Grieving And Funeral Services

This is the second of the Rites of Passage Triple Bill, dealing with ceremonies that celebrate change and how they assist people with change. This blog looks not at the funeral (which celebrates the ultimate change) but commemorations after that. Grief can be shared or private. When shared in a ceremony, grief is given a different context – the context of the group. The intensity of ceremony is twofold. First, it is an activity that stresses our membership of community and our place in it. Second, many ceremonies, particularly religious ones, have been so well crafted that they have a particular power. Advertisement: Story continues below Before Christmas I went to The Avenue Uniting Church in the leafy eastern Melbourne suburb of Blackburn to attend a moving ceremony of commemoration. In my case I was there in remembrance of my deceased and still missed motherinlaw. The ceremony is held before Christmas for, as the Minister explained, it is on the days of celebration that the loss of friend or relative is most jarringly felt. Nothing makes the trauma of death more palpable than a notable absentee from the joy of a celebration. It seemed an appropriate moment of genuine reflection and sobriety at a time when drunken debauchery is the more usual condition. In many ways, the service held no surprises. We gathered to the entrancing sound of a harpist. We sang some of the more sober and restrained carols. We reflected on the nature of our losses. Eyes filled. There was a simple yet powerful candlelighting ceremony. Eyes filled again. There was prayer. Being godless, prayer leaves me cold so I used the intoning of the words as an opportunity for an internal conversation with myself. The community, which I understand included many who were not usual congregants, demonstrating the need for Rosetta Stone French this ritual, had arrived in quiet groups and dabbed their eyes through the service. They had made a clear decision to remember the dead not in the privacy of their homes but in the ceremonial gathering of their family and peers. In doing so, in the company of the community, their remembrance resonated with power, for humans are herd animals. When we gather, we amplify our emotions. Some months earlier I had communally grieved with my community on Yom Kippur. Jewish liturgy offers mourners many opportunities to mourn and the primary vehicle is an ancient prayer called the Kaddish. It is written in Aramaic, the conversational language of biblical times (Jesus, though multilingual, would have spoken primarily Aramaic) to make the prayer more accessible for the masses. Of course my Hebrew is appalling and my Aramaic is worse (well nonexistent) so let me transliterate it for you. Boiled down to its basics, the Kaddish says: ''God’s a great guy. God’s fantastic. God’s fabulous. We love God.'' Clearly, I am not seduced by the literal meaning of the Kaddish prayer. Yet it moves me seismically every time I intone it. My parents died suddenly, shockingly and together. As a son, my duty and privilege was to recite the Kaddish at their grave. I didn't want to stuff this up and so endanger their esteemed position in the community. So I practised it continually night and day until their burial. Given my primitive Hebraic skill, an abomination of recitation was really on the cards. If I buggered it up, I could imagine in my mind their loving parental eye roll at yet another iconoclastic moment of their problematic boy. It was my final filial duty and against the odds, I think I got it pretty well right. So the Kaddish has real meaning for me, even though I am an atheist and even though the events of which I speak occurred a quarter of a century ago. It binds me anew to my community and it once again is an opportunity to pay homage to my parents by repeating my final filial responsibility of their earthly presence. So on certain holy days, this hardcore atheist can still be found in a synagogue stumbling my illiterate way through the Kaddish.

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