lesson I learned was that funerals are valuable to some while not others.
> By the time I was 16, I had been to five or six funerals.
Is it just me or does this actually seem kind of low?
They say your social cluster is 150 people, so you should be going to about 2 funerals every year (this ignores age-clustering, but that's counterbalanced by the fact that you often go to funerals slightly outside your cluster and the fact that the cluster changes over time).
>> By the time I was 16, I had been to five or six funerals.
> Is it just me or does this actually seem kind of low?
Not for someone who's young and mostly disconnected from their grandparents' generation. In my case, my family lived far away from pretty much all my relatives, which meant I'm not very close to any of them and going to a funeral meant lots of short-notice plane tickets.
I think I've only gone to two funerals in my life: one grandparent who died geographically close to use when I was a kid, and the father (who I never met) of a friend of mine.
I think it would have been better if it had been different, and I had gone to more funerals, because now my lack of exposure adds a whole extra layer of awkwardness onto dealing with death.
Even if I was close to my grandparents' generation, I only have four of them and that number doesn't increase over time. I don't think I know 16 * 2 = 32 people of my grandparents' generation, especially not now, way past my teenage years.
> Even if I was close to my grandparents' generation, I only have four of them and that number doesn't increase over time.
The scenario I was thinking of to get to more than "five or six" funerals by age 16, was to have "always go to the funeral" parents who took you to the funerals of grandparents and great aunts/uncles living nearby.
My sister and I were talking about this recently (at a funeral in our family). We're in our 40s, and people older than us had largely been to a dozen funerals or more by their teenage years, while people younger than us often went to their first in their 20s or later (or perhaps when their own parents or grandparents died and to no others). We have not-entirely-negative memories of growing up going to funerals, because that's where we saw and caught up with extended family, so funerals are... well, not exactly easy, but they're not traumatic in their own right. For some of our slightly younger friends, though, even attending the wake and funeral in our family, they were having a harder time than we were. And almost none of our cousins brought their kids. For the author, six by 16 probably was a lot more than any of her friends, yes.
I was forbidden from going to my great-grandmother's funeral with my parents even though I was 11 and an extremely well-disciplined child. "We want you to remember her as she lived, not as she died" was the reason given at the time, but leaving me out of the event where people were remembering her as she lived didn't make sense to me.
When my grandfather died when I was 15, not only wasn't I allowed to go, but I had to stay home and watch my siblings as my parents traveled a thousand miles away for a week. We more than had the money for plane tickets. They just didn't want to bring us (youngest was 10, and also not troublesome).
For my other older relatives, they've all insisted on not having services, and I can't help but feel it's both an effect and a cause of the fact that my extended family is very disconnected and fragmentary.
Honestly that seemed really high to me. I went to my first funeral at 41. I did go to a couple of viewings/wakes before that. I’m not religious, and I guess I just don’t know enough people who would invite me to a funeral.
I'm almost 60 and have only been to a handful of funerals. One or two as a kid for my grandparents who I don't even really remember, one in high school for a friend, and a few other relatives and friends on my wife's side of the family.
Generally the number of your friends who have funerals is heavily biased towards the end of your life.
America's average lifespan is 77. When you're 16, your parents are perhaps 46, and their parents are maybe 76.
And a lot of people live for 10+ years after retirement, so your teachers might all be alive too.
If you've got a big extended family, or you're part of an organisation like a church where 16 year olds come are getting to know 70+ year olds, you might have gone to more than 6 funerals.
But generally? At 16 your parents, their friends, your aunts and uncles, your 16 year old friends, their parents? Good chance they're all still alive. Your grandparents - maybe, maybe not.
Your grandparents also have siblings, and your parents would drag you to those funerals. You should also have people of many different ages in your social group and some of them will die of old age (and once in a while someone young).
I’m in my 40s and I’ve been to four, for each of my grandparents. That age clustering thing seems very important to me. For most of my life, my grandparents were the only people I knew well who were around that age.
Even now, there aren’t anywhere near 150 people whose funeral I’d attend.
Sounds within the right range to me. By that time I think I'd have been to five that I remember (a great-grandparent, a grandparent, an uncle, a great aunt, a school friend who was skittled on his morning paper-round). There may have been others that I was too young at the time to remember now.
For me, funerals and similar services are more for family and close (or at least close-ish) friends. My social cluster might number 150, but there are many in it for whom I'll pass on my regards & regrets from afar rather than attending a funeral or wake.
Are you attending 2 funerals every year, even averaged over a couple of decades to allow for clustering? I can think of one year when there were three, but that nowhere near makes up for the years when there were none or just one.
