Funerals

Funerals are normally an intimate affair.

But since childhood, I’ve sat in more funerals for people completely unknown to me, than I can recollect. A mere connection can see Samoans don their finest blacks to spend hours squeezed sardine-like in a church overflowing with white laced hats, fake fur coats and cheap perfumes. Space is consumed by multi-generational families, visiting congregations and cross-arranged flowers next to framed portraits of the departed at the altar.

While waiting for the service to begin, the organist plays familiar Samoan hymns; the comforting sounds of my mother tongue peppers the air amongst whispered jokes and gossip. Bored children begin rifling their mother’s handbags for treats or paper to draw on; the elderly are carefully ushered to their seats – sporting winter jackets on a warm, spring day. Before long, standing room is all that’s left. It seems that despite leaving our homeland, the concept of village is still strong. We congregate only to learn who’s died when we’re seated, programme in hand. Connection doesn’t have to be intimate: connection is reason enough.

When the coffin arrives, on the shoulders of burly sons or nephews, it is lovingly layered with embroidered cloths and wreaths, like badges of honour for the fallen in war. The air is thick and sombre.

Stealing a glimpse of the deceased’s family lost in their grief, I realised I had been here before. I had stood here, with this family, in these pews, singing these hymns, in these clothes. In that moment, I saw, not one family, but countless families, nameless faces, surging from my memory, playing across the scene in front of me.

And it occurred to me then that funerals are not for the dead, but for the living.

Funerals are our expression of love; of ceremony and pomp we believe fitting for, and in proportion to, the person we are biding farewell. The conscious being that existed is no more – their voice and mannerisms will cease to imprint our days. And yet, we find it hard to believe that something – someone so vivid and real could come to such a conclusion: to an end. And so, we extend their lives and stories into heaven and with other deceased relatives or preferred saints. While these are comforting, they can still be unsatisfying. The dead live stagnantly in conversations, dreams and update Facebook updates.

The notion of extension also pervades our vocabulary. We say someone has “passed on” or “is looking down from above” to curb the bluntness of death. We commonly say we are attending a funeral for a certain person, when perhaps it’s more accurate to say it’s for those in attendance, the living. The deceased, though no less important, is the common denominator for the gathering.

In this system we humans have built for ourselves – Greek coins for passage in the underworld; burials with one’s possessions; fake money burnt at graves or placing personal objects within a person’s coffin (a school badge, as I had done once, or, a wedding dress as my mother had) – the intention of traversing the space between the living and the dead is ubiquitous.

Neuroscientist and writer David Eagleman says we have three deaths. “The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.” Funerals are the recognition of the first two, but it’s the last that scares us the most.

And so we mummify the deceased in our language and beliefs; we preserve them to preserve ourselves and our sense of self and concept of the world we want to live in. We create stories for them so we can keep living the story we live. We extend them to extend ourselves because not doing so would be either too painful or simply bewildering.

Perhaps the most difficult thing then to understand about death is that there isn’t anything to understand. Death just is.

This may be more obvious to those without intimate connections to the dearly departed or notions of a hereafter. It’s also a perspective easier to assume when no emotions are at play – only observation.

But it does beg the question: how do we live with loss?

Many of us don’t. We hover precariously above the void, clutching at memories and hope of reunion, as a balm for the pain of losing someone. For a cousin who lost her father, and an aunt who lost her husband – their farewells were, at least to them, temporary.

However, even if at the core, these are illusions, they’re not necessarily things we need to dispel. Stories reviving the departed, even if it has a sequel, can form the bones of a fruitful life; it can provide a sense of self, direction and a connection to our past and identity. It can also smooth the edges of heartbreak.

If our finite time in the sun can be somewhat less painful, maybe certain illusions can have their place in our lives after all? Maybe the goal is not to eradicate the existence of illusions altogether, but rather to change the way we think they do.

And yet, I can’t help but feel a sense of relief in not sharing the same sentiments. I no longer have to perpetuate the mental gymnastics required to piece back together my grandmother’s remains we unearthed for a reburial.  Or wonder, as my 12-year-old self did upon kissing my aunt’s cold forehead, how she would heal herself of the cancer that took her and be warm to touch once more. I am not, by any means, immune to loss or grief – as recent family deaths and near-deaths have shown me. But the sense of urgency to embrace love and life is greater now than it ever has been. Because while life may be short, it’s certainly not always sweet.

After leaving the latest but definitely not the last, Samoan funeral, I remember feeling lighter despite the gathering clouds that day. Because beyond the marshland, rich with denial of death and unhealthy rituals, I saw freedom. Freedom from thinking that death was anything more than what it was, and that funerals were for anyone more than who they were for – ourselves.