Everything has been impacted by COVID. At least almost everything has been impacted by COVID. One area of unfortunate affect is the planning and implementation of memorial services and funerals. You have heard public health officials giving direction as to how many people can gather at a table in a restaurant, the capacity limits for gyms, and invariably, the number of people, officiant included or not included, allowed to attend a funeral or memorial.
It has actually been pretty rough on families. Many families have delayed services or foregone them altogether. As it has appeared multiple times that the pandemic has been winding down, a number of families have planned, hoping that restrictions would ease by the time the service for their loved one was observed.
My Dad died in August of 2020. The family thought that we would be able to gather for a service, as in the summer things were beginning to open up again. What happened instead was an increase in COVID cases and tight lockdowns in Ontario, where my Dad had lived. Travel was restricted as well, so my family here in Vancouver could not travel for a service. Gathering limits meant that a maximum of ten people could be part of the service, and even that would have to be outside only. By the time an actual service happened it was made up of eight family members and one officiant in a small cemetery, on a cold Ontario October day. My son and I joined via FaceTime. My Dad’s death was very sudden so it was jarring enough. The nature of the service seemed only to add to a sense of displacement and to a feeling that the grieving and mourning was somehow cut off.
My Dad was a really funny guy. He loved when the family, spread out across the country, all gathered together. On multiple occasions he would joke with me, “You know, when I die, all of you guys will get on a plane and gather together and tell stories about me and I won’t hear any of it because I’ll be dead. You know what I’d really like? I’d like it if you all travelled here before I die so that at least I can be part of the festivities.” I’d say to him, “Well, it’s expensive to travel from Vancouver to Ontario for all of us, and if we did it like normally happens, we’d probably be using money from your estate to pay for the travel, so, if we can get that together BEFORE you die …”.
Trust me, this was all very humorous and loving.
As it turns out, we didn’t get to gather at all (though we did a year later) and as I watched the 15 minute outdoor service, via my sister’s cell phone via FaceTime, I thought of how my Dad would jokingly say to us, given the nature of the service,
“Yep. Doesn’t surprise me at all. This is about how I would expect you guys to do this.”
Something is always wrong at a memorial or a funeral. There is no way to please everyone involved. Having been a pastor of an evangelical church for 25 years I can recall multiple times in which family members would disagree with one another about how the service for their loved one should go. This could be exacerbated by matters of faith. Religious family members might want the service to be more about God than about the loved one who died. Non-religious family members could sometimes wince a bit at declaring a faith that their loved one might not actually have had.
As a pastor I had a particular approach to memorials and funerals. I would insist somewhat that the person who died would be mentioned and remembered and memorialized. Some family members would say, “Don’t talk about them. They would not want that. Talk about their faith. Talk about how they gave their life to Jesus and make sure to give a gospel invitation.” I actually found this rather distasteful. In their mind, the funeral was supposed to have some kind of opportunity to accept Jesus, to become a Christian. I have attended funerals in which the deceased was barely mentioned, but in which the presiding minister did one of those “gospel at gunpoint” sermons. The person who died was used primarily as a warning, “See! We are all going to die and you sure don’t want to die and not know Jesus” (Implication: you’d be burning in hell. Implication, if the deceased did not pray to accept Jesus they were now burning in hell). “Charlie died and Charlie did know Jesus, but if you left here today and got hit by a bus (there were apparently a lot of busses hitting people) then do you know where you would spend eternity?”
I thought that such a way of speaking about God and such a way of memorializing the deceased was very terrible and decidedly unChristlike. I always thought that the way to speak of God at a memorial was to speak of the life of the person who had died. If God cared so much about all of us, then there would be ways that their life reflected God’s love. If they were a person of faith, of Christian faith, then it would be appropriate to speak of how their faith mattered to them and how their life demonstrated that.
The flip side of not focusing enough on the person who died was focusing entirely on what they liked. I have attended a number of memorial services which amounted to basically a list of likes. This includes a service in which four or five different speakers (including the spouse of the deceased) mentioned how the favourite activity of the person who died was finding a good bargain on a product in a store. This was a service in which I had been asked to give the homily, the sermon, and I noted (in my mind, not verbally) that I was the seventeenth person to speak during the service. Sixteen people spoke before the, supposedly important, gospel message.
Theologian Karl Barth was known for a number of theological statements. One of them was the expression, “Theology before anthropology”. The idea with this is that we will more fully understand our humanity if we start with truth about God and that we can’t understand God by starting with people or religion or church. Barth also repeatedly said and wrote that “God chose not to be God without us.” This means that you can’t really understand God, from a Christian perspective, if you move away from humanity.