I'm not sure I'm quite hitting 2, but it's pretty close. I just sat down and made a list purely from memory, and got 1 per year since I started persisting memories. And I have to be forgetting some.
In fact, the actual number includes a significant decrease due to excluding "funerals I would've gone to if I didn't have a more important funeral to go to" and "people who moved away before they died". Thankfully in recent years remote recording is usually a thing in some form (live or not, video or just audio; the quality depends significantly on the funeral home).
I was going to write this at the top level because I hadn't seen anyone make this point yet:
The thing that made me sad about this article is that it made me realize how lacking I am in community. My eldest child is six, and I can't think of more than a couple people who are likely to pass from natural causes by the time she is sixteen, who we are close enough with to definitely know about their funeral. And I have no idea how we would find out about the funerals of people we aren't so close to. It's not like there is a local paper with obituaries that we read...
Of course the elephant in the room is that when I was a kid, the coordinating organization for this was my family's church. Without having that community fixture, I find myself unsure how this sort of thing actually works.
Seems high to me. Similar to another commenter, I'm in my 30s and I think I've only been to 3 - both grandmothers and maybe a cousin. But I only remember one, and I don't remember which of them it was for.
For us it was only normal to go to funerals for family members, and my parents' generation is getting up there but still alive. So only your four grandparents are what you'd usually expect by that age.
I never even heard about deaths in friends' families unless it was a reason they were missing school.
You should go to the funeral if you think the right thing is to go to the funeral
You should do it for yourself, out of respect for the person who died and respect for the loved ones remaining. Not out of societal obligation
The corollary to that is there are plenty of times where the right thing is to not go to the funeral. If you lack those things.
There have been times I don’t go the funeral. Because the dead person was a horrible person. When people asked, I said exactly that and many times the response I got was “man I wish I had not gone”
>You should go to the funeral if you think the right thing is to go to the funeral
More broadly, your actions are a reflection of your values. If there's a mismatch, then one of two things must be true: you fell short of your ideals and you should strive to do better in the future, or your stated values really aren't your values.
> There have been times I don’t go the funeral. Because the dead person was a horrible person.
The funeral is a ritual for the people who knew and loved the dead person. The question should really be about them, rather than the deceased who is dead and gone.
Slightly disagree, only in that the people who supported the horrible person should hear the terrible acts done.
Otherwise, yes. No comfort to those who comfort/enable abusers.
I hear this argument again and again, that the dead was despised thus the funeral should not be attended. Really folks, if all people you know are to be despised, then maybe the problem is not with them? Sure, there always is the occasional asshole, but it's not always the one in the coffin, so indeed then there might be times when we should just stay home for the better of everybody.
You aren't punishing the dead person by not going. Just punishing what friends and family he or she had, out of spite. Making enemies. I mean when you say "horrible person" you're not talking about Adolf Hitler or Pol Pot, you're just talking about someone you thought (rightly or wrongly) an asshole.
Now you've made yourself the asshole to other people. Not a great life strategy.
I recently had the occasion to visit the deathbed of a relative who died with much of his family deeply wounded by, and angry at, him. Had you known him, you might have called him a horrible person and not without some backing for that claim.
But I went because I felt a duty to my relatives that isn’t released just because they didn’t hold up their end of the bargain: he had indirectly given me life, even if he had done much ill besides. And moreover I felt an obligation to the office of the head of my family that transcended the particular man.
It would be a grim world in which comfort for the grieving is a service the deceased must have earned in advance, and we the comforters decide whether they have really earned it.
>You should go to the funeral if you think the right thing is to go to the funeral. You should do it for yourself, out of respect for the person who died and respect for the loved ones remaining. Not out of societal obligation
In 2024 it would be quite better if we did more things out of societal obligation, instead of each individual placing themselves (and their whims) as the moral authority.
A world where people only do what they want or feel like doing is indeed a pretty depressing world, I know because that's exactly the world I am living in. The world I grew up on was very different, and I absolutely miss it - Christmas parties, lots of birthday parties, church events, school events, local neighbourhood events... you name it, there were lots of things to do and go to and you were expected to. I think half of the time I didn't really want to, but it didn't cross my mind to say I didn't want to go, and I think that was much, much better - today I barely go anywhere, but I know people also won't come if I call them :( it's just such a sad world.
These things still exist, but they sometimes take time to discover and even longer to gain a sense of belonging. I like to call them "tribes" but really it's just a community. Sometimes the intersection of your { interests + location } may not have a vibrant community which happens to contain members who readily welcome new people, and so it requires a bit more effort.
