Reply to Would you take young kids to an open casket funeral?

Forum Index » Elementary School-Aged Kids

Reply to "Would you take young kids to an open casket funeral?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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.  [/quote]

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. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics