Book review – The Good Funeral: Death, Grief and the Community of Care
by Thomas Long and Thomas Lynch Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, KY. 274 pages.
reviewed by WILLIAM F. MAY
An undertaker and a pastor have collaborated on this valuable and well-written book on the “good funeral,” after a demolition derby of gifted writers whacked the industry and its moneymakers. Memorably, Evelyn Waugh did a send-up of both an impresario funeral director and a blessed reverend in “The Loved One” and Jessica Mitford hilariously attacked the vulgarity of funeral rites in “The American Way of Death.”
The authors of this book point to three great shifts in public sensibility across the last 75 years, to which the funeral industry has admittedly responded as its “own worst enemy.” In the first instance, the industry shamelessly exploited a pronounced surge in anxiety following World War II, the Cold War and the advent of nuclear weapons by grotesquely selling “protection” to its customers, whether a tank-like steel casket or a “pre-need” burial insurance policy. Next, in the go-go 60s and 70s, the theme of protection gave way to “personalization,” that is, to the designer funeral, in which the undertaker sold “accessories rather than essentials,” featuring perhaps the hobbies of the deceased. In a third wave in funeral practice across the last 30 years, the body and death and grief (and the specifics of religious tradition) tend to vanish altogether in favor of a spiritualized service, increasingly called the “celebration of life.” In effect, it is a celebration whited out. The body is absent; death, whether as destructive loss or as self-expending love, is muted; and the sting of grief is unaddressed.
As a first step in dealing with the question of a meaningful rite, the authors reject the temptation to indulge in inflationary rhetoric. St. Augustine is of help here. In the debates of his time about cremation vs. burial, Augustine did not insist that burial (which he favored) was a precondition of the resurrection. He said that we bury the dead simply as an “office of humanity.” St. Augustine’s restraint is appealing. In our limited way, we fulfill this office when we tend to the dead, whether by burial, cremation, or some other fitting means. Human beings have traditionally marked their ceasing to be by going the distance with their dead. The community engages in a final accompanying and letting go. In a phrase carried over from Thomas Lynch’s earlier award-winning book, “It is by getting the dead where they need to go, we help the living get where they need to be.” Thomas Long adds that by this caring for one another, men and women follow in the pathway of God’s caring for each of us, our ensouled bodies, our embodied souls, our embodied lives together. That is the larger storyline which we imperfectly mark in the good funeral.
How then to deal with the current practice of the celebration of life, which often comes after some passage of time and uncoupled from the disposition of the body? First, the prior disposition of the body should not be riteless and communityless; it is part of our “office of humanity.” Second, the memorial service should not erase the recollection of this earlier “office of humanity,” as if it were not also a part of the larger and enduring story that participants momentarily and imperfectly share.
WILLIAM F. MAY is the retired Cary M. Maguire Professor of Ethics at Southern Methodist University and the author of numerous books and articles. He is best known for his work in medical ethics.