Some examples of communities I've been a part of over the years:
- Family
- Church groups
- Bar buddies (overlapping with the previous category :))
- Biker community
- Startup community
- Technology groups
- Queer communities
- Neighbor groups
It was a lot harder to get into groups when I used to be introverted, I distinctly remember how afraid I was. My startup was the thing that forced me way out of my comfort zone and led me to learn how to overcome my fears of joining groups full of unknown people. The "ah-ha" moment was when I realized many others had the same fears and insecurities as I did, and yet that's ok.
Societal obligation in this case is literally basic minor respect towards the remaining people. And frankly, the loneliness epidemic HN like to talk about is closely related to the ideology where the only thing that matters is yourself.
It's not for you, and it's not for other people. It's just a thing. It's not an analogy about doing the right thing. It's just going to the funeral. That's what you should do, for lots of reasons. When you do it, you'll know why; maybe later, but you'll know.
Conversely I went to one high school reunion I was feeling iffy about, had an okay time but was also completely happy just never going to anymore (and haven't).
But there's definitely some other effects in play there: revisiting people from your past who you've lost touch with is a pretty fraught experience, at least for me because ultimately the relationship is at best frozen in time from whenever you last talked: high school is particularly bad IMO, because it tends to feel like just trying not to be who you were a decade ago as everyone remembers you, rather then getting to be who you are now.
I've never been to a high school reunion, and I don't intend to go to any future ones.
But I went to a high school friend's 40th, and caught up with the people who were my good friends - and still are - and it was worth every penny just to hear their voices face to face for a few days.
My 10th reunion was kind of poorly put together and poorly attended. I almost didn't go to my 25th based on that experience.
But it was the complete opposite. There was a committee of four students that planned it, they set up a tour of the building with the new principal in the morning, they rented out a venue that had an almost prom-like feel to it, there was a memorial to four students that had died (three of which I wasn't even aware of, one of which was my friend that shot and killed himself while we were still in high school, so it was nice to see him remembered).
Tons of people were there (like at least 60 people), and I talked to people I barely talked to in high school because I was so shy (and realized my reputation seemed to be a bit higher than I had anticipated, I just thought I was the quiet weird kid), and I was able to remember and reconnect to some friendships I had mostly forgotten about in the years since, and see how these people had changed since up close instead of just some random posts on Facebook.
It was really great for the most part. Only downer was seeing how many people had kids and how old those children were (a few people were nearly empty nesters already), since I still don't have children yet.
That's bad advice to always go to social events. I tried to follow it in order to expand my social circle, but I ended up staying in places that sucked, with people I didn't like. I try to dedicate some effort to tell whether I actually want to attend or not, and then follow through. I follow my gut, but never change my mind after making the decision.
Of course if the only offer you get is places who suck and people you don't like, it's a bummer. Although I don't think the OP meant that - going for going's sake. In a hypothetical situation when the place would be just okay and the people too, some people's brains (mine too) tend to say "meh don't bother, nothing stellar gonna happen anyway". That is the impulse we ought to fight: don't save yourself for exceptional events, but be surprised by the small pleasures in regular ones. And still avoid the bad ones, that goes without saying.
About 25 years ago, a friend offered 'Prioritize things that only happen once in life' as an idea for helping me decide whether to go to my friend's wedding or an important work event. The wedding was great, and the idea has been useful in many other situations, none more so that funerals.
Funerals aren't for the one who passed they're for the ones left behind. Be there for the ones left behind and remember you are one of the ones left behind.
> I don’t want my last act on Earth to be inconveniencing people.
There’s no way around that. Death inconveniences the living. Your death will probably make a mess of some kind. Your dead body will have to be buried or cremated, or it will be an even bigger inconvenience. Your effects will have to be split up among the living in some way.
And if you find funerals to be an inconvenience, don’t go. But don’t kid yourself into thinking that everyone will be happier if you insist on no funeral. Many of us want to gather with everyone else who cared about the person who died, and it feels strange and wrong to be denied the opportunity. Funerals are for the living anyway. Let the living make their own decisions about what events they want to hold and attend.
> But that could be minimized. For example, by not taking precious square meters of Earth surface from the living.
