Are funerals and visitation services such a social event? I just came back from a visitation service, and it just amazed me how many people were there, eating, laughing, talking, socializing... right there with the person that died in the room. I know it's customary to have a lil party after the service, but this was during the service. It's one thing to have a celebration of life, tell tales & stories about the person that has passed, relive the good times. That's wonderful. But this, this was something else altogether. This was like a picnic, or a social gathering after church, everyone chitter chattering while munching on cookies and coffee. I noticed some of the people looking at me like they couldn't figure out why I was so sad and crying. It was the same way at my grandmother's funeral recently. They literally ordered pizza to the funeral home, so it would "come out of the funeral expenses and we don't have to pay for it" kids running around knocking stuff over, yelling, screaming, etc etc
Maybe it's just me, but I just find it "tacky" for lack of a better word. I come to a funeral to pay my respects to the person that died and their family. I don't come to a funeral for the cookies & pizza.

I'm sorry for your loss.

I haven't noticed this.

People do socialize and kids do run about, but I haven't noticed it being disrespectful or anything, and when the kids begin to run around, the parents always take care of it.

I do have to say when someone in my family dies (as long as its not a child or something like that) the family does try to make it into a party... of course we are sad and crying... but then we have each other there to cheer up... we know the last thing the person would have wanted was a room full of people sitting around them crying and feeling sorry for themselves and each other...

however, kids not being kept in check and ordering pizza to the funeral home?!?! that's just unacceptable...

after I die, it matters not to me what people do

they can mourn and cry, or they can party,,,,its up to those who make the effort to do the planning,,,

I'm sorry for your loss.

I have never seen that at a funeral before. I think if it were my loved one that would bother me.

I was more than willing, even thru the crying, to talk about him and his life and accomplishments. I wanted to do more than just mourn his loss, I wanted to celebrate his life. It didn't seem like that was the case.
I know at my grandmother's funeral, I was actually called "dramatic" because I didn't feel like getting my picture taken. People were lining up together, posing, and all that for pictures. I didn't want to do that. I just wanted to sit with my family. I just didn't feel it was right. Maybe it's just me, I know how stubborn I am

I think the only thing that truly offended me was the ordering pizza out of the funeral funds at grandmother's funeral by my Aunt, my grandmother's daughter. You're right, the rest just made me uncomfortable but that really offended me.

Funerals are for the living.

Some folks go there to wail, eat crocodiles, and feel sorry for themselves.

Others just want to say goodbye.

Some see a funeral as an ending.

Others see it as a beginning.

Sometimes nobody cries.

Sometimes everybody does.

Not even kidding when I say...

A Polish wake is a hell of a lot more fun than a Baptist wedding.

For my dads side of the family...we feed, play loud polka music, drink (even non drinkers) , joke and laugh tell stupid stories and smoke fine cigars while having a last gathering for that soul.

Moms side of the family makes it a horrible 4-7hours of excruciating silences with the occasional sobbing to lighten the mood. The grand finale is a 45 minute prayer with a bunch of no talent hacks warbling out "Amazing Grace ".

Baptist funerals suck.

In my family we just stick em in the shed and keep cashing those
S.S. checks.

Now THAT was funny Mo.

(Sorry...off tangent)

Yo... no jokes, young man, this is a funeral thread. Don't diss the stiff.

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Please keep reading... I know it's a wall of text, but it has some rather valuable points and I don't mind saying so myself. Plus it's an easier read, than what the priest or minister has to read at Christian funerals.

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OP: I sincerely agree. In the last three funerals I attended, I had more fun than a barrel of monkeys, or even the celebrated one in the focus of attention.

And I say it's more of a temperament issue who wants to celebrate the winfall of inheritance in what way.

I am a hermit, (this is part of the point I am making), so when I get together with real life people, I get high on socializing. In my other aunt's family there were two deaths in quick succession. We packed ourselves in a car, and drove down, and I was in a giddy mood the whole three days down there. I was making jokes, people could not help but laugh. I got much closer emotionally to my two cousins and to the husband of one of them. All through and because of my unbridled, unaffected, natural and bursting-at-the-seams outpouring of humour. People who had never seen me and never will, pointed at me from across the Grand Hall in the Funeral Parlor (if we wait long enough, they'll be called Funeral Boudoires or Funeral Saloons, out in the West), and smiled, obviously telling each other "hey, that guy's funny. I definitely need to learn how to lip-read before I die.

My dead aunt's husband is a gouch, he is always putting everyone down. My uncle was explaining something at the dinner table, where the whole family sat, and my aunt's husband can't stand him, coz he figured Uncle was a bad example to uncle's sister, the guy's wife, by being so brilliant and successful and without too much effort, too. So the aunt's husband was always picking on Uncle or anyone else, he was always flexing his social muscles, he was always provocatively insulting, with out being really insulting.