This is what guided my approach in memorials. I wanted to speak about important and meaningful things in the service. I wanted to talk about more than simply, “what they liked”. I wanted to talk about God. I did not think, however, that the way to talk about God was to forget about the person who had died or to use them only as a warning. If God is real, then God was real in the life of this person. That was a blessing that could be marked. If I had been asked to speak at the service, even if the person and the family was non-religious, then I could speak about transcendence. I could speak about what Christian faith says about God’s love for all people. I could speak about my faith and about what hope for all people means in Christian understanding. I could speak hopefully for this person and this family, even if they did not share my faith.
Can I tell you about one of my favourite memorial services ever?
A man began attending our church when he was in his mid 60’s. He had come from another church in the neighbourhood and I was not sure why he had left, but he maintained positive relationships with people from his previous church, including the pastor. Larry was outgoing and funny and engaging. He was apparently single. He looked like the stereotypical fun-loving uncle. He made fast friends with the significant number of stalwart 60 and 70-something-year-olds crew at the church. Most of these people were quite conservative and they clearly began to see Larry as one of them, as someone who pretty much shared the kind of moral perspective that they had on the world.
Larry attended men’s breakfasts, the adult education classes and every Sunday service. He and I would go for coffee or lunch fairly frequently. He told me that he had been married years ago, but his marriage fell apart. His wife still lived in Montreal and they were close now. Not long into his time at the church, Larry was diagnosed with terminal leukemia. I visited him fairly frequently in the hospital. The hospital was already facing overcrowding problems and somehow Larry wound up not with a room, but with a bed in an alcove at the end of a hall. No door, just a sheet hanging from the ceiling and a sliding door to an outside patio that had previously been used as a place for people to smoke. It was in that space one day when I was visiting Larry that he said that he had “something to tell” me. He told me that he was gay. He asked me if I knew that already. I told him that I did. He told me that he suspected I knew, but that he had been so pleased with the fact that it clearly was not an issue for me even though I was a pastor at an evangelical church.
Larry became more and more sick. At the time, there was no hospice locally so Larry was moved to a hospice in heart of the inner-city (for those who know Vancouver it was near Hastings and Main). Some people were reluctant to visit him there. Larry didn’t like being there, not because of the neighbourhood, but because he felt lonely without the company. That’s where Larry died
Not long after came the memorial service. Larry had everything prepared. He wanted both of the pastors that he knew to participate. I was to preside and preach the message. The other pastor was to run an open mic time. Larry wanted an open mic time at his service. The other pastor was a nice and capable person. Perhaps he would have done a better job at the sermon than me, but I am pretty confident that I would have done a better job at the open mic than he did. He just let it go on for so long, with lots of long pauses and lots of “Anybody else have anything to say?”. I remember the service lasted well over two hours. People from the catering team began to fill up the foyer wondering how much longer things were going to take.
The best part (I know it was a memorial not a tv show), the most memorable part of the service was during the open mic. I was sitting at the front facing the congregation. The congregation was made up of some of Larry’s family, including his ex-wife who clearly loved him and who was clearly full of life. There were also a lot of people from our church including, of course, the conservative 60 and 70 year-old crowd who had come to befriend Larry through the church. At one of the “does anyone else have anything to say?” moments, one of the early ones, a young man, who clearly most people in the church did not know, walked towards the front carrying a nice bag from an expensive store (Nordstroms or the like). The young man was crying, and as he got closer to the mic his crying turned to something more like wailing. People in the congregation were already embarrassed on his behalf, thinking that there was no way he was going to get through whatever he planned to say, maybe wondering how a young guy like this was so inconsolable at the death of an older single man like Larry. With determination the young man fought off his tears and started with one word, “Larry! Larry! … I miss you so much! I don’t know what I’ll do without you!” The light was beginning to go on for some people in the congregation, but mostly not for the church-goers. The young man repeatedly expressed his love for Larry and then reached down to the nice bag and took out a stuffed bear. As he did, his wailing once again found its strength. Through it, in staccato bursts, he said, “This is the bear that shared our bed every night. Oh Larry! I will never wake up again with you there. I miss you so much!”
I want to note here that I want in no way to diminish or belittle the grief of this man. It was real and it mattered. He had lost his partner, his love. I was grateful for him. I still am.
However.
The light had gone on for most of the people in the sanctuary now, even most of the conservative church people. I looked out and saw the faces of church people who had become Larry’s friends. Some of these people, loving as they mostly were, were also people who had told their friends and family that homosexuality was wrong. They were among those who might say, “the Bible says …” and then proceed to explain that the way God meant for things to be was a man and a woman together, not a woman and a woman, not a man and a man. (Convenient how that had worked out for them). To be fair, many of these same people have come to see things differently. Maybe Larry helped. I like to think that Larry helped.
To this day I still find myself saying from time to time, “Thank you Larry, for insisting that there be an open mic time at your service. You did well. I am grateful.”