I understand and even agree with the sentiment here, but to me “I don’t want to be buried” or “I don’t want a funeral” is micromanaging. I’ve expressed a preference for as little inconvenience to the people I love and as little damage to the Earth as possible. My children or whoever else survives me can make whatever decisions work for them. I don’t want my last act to be ordering them around. My dad, for example, had always planned to be buried, but when he was nearing death he suddenly said he wanted to be cremated, which was distressing to some of the family and was going to mean redoing a bunch of plans. When we asked him what was behind this sudden change of mind, it turned out he didn’t actually care one way or the other, he’d just recently found out cremation was less expensive and he was trying to save us money. Turns out it’s important to say what you really mean—“I love you and want to save you inconvenience and grief”—rather than “I don’t want a funeral” or “I don’t want to be buried” or whatever.
> That’s not inconvenience :)
Heh. You must not have been executor of anyone’s estate. It’s pretty inconvenient. All I can hope for is to have enough money that it’ll be worth it to whichever kid ends up doing it.
As part of my plan of not inconveniencing anyone, I already doled out kids' inheritance in cash and real estate, and will donate the rest. I also rented 100-years storage at forever.com, so nobody has to deal with my old photos, memorabilia etc. Everything else is a matter of 2 hours' work by a garbage disposal team. Executors can walk.
It frequently is. In fact, it tends to be a more difficult form of grieving in my opinion because now they are forced to throw away things that were yours because they know nobody else wants them. Your bedding, your old spice cabinet, the magazines you never threw out. All of those are more for your heirs to deal with emotionally and physically.
Why do you think it is an inconvenience for people to meet other people they know and/or like? You could see it as a last gift from you to bring them together.
Larger message about doing the thing you really should do aside, ever since my parents dissuaded me from going to my grandfather's funeral (a man that I loved and respected but who's funeral came at an "inconvenient" time in my life) I have greatly regretted it. Not going burned itself into my mind and since that time I have never missed a funeral. Even for someone I only knew a little or hadn't seen in many years. If I had a connection with them, thought fondly of them, I make every effort to go. It just feels like the right thing to do.
The only regret I have in life (I'm in my mid-50s) is not attending the funeral of my friend's Mom. I didn't know her, so I figured I didn't have to go (I was in my early 20's, not that my age excuses anything). Another friend made me realize that I should've been there for my friend. After that, my friend moved away and things were never the same, no matter how hard I tried to keep in touch. Ever since, I always go to the wake/funeral.
Similar here. Good friend of many years - his mother passed a few years back, then his dad earlier this year. In both cases it was relatively sudden, but the compounding factor is I live 800 miles away. In both cases, I debated whether to go up for the funeral, but one case scheduling was near impossible. In the other... I rationalized that... he'd just be too busy with other family issues, and that was the case. I feel like I still should have gone, but we did catch up in person a couple months later, and he'd had time to process and reflect a bit more. Lots of drama was going on (and still is a bit) so being there in the moment might have been more about me trying to feel like I was doing something ("being there") instead of actually being of any real benefit for his family.
I've only got a couple of other friends that close that I would consider attending their parents' funeral. One parent passed away during covid and there was no service. When that other parent passes, I think I will go, even though we've not seen each other in years. Several states away, again, but I will plan on going.
I was going to add a top-level comment adding that there's a bit of nuance here between _the wake_ (calling hours, as the author puts it) and _the funeral_.
I actually have a similar regret about not attending the _funeral_ for a friend's mother, although I did attend the wake. In retrospect, I absolutely should have gone to the funeral but, at least in the US, the expectations around who should attend _the funeral_ vary between religions/backgrounds/etc. and it can sometimes be hard to tell what the most appropriate move is. This is especially true if you're no longer/not very close to the family in question. Some families want _the funeral_ to be a more intimate, private affair and will sometimes even mention that it will be in the announcement.
But, to your and the author's point, I think as a general rule, _going_ is the better bet.
We don't know for sure, but it is often said that the father wasn't dead in that story. That is the person in question was really saying "I don't want to tell my family what I'm doing, once they are gone I'll follow you". (timelines are not clear, but Jesus likely died a couple years latter so the opportunity to follow Jesus would have ended long before the parents died)
Personal opinion: I find funerals to be a waste of time and money.
Especially, coming from a culture where they are a big event. People spend enormous money on funerals —- money that they wouldn’t help you with while you are alive and struggling.
Maybe attending one in a less flamboyant culture will change my mind.
But I wish more people in general don’t wait for terminal events to do or say nice things.
I shared your opinion until I attended my first funeral as an adult. They are very important for the grieving process, at least to me.
That doesn't mean much money needs to be spent, I've only been to scaled down funerals where there's a short ceremony and a meal afterwards.
