Role of Funerals in Grief

¶ … Role of Funerals in Grief Recovery

Rituals in Human Life and Death

Human societies represent myriad different cultures and social rituals but the degree to which they rely on those types of shared organized behaviors is much more consistent. Even the most widely disparate and geographically diverse human societies maintain some form of ritual in connection with the socially significant events and whatever milestones are recognized in a particular culture. Virtually all known human societies that have ever existed exhibit some ritualistic response to human death. For this reason, anthropologists and evolutionary biologists have even considered the possibility that there are biological influences that contribute to this common phenomenon, especially since there is even evidence that certain non-human animals (such as elephants) also recognize death through shared rituals. In fact, the similarity between the way elephants pay respect to the bones of members of their species, particularly among biological relations, and the way humans pay respect to the remains of loved ones is eerie.

Humans are the only species known to conduct organized funerals but one indication of how important that particular ritual is to society is the fact that archeological funeral artifacts date back to the earliest known human remains and the fact that they exhibit such fundamental similarity in so many respects. There are several functional reasons that the disposal of human remains would have developed independently in all human societies: decaying corpses are sources of disease; exposed corpses are consumed by wildlife; and there are very obvious issues of sensitivity in connection with seeing the dead. Therefore, the practices of burial and cremation probably evolved very similarly, at least to the extent they were related to functional issues about dealing with human death as a society. However, one of the most important functions of the funeral ritual is its role in the psychology of closure in general and of the importance of closure in recovery from grief in particular.

Closure and the Role of Funerals

The psychological concept of closure is a function of the fact that human beings prefer certainty to uncertainty with respect to anything that is extremely important to their lives. The loss of loved ones is always emotionally painful for the members of the surviving family. Initially and for the relatively short-term after the death of close relations or acquaintances, many individuals are inconsolable. Undoubtedly, funerals are said and they can be emotionally wrenching affairs. However, they also serve a crucial psychological function beyond the practical functions that they serve: they provide psychological closure for survivors.

To appreciate the significance of closure in grief and grief recovery, one need look no further than the effects of the loss of loved ones in situations where their surviving family members have certainty about the loss together with the opportunity to hold a funeral compared with the effects of the loss of loved ones in situations where their surviving family members lack certainty about the loss and have no opportunity to hold a funeral. Loss of loved ones is always traumatic and always requires sort-term and long-term emotional recovery. In situations where the family has the opportunity to hold a funeral ritual and also to include the remains in whatever particular way their culture prescribes, the funeral ritual provides an opportunity to fully (and publicly) express grief in the manner that (at least) eliminates the unconscious (or repressed) grief of loss that can otherwise re-emerge long after the typical grieving process. Families who have certainty about the loss of their loved one also have the opportunity afforded by psychological closure to begin the long-term process of emotional recovery to the normalcy of life without acute emotional sorrow or worry.

By contrast, in situations where their surviving family members lack certainty about the loss and have no opportunity to hold a funeral ritual, surviving family members may not have an opportunity to fully (or publicly) express their grief sufficiently to remove it from their unconsciousness; they may hold residual grief much longer after the loss and experience it unpredictably much longer than the typical acute phase of grief. There is almost certainly a form of catharsis associated the full expression of grief made possible by funeral rituals that is absent otherwise.

More importantly, the closure provided by the funeral ritual and by actually witnessing the burial (or disposal) of the remains of the deceased allows the survivors to fully accept that the deceased individual is gone permanently. That certainty allows them to make the gradual transition from grief to long-term recovery and resumption of normal life. Meanwhile, surviving family members of soldiers designated "missing in action and presumed dead" (for example) have no such certainty. In that regard, the less certain the conclusion about death is the less closure the family can derive from the circumstances. They may be forever caught in between the grief that corresponds to the loss and the hope of mistake and eventual reunion. In essence, they never have the opportunity to fully accept the loss, to fully express their grief, and to begin recovering from the state of mourning.