Would you take young kids to an open casket funeral?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I took DS (9y.o.) to my grandmother’s open casket viewing and then closed casket funeral. Open casket is part of our cultural and family tradition. He asked to come. I also kept him at the back of the room and did not make it an issue if he did or did not want to see her body and say prayers. We talked about the fact that it would be open casket before we went but also talked to him, before we went, that he joule only participate in the way in which he felt comfortable. Towards the end of the viewing, he asked me to join him in approaching the casket to pray and see her. We did this together in a no-drama and supported manner. He came away from the whole experience focused on the opportunity to meet extended family and felt proud and grown up that he had joined and shown his respects.

Death is a part of life. I think it is just important to allow your kids space and choices as to how to participate.

This seems like a very sensitive way to handle it.

[Anonymous]

We've been to open casket funerals. Kids handled it fine. It's a chance to say goodbye.

[Anonymous]

Absolutely. Not. I don’t want to go to an open casket viewing or service. Sure wouldn’t take my young child to one. My child is an adult now so she can make her own decisions.

[Anonymous]

No. We are Jewish and funerals are for honoring the deceased person. Putting the body on display is not seen as kavod hameis. Getting closure is what shiva and sheloshim are for.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:No.

I was forced to view my dead mother, and the image haunts me. There was no reason for that: I knew she was dead and not coming back, and while relatives kept blabbering about “closure”, that isn’t what I got from the experience. It was like a horror moving made real and I hate that I have had that image of my mom in my head for the past thirty years.

I don’t understand the purpose of viewing dead bodies, I really don’t. I firmly believe that the majority of people who view dead bodies at funerals have some subconscious prurient fascination with seeing the person that way. I hated overhearing my friends’ parents and my mom’s brothers’ spouses gossiping about my mom’s appearance in the casket. Barbaric, hideous custom. Don’t even get me started on the brutality of what is done to bodies to make them viewable.

I’m sorry that you were traumatized and that some people in your family circle were gossipy and horrible. But for many of us, viewing dead bodies is an important part of appreciating life…the life of the dead person, the tangible and very real reminder of everyone’s mortality, the humbling reality of the smallness of today’s stressors in the face of our certain deaths. Death is so abstract and distant to most people. They hate funerals. They would never touch a dead body.

I held my mom as she took her last breath. I washed her face and hands after she died. I kissed her soft forehead. I knew of course that her spirit no longer inhabited her body, but I loved her body, too. These were the hands that held mine. When my dad died, it was sadly more sudden and I wasn’t with him at his death, but we saw his remains in his hospital room afterward. I petted his lively white hair and kissed his forehead. I washed his hands and kissed them. Saying goodbye to his body.

It is not morbidity that motivates me to look upon the dead as I pray for them; it is with profound gratitude to be present at the precipice between life and dearth, in remembrance.

So you can’t remember the person without viewing their desecrated corpse?

The preparation for viewing and embalming is brutal and crude. And YOU might find yourself better able to remember by gazing upon the corpse, but I assure you that the majority of others at the ‘viewing’ are getting some morbid enjoyment in looking to see how she was prepared and looks. I think it is exploitative in the last stage a family really has to protect the dignity of the deceased person. If you love someone, why pay a stranger to wire and stitch or glue their mouth closed, use a spiky insert to force their eyelids in place, brutally puncture their internal organs with a trocar and drain them of blood? That’s not even all. Why would you want strangers to do this to your loved one? It’s grotesque and a violation of the body.

That’s what I think, anyway. I lost a parent young and I will never forgive my relatives for forcing me to view her. I don’t know why someone would do that to a child.

I am an intelligent person and don’t need to look at the brutalised remains of a body to remember the person.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:No. We are Jewish and funerals are for honoring the deceased person. Putting the body on display is not seen as kavod hameis. Getting closure is what shiva and sheloshim are for.

I am not Jewish and was raised Catholic, but I wholeheartedly feel that your way is best. What a sensitive, civilised way to honor the dead.

[Anonymous]

No. I’m typically White-bread American and all our funerals are closed caskets or memorial services. I think the last open casket funeral I went to was in like 1990 for my grandmother.