Eh. For children of less than stellar parents, a funeral is:
- A bad person gets celebrated in a way that is not aligned to your understanding
- A bunch of people who don't know about the less than stellar bits offering what feels like performative grief
- Others who enabled the less than stellar bits angry their applecart has been upset, looking to lash out at a scapegoat.
Obviously not everyone has this negative experience, but narcissism is in about 6.2-7.7% of the population; other "dark traits" are also around in a long tail. So it's not unreasonable to expect around 12-15%? of people risk a potential increase to trauma at an already complex time of their lives.
It probably depends on one's culture. In the Philippines, it's customary for funeral visitors to give a small donation to the bereaved family members (typically, around 20-40 USD). And since funerals are considered a big social event, it's not uncommon to hear of fmilies who were able to recoup (or pay off) their funeral expenses through the donations alone.
I feel much the same. I hope that when I die, the people around me will remember the many times that I have asked to have my body disposed of as quietly and cheaply as possible, and to not perform a funeral for me, and if they wish to use my death as an excuse to gather, to make the event as joyful as possible and as little about me as they can.
The funeral industry is also very predatory. They know full well they have people in grief making decisions and they end up getting pressured into buying a casket that's just going to be buried in the ground in a few days, but they will be paying for for the next 10 years. That a family can come out of a funeral tens of thousands of dollars in debt is just absurd.
In my culture (Berber), each time any of your relatives gets sick, you also must visit him/her and bring something with you for him/her (usually nice food/fruits and/or money).
Reminded me of the famous quote by Twain:
"When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadA small but important suggested addition: if it's someone who's funeral you would go to, tell that person now what they mean to you. Then they can hear it while they are still alive.
It is not a given that you will have enough time to tell them later.
you ask me that after I said "clearly, the message of not attending is being said to others not to the person, but you get the gist"
so clearly, you didn't get the gist. not attending says something to the other friends/family that did attend. the knee jerk reaction is "what an asshole to not attend" typically followed by "I wonder what happened that would make them not attend". then the gossiping begins and the person sending the message smiles a wry smile
Ok. I can respect that.
It is just that as I was thinking the dead was the target, it would be better to make sure you get whatever retribution while he is alive.
Does this person have friends from childhood? Do his friends come from the same place, or all sorts of places? Do they know each other, or does he have a lot of singletons there?
Who considers themselves close family? Second cousins? Or did their cousins not even come?
How well represented are various social classes?
I always find these things super interesting when I go to one of these.
What? You have enemies? Like the Joker and Batman or Lex Luthor and Superman?
Honestly, to me, that word describes a kind of relation that mainly exists in comic books and between nation states.
I don't actively search for their obits or anything, but if I learned about a funeral, I'd make the time to visit, stand quietly, and reflect.
Probably not the healthiest thing, but not my unhealthiest quality either. At the moment it is only theoretical. But I can think of 3 or 4 I'm now likely to google up and see what they're up to and assess who is closer to the pine box. :)
Do you have grudge against those people, such that put effort into trying to undermine or defeat them? I feel the word "enemy" has connotations of a kind of direct, sustained opposition that just seems like it'd be really unusual (and unhealthy) in real life.
Doing the right thing all the time is painful, tedious and can cost you. But doing the wrong thing will cost you too. Both compound.
The literal advice about going to the funeral is about showing up for people who meant something to you. There are only a few special times in your life when you get to see a large chunk of other people's important people:
* graduations
* coming of age ceremonies
* weddings
* funerals
Being there gives you a special chance to know the person better. Just do it.
To end with a lighter note loosely related, a funny citation of the marshal Foch:
> "An assembly must have an odd number of members in order to make a decision, but three is already too many."
I've tried, man. I'm deeply uncomfortable in social situations, and events with lots of wacky, nonsense traditions and rules that I don't understand makes things exponentially worse. Going to events like weddings and graduations makes me utterly miserable. I feel like shit for days before & afterwards, and I always regret going for months & years afterwards. I guess there's a chance someone there is glad I'm off being miserable in a corner, but I doubt it. So I've mostly stopped going to these things.
https://bible.com/bible/1/ecc.7.4.KJV
Come to think of it, so would The Heart of Fools.
Or maybe I'm just noticing more.
I've been on HN since 2007.
There was that story a few weeks ago with the aging parents and their daughter that took a picture of them waving goodbye, each year she visited.
I like these stories. It gives me pause and to wonder what it's all been for.
Probably for my kids. My second oldest (9) loves creating levels in Geometry Dash. He'll probably be an engineer.
He asks great questions. He can teach himself new tricks from YouTube videos. He asks for critical feedback on his levels. That's a good start.
