good funeral
The kids come tearing up the stairs in a noisy pack of about a dozen: feet stomping, breathless gasping, conspiratorial whispering, uncontained squealing. It’s how kids sound when they know they’re pushing the boundary of what Mom would allow, yet not technically doing anything wrong. At the top of the stairs, outside my office door, they suddenly get quiet and then scatter, each to find their own nook, cranny or shadow. Then all is still again.
A minute later, one more comes alone and cautiously peeks around my doorframe. She shyly draws back when I look up from my computer.
“They’re up here,” I tell her, “Go get ‘em”.
There is hardly a better venue than a big old church for an epic game of hide and seek.
This is how good funerals end. The service was this morning in the sanctuary, burial at noon in the cemetery, then lunch back here in Fellowship Hall.
Eventually, the guests are gone, and only family remains. While the kids run and hide and explore the church, the adults are downstairs - starting to unwind now that the formalities are over. Neckties are loosened, postures relaxed, connections remade. Cousins talk to each other, maybe for the first time in years.
The funeral ceremony provides some closure and, for many, is a necessary part of moving forward into the next stages of grief and life. It’s a heavy day. There’s the sorrow of today’s loss, and there’s also the weight of the next generation realizing that more of the burden of holding the family together is now theirs.
And, of course, we don’t say it out loud, but the funeral is a reminder of where we’re all headed. To exist at all is a miracle and a blessing, but we don’t get to hang around forever. Our faith gives us hope for whatever comes after this life, and maybe we even have a picture of it in our minds, but the truth of it will remain a mystery until we get there. Maybe this inevitable journey into the unknown, facing all of us, is what we’re really grieving.
In my 17th year of working in a church, I’ve been to quite a few funerals. There are good ones and difficult ones.
The difficult ones are when the family brings their resentments and their jealousies or refuses to participate because of them. I’ve seen families reserve space in the pews for 60, but then only fifteen show up because of some long-smoldering conflicts, and it adds another layer of sadness to the day.
But there are many more good funerals than bad. Good funerals draw us together and help us rediscover our connectedness. The kids running around the building are a good sign. It means the adults aren’t in a hurry to leave - that they’re feeling the value of this time together. Good funerals celebrate the lives of those who were engaged with us, those who took interest in us, encouraged us, created a sense of “home” for us, and who helped us discover who we are. Often, they were the people who brought stability and continuity to our lives.
What the kids probably aren’t aware of right now … the 7 - 8 - 10-year-olds running, hiding, and seeking … is that when they find each other, what they are finding is their generation of the family. This is their crew - the family they’ll be closest to - the people whose milestones they’ll celebrate as time goes on: birthdays, graduations, weddings, anniversaries, and more funerals.
By now, I’m sure one or two of the kids have found the old, dead-end stairway behind the organ pipes. Dark and creaky - a perfect place to hide if you’re brave enough to stay there. Another might be in the basement closet under the bell tower, and more of them are in the classrooms, the theater, and the youth cafe just down the hall from where I’m sitting at my desk. We usually keep those rooms locked when they aren’t in use.
Eventually, these kids will age-out of children's games, and they’ll be the ones downstairs hanging around after lunch, rediscovering their bonds, reminiscing with “remember whens”, and committing to stay better in-touch. Days like today, and this game of hide and seek will be part of the memories they’ll share when they meet at funerals in the years to come.
Right now, though, they aren’t thinking too deeply about the place they hold in the family’s line of succession. They’re searching for each other in the hidey holes of this big old building and for them it isn’t any more poignant than that.
We - those of us on staff at the church - never really know who will show up for a funeral, but I always hope the kids will come, so I unlock a few doors to give them room to run, hide, and explore because I want them to have a good funeral.
