The Importance of Funerals…

Okay, a warning, this post is going to be very, very personal (but not in a TMI way). I read Dear Abby almost every day. Recently there was a question on whether children should be required to attend funerals, particularly of their parents and grandparents.

This is something I know a bit about. My mother died of liver and lung cancer on February 16, 1989. This time is a huge emotional mess of memories in my mind. There was so much going on. My parents divorced in 1986 (no one told me why, but I have since discovered there were some extremely good reasons for it) when my sister was 3 weeks old. Not long after that my dad gave up all feeble attempts to parent us (my best guess is that he was so embittered at that point that he stopped trying) and took a job out of state. He literally vanished from our lives at that point.

Not long after my mother went to the doctor because of a hard lump in her stomach and was diagnosed with cancer. She began chemo, but she was too proud to ask for help. Instead we closed the ranks. At 6 I was cleaning the house, cooking food for my two younger siblings while my mother was too sick to get out of bed. Her family came to visit and found us that way, and  for good or ill they moved in on a rotation, making sure that someone was always there to make sure the house was taken care of. The down side of this was that one of the things they decided was to shield us from what was happening to our mom. That meant, at times, shielding us from our mom herself.

We were care for, but who was caring for us rotated, and it wasn’t ever our mother. In fact, one of my most pleasant memories of those times was when I got to talk with and spend time with my mom… while the nurse was teaching me how to care for (and flush, which I found weirdly fascinating) the tubes that were implanted my mother’s upper chest for the chemo.

It doesn’t feel like it was three years in my head, and I don’t remember my mother taking a dive for the worse. Really, I don’t remember a lot, just little bits here and there. I was staying with my Grandma and my aunt. I’d been awake because I was listening to the sound of their voices and being happy because they hadn’t told me to get up yet. The phone rang and I just knew. So when my Grandma told me that mom had died I didn’t feel much of anything.

Uncertainty that was about it. What now? Where would we go? Who would take care of us? I considered us orphans (because we hadn’t seen my father at all in that time. Not once.) My knowledge of what happened to orphans was based on TV shows and movies where the plucky, lovable orphan wins hearts and breaks into song and ends up with a better, more loving family in the end. But then, I wasn’t exactly based in reality at that point.

So next came the funeral. People say funerals allow closure. No. Closure is something that happens years later, after you’ve gone through the seven stages of grief and you realize that you’ve been living your life without that person for years and you come to terms with the fact that it’s not going to change.

My mother had three four hour viewings and a similar funeral. My family decided that us kids ( I was 9, my brother was 7, my sister had just turned 3) should have to be there. We were the hosts see, so for three nights, four hours each night, we had to sit by our mother in the coffin and listen to a procession of people tell us how sorry they were and then talk as if we weren’t there.

I stared at the flowers a lot.

Then there was the funeral. My dad finally came into town. That was the first time I’d seen him since… oh hell I can’t remember. Since a week long vacation we took to visit him in Cincinnati around the time my mom was undergoing tests for her diagnosis. It was another dress up like we’re going to church, sit and be silent while more people tell us how sorry they are, but no one could even tell us what was going to happen to us. It was horrible. All I wanted to know what if we’d be living on the street or in a state home or something. Part of me thought when we got home from the funeral we’d be kicked out then. I pictured myself, with my little suitcase, sitting on a curb alone while the cars drove by, hoping someone would stop and pick me up.

What happened was that almost immediately after the funeral the three of us were split up. My sister stayed with my grandma and aunt. My brother went to live with our favorite aunt (they had cable!). I went to live with my brother’s cousin, because their daughter and I went to the same school. From the funeral until mid June I didn’t see anyone I was actually related to. I got a phone call from my dad once. And a letter with a check. (That would be the first of many “Here have some money to prove that I love you, now go someplace else.”)

In my case, and I am aware that not all parental deaths go like my mother’s did, the funeral was nothing but compacting pain on top of pain. The fact that I was as good as abandoned afterwards, left with a family whose only obligation to me was a promise they made. I assure you I was trouble, you know, losing my father, having lost my mother after a long disease, been abandoned by my family as both my mother’s family ceased contact–in their defense I’ve since discovered that my father’s family cut them out after the funeral–and then my father’s family left me, personally, to someone I barely knew, not even bothering with a call even though my sister was only three miles away (see, later on a trip to visit a different cousin I actually walked the difference).

Yes, I was absolute trouble. I was, as Scalzi coined, a seething cauldron of disconnected rage. What I didn’t have was closure. What I couldn’t get was closure. Because all the people in the world telling me they were sorry, and seeing my mother lowered into the ground, never going back to the house I’d grown up, not even seeing my siblings and being allowed to mourn together, being completely cut off from people I thought loved me, being in a family where I wasn’t the daughter (there was one, I wasn’t it) I was “the thing the agreed to and couldn’t get out of now” NONE of those things brought me closure.

You know what would have? What would have helped more than anything else? If someone had taken me aside and said, “You’re going to be okay. You will be taken care of. You will still be loved. You’re not alone. I’m here. And I’m going to be here for as long as you need me. It won’t be easy, but it will be okay.”

That would have given me closure.