I'm just rambling.
Btw, which post are you referring to? I am curious to read it as well.
You kid sounds amazing. Be proud and ramble on.
- kids who just graduated and realize that they've been told lies and need some life advice
- midlife crisis
- retirees who can see the death slowly approaching and reevaluate their lives in panic
I know several people who expressed a wish not to have a funeral. Sometimes this wish stems from a desire not to be an inconvenience, or a sense of guilt or shame that one's life was not well-lived. Sometimes, simply the view that funerals don't matter, so why bother.
In every case, I think this desire is mistaken. The need to mourn the dead is an instinct older than our species itself, and in dismissing it we wound the people closest to us.
If you're the sort of person to whom the idea of skipping your own funeral sounds tempting, I kindly ask you for the sake of your loved ones that you reconsider.
The body does not need to be present for a memorial, as it is for a funeral. That makes it a somewhat easier event to arrange.
And honestly, standing at his gravesite paying my respects, I do not have the painful memories that I had with my mother's funeral, trying to organize, trying to handle everyone and everything, and not being able to grieve in the way that I wanted until long after. Instead, I am able to simply talk to him, and not have such a frustrating coda.
They say that funerals are for the living. Sure. But going to funerals of loved ones has never made me feel better in the long run compared to more private goodbyes, and I am not the only one to feel this way.
But I also recognize that other people got more out of it than did I. They cried and hugged and shared memories. That experience I am assuming was very valuable to them. But not to me. I was stressed the entire time. The lesson I learned was that funerals are valuable to some while not others.
Is it just me or does this actually seem kind of low?
They say your social cluster is 150 people, so you should be going to about 2 funerals every year (this ignores age-clustering, but that's counterbalanced by the fact that you often go to funerals slightly outside your cluster and the fact that the cluster changes over time).
Yes, it's low.
I go to much fewer than 2 funerals per year. But now that I'm 55 it will likely start picking up.
> Is it just me or does this actually seem kind of low?
Not for someone who's young and mostly disconnected from their grandparents' generation. In my case, my family lived far away from pretty much all my relatives, which meant I'm not very close to any of them and going to a funeral meant lots of short-notice plane tickets.
I think I've only gone to two funerals in my life: one grandparent who died geographically close to use when I was a kid, and the father (who I never met) of a friend of mine.
I think it would have been better if it had been different, and I had gone to more funerals, because now my lack of exposure adds a whole extra layer of awkwardness onto dealing with death.
The scenario I was thinking of to get to more than "five or six" funerals by age 16, was to have "always go to the funeral" parents who took you to the funerals of grandparents and great aunts/uncles living nearby.
> They say your social cluster is 150 people
Maybe yours is.
It's an interesting shift. A loss, I think.
When my grandfather died when I was 15, not only wasn't I allowed to go, but I had to stay home and watch my siblings as my parents traveled a thousand miles away for a week. We more than had the money for plane tickets. They just didn't want to bring us (youngest was 10, and also not troublesome).
For my other older relatives, they've all insisted on not having services, and I can't help but feel it's both an effect and a cause of the fact that my extended family is very disconnected and fragmentary.
My parents are / were just very distant from their families, didn't make much effort to tie their children into their adult social networks, etc.
I went to the only funeral I was ever invited to lol.
America's average lifespan is 77. When you're 16, your parents are perhaps 46, and their parents are maybe 76.
And a lot of people live for 10+ years after retirement, so your teachers might all be alive too.
If you've got a big extended family, or you're part of an organisation like a church where 16 year olds come are getting to know 70+ year olds, you might have gone to more than 6 funerals.
But generally? At 16 your parents, their friends, your aunts and uncles, your 16 year old friends, their parents? Good chance they're all still alive. Your grandparents - maybe, maybe not.
"Should" seems right, but in practice, do young people have this? How? (Thinking of the US here.)
When I was a kid, this came through church. But church attendance among the young has fallen off a cliff, with (to my knowledge) no replacement.
Even now, there aren’t anywhere near 150 people whose funeral I’d attend.
Nowadays many families have just one or two kids and everyone is spread over all of country and world.
For me, funerals and similar services are more for family and close (or at least close-ish) friends. My social cluster might number 150, but there are many in it for whom I'll pass on my regards & regrets from afar rather than attending a funeral or wake.
Are you attending 2 funerals every year, even averaged over a couple of decades to allow for clustering? I can think of one year when there were three, but that nowhere near makes up for the years when there were none or just one.
