Whatever your spiritual beliefs, death creates a threshold between the world of the living and the world of the dead.
When we think of a funeral as a rite of passage, we’re referring not to the deceased but to those left behind. For the survivors, life is irrevocably changed by the death of someone significant, often a parent or a spouse.
One purpose of a funeral is to celebrate the life of the deceased.
Contemporary Western funerals often include stories about the deceased, told by family and friends. Painful as they might be to hear, stories remind us of who the deceased was. Stories keep a person alive in our hearts. If you’re planning a funeral service, this is the part you’re likely to think of first.
Just as guests at a wedding celebrate the happiness of the newlyweds and affirm their new status, guests at a funeral acknowledge and affirm the grief and new status of a spouse or family. That’s because another purpose of a funeral is to acknowledge the death. If you’re planning a funeral service, this is the part you might not think of in such a specific way. I think that’s because death is still a taboo subject.
