Where Have All the Funerals Gone?

“You will enjoy doing funerals and find officiating at weddings exhausting!”

These counterintuitive words of our seminary professors did have a certain logic: weddings often resemble expensive pagan ceremonies, where families hire you to somehow adorn bridezillas and drunken groomsmen with a Christian sheen. On the other hand, funerals demand Christian rituals, where a family entrusts you to lead them through the valley of the shadow of death.

While that might have been true one or two generations ago, this adage no longer matches my experience. Today, funerals are starting to feel like weddings of old, with clergy needing to bring Jesus to an otherwise secular affair.

Our society has seen huge shifts in how funerals are conducted. Admittedly, these tend to fly under the radar: I have yet to see a picture of an urn on social media; and if I did, I highly doubt anyone would comment: “Back in the day, we always had caskets.” Most people do not wish to dwell on funeral practices and certainly not to broadcast them on social media. Nonetheless, the cumulative effect of the changes means that most people of three or four generations ago, if they were transported to our world today, would hardly recognize how we grieve (or try not to grieve) our loved ones.

I’m not interested in offering a critique of how individual families have chosen to honor their loved ones. What does interest me are the monumental shifts occurring within American funeral practices. These shifts grow out of other changes happening in our society. As such, they reveal something profound about our culture. Furthermore, they speak volumes about what secularization actually looks like and its impact on our capacity for grief. If I can, I would like to offer some insight on why funeral planning has grown so fatiguing for families and why afterwards people often feel exhausted, disconnected, and confused rather than relieved and reconciled.

Change #1: Funerals happen long after the death

Early on in my ministry (mid-2000s), almost all the funerals occurred within a week of the death of someone, certainly within ten days. I would say, now, the average funeral occurs three weeks after death, but I frequently perform services a few months or even years later.

Many factors contribute towards this, but travel time and distance certainly impact how quickly a family can make arrangements. For economic and sociological reasons, families live further apart than they did previously. To plan the service for one matriarch in my congregation, we needed to coordinate with adult children in four time zones and on three continents. While that may serve as an outlier, almost any service today involves key players who must fly or travel extensively to attend.

This creates a real temptation for the family to delay the service. The logic goes like this, “Next weekend does not work because Uncle Ed cannot get off work and flight tickets cost too much for Aunt Marge, so we will aim for the first weekend of next month.” But then, once it cannot happen right away, later seems better. “Well, that weekend, cousin Meredith has a soccer tournament, and the next weekend his brother has a concert …” It turns out that in most families, people readily oblige to push the date back. Most of us would rather avoid a funeral!

This creates a weird situation in which the nearby family often grieves on a very different timetable than the far-away family. The nearby typically have to deal with the immediate aftermath of the death, everything from cleaning out a room at a nursing home to finding the will. But even if the far-away family helps with this, the nearby family often have other local community members aware of the death and expressing daily condolences at places like the grocery store. In contrast, the far-away family lives in a community often unaware of their loss. The two cohorts experience the same death in profoundly different ways, with those nearby typically having a far more intense experience. By the time a funeral service comes around, the local family can feel like they take a step backwards in their grief to reprocess everything. Those arriving into town often feel shocked to deal with something that they had not needed to address on a daily basis or to enter into a situation in which so much has already changed.

Change #2: We don’t call them funerals

We have stopped calling funerals “funerals,” preferring instead “celebrations of life.” Before I criticize this, I want to offer empathy. With modern medicine, many people suffer from chronic illnesses whose treatments’ real cost extends well beyond the medical bills. We often see our loved ones reduced in capacity over many months, all while we fight insurance companies. This means grieving often begins well prior to death. If someone has been sitting by someone’s bedside for six months intensely after seven years of experimental cancer treatments or dementia caregiving, I get why they might not want to sit around and be sad. Relief likely serves as their main emotion, not grief.

That said, I feel uncomfortable with the term “celebration of life.” Of course, a funeral includes a celebration of life. If it is a Christian funeral, it also must celebrate the life of Jesus Christ, who raises the dead to the life of eternal celebration. We can certainly rejoice in how God blessed us through our loved one. However, the use of this term often suggests that we should not grieve. Instead, we should smile and wear white or whatever other non-black color the instructions entail. (Yes, this happens.) A world emerges in which we cannot only delay the encounter with the messy and chaotic world of grief, but we are also shamed for even attempting to mourn.

Change #3: Designer funerals

Funerals no longer follow given rubrics, but families increasingly want input on the service. This grows, I imagine, out of habit, for we can customize everything, from our food to our clothing. Why not funeral services too? Furthermore, if you give families more time to plan a funeral, people begin to approach them far more like weddings, in which every detail comes up for debate and decision. In addition, in the age of cremation instead of caskets, funeral homes make less profit per funeral and therefore can only survive through volume. This means they will do anything to please a family, regardless of clergy preferences. “Sure, you want ‘I Did It My Way’ while people form a conga line, no problem.”

Finding a common ground also proves quite challenging for those planning a service. Families and friends cannot simply open a hymnbook and expect to find something recognizable. People not only hail from different generations but different religious and nonreligious backgrounds. Swimming in this pluralistic morass, families often grasp for a common denominator, which turns out to be the Eagles or Buckeyes or some other sports team. While God can do all things, helping a family tap into the wisdom of the ages regarding mourning or the eternal hope of the resurrection proves difficult when the focus of the worship service seems to be a person’s love for the Chicago Bears.

Previously, my job was to gently help people move beyond platitudes and into a set of rituals that allowed them a safe space to gather, acknowledge their grief, and receive the promises of everlasting life. Now I aim to get them to agree to have a funeral within the three weeks, if at all. Increasingly people, unable to find a common time and nervous to plan a service amid fractured family dynamics, choose not to have a service. At my church we do at least one “backdoor” funeral a year, where the clergy has to convince the family to have a “small” service that grows into a funeral.

I need to make sure the service has space for grief in a culture seeking to cut this off at every turn. Before, I ensured that “resurrection” entered into the worship service; now I often find myself the only person willing to use words like “die” and “death.” People need to hear that death is real and that tears and sadness inevitably grow out of love. It should not surprise anyone that I preach on John 11, where Jesus weeps over death. I also find myself referencing the Marvel miniseries WandaVision. Wanda, unable to come to terms with the death of her partner, creates a fantasy world in which he remains alive. Unfortunately, this fantasy world ends up trapping many innocent people in a literal maelstrom of unprocessed grief. The show does not intend to criticize those who struggle with grief, rather it intends to reveal the depth of grief. It acknowledges the way forward starts with naming loss. It wisely offers something that I long to communicate to those planning and attending a service: “What is grief, but love that persists.”

We all need something more than simply, “It is okay to cry.” We need something more than a celebration of life. Instead, we need to hear the message that we will see our loved ones again. The avoidance of grief, I humbly offer, grows out of a dying belief in the resurrection. If there is no resurrection, then the permanence of death is too great to bear. Indeed, it seems the way to let people begin to cry is precisely to lead them in a liturgy in which they hear the beautiful news that God will one day wipe away all of our tears. This God, they will discover, does walk with us through the valley of the shadow of death and into celebration of life, life together and life eternal.