In fact, the actual number includes a significant decrease due to excluding "funerals I would've gone to if I didn't have a more important funeral to go to" and "people who moved away before they died". Thankfully in recent years remote recording is usually a thing in some form (live or not, video or just audio; the quality depends significantly on the funeral home).
The thing that made me sad about this article is that it made me realize how lacking I am in community. My eldest child is six, and I can't think of more than a couple people who are likely to pass from natural causes by the time she is sixteen, who we are close enough with to definitely know about their funeral. And I have no idea how we would find out about the funerals of people we aren't so close to. It's not like there is a local paper with obituaries that we read...
Of course the elephant in the room is that when I was a kid, the coordinating organization for this was my family's church. Without having that community fixture, I find myself unsure how this sort of thing actually works.
For us it was only normal to go to funerals for family members, and my parents' generation is getting up there but still alive. So only your four grandparents are what you'd usually expect by that age.
I never even heard about deaths in friends' families unless it was a reason they were missing school.
You should do it for yourself, out of respect for the person who died and respect for the loved ones remaining. Not out of societal obligation
The corollary to that is there are plenty of times where the right thing is to not go to the funeral. If you lack those things.
There have been times I don’t go the funeral. Because the dead person was a horrible person. When people asked, I said exactly that and many times the response I got was “man I wish I had not gone”
More broadly, your actions are a reflection of your values. If there's a mismatch, then one of two things must be true: you fell short of your ideals and you should strive to do better in the future, or your stated values really aren't your values.
The funeral is a ritual for the people who knew and loved the dead person. The question should really be about them, rather than the deceased who is dead and gone.
Now you've made yourself the asshole to other people. Not a great life strategy.
Was there another assumption?
But I went because I felt a duty to my relatives that isn’t released just because they didn’t hold up their end of the bargain: he had indirectly given me life, even if he had done much ill besides. And moreover I felt an obligation to the office of the head of my family that transcended the particular man.
It would be a grim world in which comfort for the grieving is a service the deceased must have earned in advance, and we the comforters decide whether they have really earned it.
In 2024 it would be quite better if we did more things out of societal obligation, instead of each individual placing themselves (and their whims) as the moral authority.
Some examples of communities I've been a part of over the years:
- Family
- Church groups
- Bar buddies (overlapping with the previous category :))
- Biker community
- Startup community
- Technology groups
- Queer communities
- Neighbor groups
It was a lot harder to get into groups when I used to be introverted, I distinctly remember how afraid I was. My startup was the thing that forced me way out of my comfort zone and led me to learn how to overcome my fears of joining groups full of unknown people. The "ah-ha" moment was when I realized many others had the same fears and insecurities as I did, and yet that's ok.
Societal obligation in this case is literally basic minor respect towards the remaining people. And frankly, the loneliness epidemic HN like to talk about is closely related to the ideology where the only thing that matters is yourself.
It's not for you, and it's not for other people. It's just a thing. It's not an analogy about doing the right thing. It's just going to the funeral. That's what you should do, for lots of reasons. When you do it, you'll know why; maybe later, but you'll know.
9+ times out of 10 when I’m on the fence about going to a major life event and go, I’m glad I did. Can’t think of the last thing I regretted going to.
I’ve certainly missed some like graduations I regret not making it to.
Funerals are towards the top of the list of big life events and I’ve never regretted one.
But there's definitely some other effects in play there: revisiting people from your past who you've lost touch with is a pretty fraught experience, at least for me because ultimately the relationship is at best frozen in time from whenever you last talked: high school is particularly bad IMO, because it tends to feel like just trying not to be who you were a decade ago as everyone remembers you, rather then getting to be who you are now.
But I went to a high school friend's 40th, and caught up with the people who were my good friends - and still are - and it was worth every penny just to hear their voices face to face for a few days.
But it was the complete opposite. There was a committee of four students that planned it, they set up a tour of the building with the new principal in the morning, they rented out a venue that had an almost prom-like feel to it, there was a memorial to four students that had died (three of which I wasn't even aware of, one of which was my friend that shot and killed himself while we were still in high school, so it was nice to see him remembered).
Tons of people were there (like at least 60 people), and I talked to people I barely talked to in high school because I was so shy (and realized my reputation seemed to be a bit higher than I had anticipated, I just thought I was the quiet weird kid), and I was able to remember and reconnect to some friendships I had mostly forgotten about in the years since, and see how these people had changed since up close instead of just some random posts on Facebook.
It was really great for the most part. Only downer was seeing how many people had kids and how old those children were (a few people were nearly empty nesters already), since I still don't have children yet.
