Funeral practices and grief (original) (raw)
Related papers
Cremation and Grief: Are Ways of Commemorating the Dead Related to Adjustment Over Time?
OMEGA - Journal of Death and Dying
Funeral services are known to serve multiple functions for bereaved persons. There is also a common, intuitively reasonable assumption of positive associations between engaging in funeral activities and adjustment to bereavement. We examined whether restricting ceremonial cremation arrangements to a minimum has a negative association with grief over time. Bereaved persons in the United Kingdom completed questionnaires 2 to 5 months postloss and again a year later ( N = 233 with complete data; dropout = 11.4%). Neither type nor elaborateness of the cremation service, nor satisfaction with arrangements (typically high), emerged as significantly related to grief; no major subgroup differences (e.g., according to income level) were found. Results suggested that it does not matter to grief whether a more minimalistic or elaborate funeral ceremony was observed. We concluded that the funeral industry represented in this investigation is offering bereaved people the range of choices regardi...
Sociology
Funerals have long been of interest to social scientists. Previous sociological work has examined the relationship between individuality, belief and tradition within funeral services, founded on the assumption that public rituals have psycho-social benefit for organisers and attendees. With the introduction of direct cremation to the UK, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on funeral service attendance in 2020 and 2021, critique of this assumption is now needed. Drawing on interviews with recently bereaved people who organised a direct cremation in late 2017, this article illustrates how compromise, control and consistency are key drivers for not having a funeral service. The article argues that a declining importance in the fate of the body and a move towards ‘invite-only’ commemorative events represents a waning need for social support offered by a public, communal funeral service. In turn, this indicates a sequestration, or privatisation, of the contemporary funeral.
2015
Bereavement, while universal, is experienced and expressed uniquely; it is both ultimate and particular. As the predominant social expression of grief, funerals are purported to be waning and/or transitioning to emergent, less conventional ceremonial forms. In this research, the possible salutary utility of funerals is outlined, and trends relative to the cost, nature (type), and prevalence of funeral services are examined relative to an extant data set from two funeral homes of shared ownership in northeast Tennessee. This data analysis of specific funeral trends in south central Appalachia is juxtaposed against the broader backdrop of current theoretical, clinical, and socio-cultural understandings of bereavement, grief, and mourning.
Funerals, memorials and bereavement care
Bereavement Care, 2019
A population survey finds that bereaved people draw upon diverse sources of support in their communities, from both formal services and informal networks of care. The formal service most frequently recognised by participants is provided by funeral directors. We outline some reasons for this, and explore one particular theme, memorialisation, in which funeral providers have traditionally been a lead discipline. Significant changes in memorialisation over recent decades challenge today's funeral industry, but also draw our attention to underlying social changes reshaping our understanding not only of bereavement care but of care in general. Bereavement support is most effective when provided collaboratively by formal and informal care providers, but collaboration is challenged by policies that continue to privilege formal services over informal care. This challenge of developing constructive, respectful and complementary collaborations between formal and informal care is not peculiar to bereavement care, but is a social policy imperative for contemporary societies.
Bodies and ceremonies: is the UK funeral industry still fit for purpose?
Mortality, 2016
Funerals may be defined as the ritual or ceremonial disposal of a body; the two essential components are therefore a body and a ceremony/ritual. The UK funeral industry's structure revolves around those who manage the body rather than the ceremony. This structure, in which the client contracts with a funeral director who subcontracts the funeral ceremony to a priest or celebrant, was fit for purpose in the nineteenth century when most of the family's choices concerned hardware (coffins, carriages, horses, etc) for the body's containment and transport. It may no longer be fit, however, in the twenty first century when, for many families, the major choices concern how to personalise the ceremony. In theory, it might therefore now be more appropriate for at least some families first to contract with a celebrant, who would then subcontract the body's care, storage and transport, reversing who is contractor and who is subcontractor. In practice, factors on both the demand and supply side keep the industry's present structure in place. Though the past 25 years have seen much innovation, conservative innovations such as celebrancy and green burial that accept the industry's existing structure have proved more successful than radical innovations that challenge it. This hinders measures to reduce funeral costs and funeral poverty.
The Evolving Landscape: Funerals, Cemeteries, Memorialization, and Bereavement Support
Omega - Journal Of Death And Dying, 2020
The aim of this study was to provide a better understanding of current memorialization practices and their influence on grief due to bereavement and to explore ways of improving bereavement outcomes. The qualitative research design incorporated two phases, a scoping literature review, followed by in-depth interviews with eight service providers from the funeral, cemetery, and crematorium industries across Australia. The trend toward informal memorialization practices blurs the roles of community members and formal industry service providers. A public health approach to bereavement support that encompasses both groups is recommended as the most appropriate response to the evolving landscape. This approach focuses on building partnerships between industry service providers and other community organizations involved in end-of-life issues. We propose that reframing the role of formal industry service providers as educators and facilitators partnered within compassionate communities will support improved outcomes for the bereaved.
How Funerals Accomplish Family: Findings From a Mass-Observation Study
Omega, 2018
The article analyses how potentially conflicting frames of grief and family operate in a number of English funerals. The data come from the 2010 Mass-Observation directive "Going to Funerals" which asked its panel of correspondents to write about the most recent funeral they had attended. In their writings, grief is displayed through conventional understandings of family. Drawing on Randall Collins, we show how the funeral stratifies mourners into family or nonfamily, a stratification accomplished-by family and nonfamily-through both outward display and inner feeling. The funerals described were more about a very traditional notion of family than about grief; family trumped grief, or at least provided the frame through which grief could be written about; and perceptions of "family" prompted emotions which in turn defined family. The funerals were portrayed as a distinct arena privileging family over the fluid and varied personal attachments highlighted in both th...