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Most people are fixers. We don't like to see people in pain, and so we minimize it. That's not helpful.

A trend in funerals is to have a celebration of the deceased's life. They have a party around a theme of that person's life. People say they want to be remembered for what they cared about and how they lived when they were active, not how they died.

Zonnebelt-Smeenge: Yeah, and that makes my blood boil. Our society wants to make it easy on everybody. We don't recognize that when we do that we're actually making it harder for that person to work through grief. Facing pain is healing. Avoiding pain doesn't heal. A funeral ought to be a celebration of the person's life. We are advocates of people giving eulogies. But it also ought to recognize that these grieving people are here who have woven their life around someone who has died. They're going to be lonely. They're not going to feel whole. They are going to miss that person.

DeVries and I encourage people to see the body. People say they want to remember their loved one alive, not dead. But that really short changes our mental capacity. Just because I see my loved one dead doesn't mean I can't remember seeing them at the beach or at a reunion or holiday. Our minds are much more expansive then that. We know from research that people who don't see the deceased loved one have a harder time accepting the reality that that person died.

DeVries: When people want to celebrate instead of having a funeral, they're making the grief process much more difficult.

Copyright © 2007 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Traveling Through Grief is available from Christianbook.com and other book retailers.

Susan J. Zonnebelt-Smeenge and Robert C. DeVries are also authors of Living Fully in the Shadow of Death.

Similar CT articles are collected on our death and dying page.

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May 2007, Vol. 51, No. 5