The reasons my brain comes up with for why I shouldn't go are just lies.
Just go. And take what you can get while the opportunities are still coming.
It’s like saying it’s bad advice to approach women because of some bad experiences you had. Meanwhile the next woman you meet might be your wife.
And no, I don't want my last act on Earth to be inconveniencing people.
There’s no way around that. Death inconveniences the living. Your death will probably make a mess of some kind. Your dead body will have to be buried or cremated, or it will be an even bigger inconvenience. Your effects will have to be split up among the living in some way.
And if you find funerals to be an inconvenience, don’t go. But don’t kid yourself into thinking that everyone will be happier if you insist on no funeral. Many of us want to gather with everyone else who cared about the person who died, and it feels strange and wrong to be denied the opportunity. Funerals are for the living anyway. Let the living make their own decisions about what events they want to hold and attend.
But that could be minimized. For example, by not taking precious square meters of Earth surface from the living.
>> Your effects will have to be split up among the living in some way.
That's not inconvenience :)
I understand and even agree with the sentiment here, but to me “I don’t want to be buried” or “I don’t want a funeral” is micromanaging. I’ve expressed a preference for as little inconvenience to the people I love and as little damage to the Earth as possible. My children or whoever else survives me can make whatever decisions work for them. I don’t want my last act to be ordering them around. My dad, for example, had always planned to be buried, but when he was nearing death he suddenly said he wanted to be cremated, which was distressing to some of the family and was going to mean redoing a bunch of plans. When we asked him what was behind this sudden change of mind, it turned out he didn’t actually care one way or the other, he’d just recently found out cremation was less expensive and he was trying to save us money. Turns out it’s important to say what you really mean—“I love you and want to save you inconvenience and grief”—rather than “I don’t want a funeral” or “I don’t want to be buried” or whatever.
> That’s not inconvenience :)
Heh. You must not have been executor of anyone’s estate. It’s pretty inconvenient. All I can hope for is to have enough money that it’ll be worth it to whichever kid ends up doing it.
It frequently is. In fact, it tends to be a more difficult form of grieving in my opinion because now they are forced to throw away things that were yours because they know nobody else wants them. Your bedding, your old spice cabinet, the magazines you never threw out. All of those are more for your heirs to deal with emotionally and physically.
In fact, I think you have it exactly backwards. The industry popped up in order to exploit a deep human need. It did not create that need.
I've only got a couple of other friends that close that I would consider attending their parents' funeral. One parent passed away during covid and there was no service. When that other parent passes, I think I will go, even though we've not seen each other in years. Several states away, again, but I will plan on going.
I was going to add a top-level comment adding that there's a bit of nuance here between _the wake_ (calling hours, as the author puts it) and _the funeral_.
I actually have a similar regret about not attending the _funeral_ for a friend's mother, although I did attend the wake. In retrospect, I absolutely should have gone to the funeral but, at least in the US, the expectations around who should attend _the funeral_ vary between religions/backgrounds/etc. and it can sometimes be hard to tell what the most appropriate move is. This is especially true if you're no longer/not very close to the family in question. Some families want _the funeral_ to be a more intimate, private affair and will sometimes even mention that it will be in the announcement.
But, to your and the author's point, I think as a general rule, _going_ is the better bet.
> Let the dead bury the dead
Especially, coming from a culture where they are a big event. People spend enormous money on funerals —- money that they wouldn’t help you with while you are alive and struggling.
Maybe attending one in a less flamboyant culture will change my mind.
But I wish more people in general don’t wait for terminal events to do or say nice things.
- A bad person gets celebrated in a way that is not aligned to your understanding
- A bunch of people who don't know about the less than stellar bits offering what feels like performative grief
- Others who enabled the less than stellar bits angry their applecart has been upset, looking to lash out at a scapegoat.
Obviously not everyone has this negative experience, but narcissism is in about 6.2-7.7% of the population; other "dark traits" are also around in a long tail. So it's not unreasonable to expect around 12-15%? of people risk a potential increase to trauma at an already complex time of their lives.
> ... I wish more people in general don’t wait for terminal events to do or say nice things.
I agree, but whatever you did earlier, that's not a reason to not do something now.
In my culture (Berber), each time any of your relatives gets sick, you also must visit him/her and bring something with you for him/her (usually nice food/fruits and/or money).
I never attend funerals, and I rarely attend weddings. I skipped my father’s funeral. It simply doesn’t matter if you go or not.
Consider that funerals may have developed over millennia as a component of the grieving process. There is nothing necessarily religious about them.