Funeral Service Times August 2017 November 2018 | Page 20

20 DR KEVIN MYERS
They were here: How people use
rituals to keep their dead alive
University of Birmingham lecturer Dr Kevin Myers looks at the different services and ways in which
people celebrate the lives of those who have passed
W
e have been told that we
live in a death-denying
world. In it, we are said
to have sequestered or
relegated death to the margins of our social
and cultural lives. We have also been
asked to believe that grief is an emotional
experience, something that happens in
stages. These stages end when we ‘let go’ of
our dead, and move forward in life to create
new attachments (Kübler-Ross & Kessler,
2005). However, this is simply not the case.
We do not grieve in stages and we certainly
do not live in a death-denying world. Death
is all around us, it is on full public display for
all to see and engage with. And millions do.
We also do not look to banish our dead. In
fact, we often do the exact opposite. In this
sense, it can be argued that today the dead
have never been so alive (Walter, 1999).
Much like in the past, we continue to create,
use and develop means to keep them alive,
albeit in increasingly innovative ways (Myers,
2016). In many instances, this process begins
with the funeral service.
THE FIRST CHAPTER IN THE NEW
LIFE OF THE DEAD
How do we keep our dead alive and have
these methods changed over time? Within
Ireland, funeral services mostly take place
within a Catholic church. Secular funerals,
including civil and humanist services,
have increased in popularity, but their
numbers remain quite low. Of the religious
services, the rites themselves have become
contested. What we are seeing is a call for
increased personalisation in the funeral
service, made manifest typically in requests
by the bereaved to play a secular song at the
service and the recitation of a personalised
eulogy. Anecdotes about the conflict
between the clergy and bereaved families
at funeral services are commonplace
throughout Ireland and wider Europe
(Quartier, 2009).
But commemoration does not stop
there. Throughout history, people have
commemorated the dead in deed, word and
song. This includes visiting graves, holding
anniversary services and the performance
of religious rituals. In both the UK and
Ireland, we often find roadside memorials
NOVEMBER 2018
punctuating streets, lanes and highways.
These are public commemorations of private
loss. However, new innovative technologies
have allowed people to publicly mourn in
ways unavailable to their parents before
them. Where once religious institutions
acted as the primary gatekeepers between
this world and the next, the media has begun
to take over much of this function. It often
happens from the top down. Corporations
such as Google include commemorating
segments in most of their annual Year in
Search videos. Many will also be familiar
with Facebook memorial pages, and more
recently the development of a feature
referred to as a legacy contact, which allows
users to nominate a friend or family member
to take ownership of their page after death.
These are not the acts of a death-denying
society.
THEY WERE HERE
Perhaps the central goal for much of these
practices relates to an almost innate wish
to remind people that their loved ones
lived at all. Funerals, months minds, and
Facebook posts offer people the opportunity
to keep their dead alive, if only for another
moment before they are heard of no more.
These rituals are plays, stories told by the
bereaved, in an attempt to make the lives of
their dead signify something.
References
Quartier, T. (2009). ‘Personal symbols
in Roman Catholic funerals in the
Netherlands’, Mortality, 14(2), pp.133-
146.
Kübler-Ross, E & Kessler, D. (2005)
On grief and grieving. Finding the
meaning of grief through the five
stages of loss. New York: Scribner.
Myers, K. (2016). Keeping the dead
alive: Death and use of social media
in contemporary Ireland. In S. Ryan
(Eds.). Death and the Irish: A miscella-
ny. Dublin: Wordwell Press.
Walter, T. (1999). On Bereavement:
A Culture of Grief. Philadelphia: Open
University Press.
www.funeralservicetimes.co.uk