So he said after uncle finished, "yeah, whatever, but what do I know, I am just a dumbbell", and he looked around, pointed at me, "and you are the other dumbbell." There was silence. Everyone knew I am the sensitive one in the family. "And you know what that makes us?" I asked, without missing a beat. "No," he said, "I don't know." I said, "since we are each a dumbbell, we two make a barbell." it was such a relief. Everyone laughed up aloud. The old man did not how to come back to that, because basically what I said made no sense. Absolutely no sense. It was an equivocation-based play on words, and because logically it made no sense, there was nothing in what I just had said which the husband of my dead aunt could pick on. You can only pick on intellectual meaning. If it is completely senseless, an intelligent nitpicker is disarmed.

I have to say for fairness sake's, that since his wife died, he made complete peace with my uncle, his wife's brother. They both are the same age, now they have something to share, and the husband jealousy completely evaporated since his wife died. So there is no motivation to be defensive and to be on the attack because of it. The two old trottlies get along now just fine.

I said earlier that there is a temperament thing involved, too. I went to a Jewish funeral about five-six years ago, and the atmosphere was criptic, despite the humid heat of July.

And before that, I had attended a funeral for the Czech husband of an Englishwoman. Most of her friends were from the British Isles, some English, some Schotts, and a few Canadians. Due to the heavy British presence, there was a lot of Gin and Tonic. Everyone got into a mood, and as I was being the centre of attention, what with flirting with all those refined women aged to a beauty, because no unmarried woman would ever lower her standards to flirt with me (an ugly guy is okay to have innocent innuendos to exchange with, by the husbands and by the social norms of the time and place in history and in geographical location), I had a ball. Then I noticed from the corner of my eyes, that the widow was sinking into a deeper and deeper withdrawal, sadness, despair, and even fear and fright. Her deepening gloom was in direct proportion to the reveller's revel around her. My heart is still aching as I mentally rehash that picture, it was almost, or not even almost, grotesque.
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Just remember: Jesus and his disciples had the best meal of their lives the day before his arrest; we rejoice at Easter; the New Year as a national holiday and biggest party of the year that knows no political boundaries, celebrates the death of the old year as much as the arrival of the new. What I am trying to say is that most people who mourn at funerals are people who have a reason to mourn; all other people are happy to see old friends, or to meet new ones; and this is not a new phenomenon, it's been like this most probably, since man has walked the earth.

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There is a new trend which I saw at a funeral in Toronto. The president of our Bridge club died. He literally died. There were hundreds at his funeral. In his life he was a bitter basssstrd, he was unfair, ugly in behaviour, a grouch, a gouche, nothing likeable about him. But this was his funeral, and even his nephiews and stuff came from another province.

The sous-prez of the club asked someone from the club to speak. He did. In front of all attendeed, in front of the nieces and cousins of the deceased.

The eulogist got up, to the speaker's stand, and said, "I was rather surprised that I have been asked to give the eulogy. I really hated the deerly departed. He was a despicable man, a rude, kentankerous old man, and he was not much better as a young man, either." And so on and so forth.

There was NO outrage, NO scandal. The mourners sat in the pews, and wiped their tears with their frilly handkerchieves. "what a beautiful speech", they would smile from their black veils and through mists of their teary eyes.

I have never seen anything like it. The eulogist literally trashed (in words, not with his shoes or feet) the man lying in state right in front of him.

I would not have dared.

I think I have a lot of respect for the man who gave that eulogy. For a number of very strong reasons. Each in contradiction to the "of the dead only good".

One was that the speaker was in a predicament: should he act on man's natural instinct, yes, instinct, instinctual fear and superstition to speak no evil of the deceised, or should he have a spine and say what he wanted to? Especially in such a non-conducive event, especially witnessed by many.

He chose to be true to his own spirit. The speaker. Yes, he was speaking evil, of a man who could not defend himself; but the dead man had given reason in his life to support with living examples the things that the speaker said; and while alive, he had had a lot of time to defend himself, and millions of opportunities to make sure he would be happily remembered, and he had blown all his chances or opportunities so presented to him.

Extra kudos to the speaker for successfully overcoming the superstitious fear of an impending and alleged curse that he pulled upon himself by trashing a dead man.

All in all, that was not a happy funeral, but and even more disrespectful one: it was a funeral that opposed all prior funerals of humans, going back to the time of the first humans, during which all and every one was a tad afraid of the dead.

I don't know how the Nazis and other political and ethnic mass-murderers stand up to the secularity of this eulogist's strong foothold on an atheist rock of ideology.

It may have something to do with the wishes of the deceased as well. A friend of mine (21) was dying of cancer. She requested that a party be thrown in her honor when she died. That is what went down.

I'm sorry for your loss Jill . Not too many years ago showings were held in the "parlor" of the home. Food was in the kitchen and everyone gathered to reminisce.

I feel ya It was that way when my I spread my mothers ashes, it pissed me off so bad that I went upfront and yelled at many of them and asked most of them to leave.

I think it should be first the wishes of the deceased

and if not specified, than it should be the wishes of those making and paying for the arrangements,,,

If that had happened at my wife's funeral, then I would not have liked it.

Something like that I can totally understand, even maybe get some comfort from.

if they don't party on the beach naked after mine I will throw lightening bolts onto the living and eat pizza

I have only been to one funeral home once so I don't know what they do there but I know that different cultures treat death differently - as far as how solemn or joyful the funeral is

he might be serious


*off shopping for shed*