Life is Precious, Even After Death

As appeared in the January issue of the MFDA Bulletin.

By Jerry J. Brown, Friend of the Funeral Service community and
a member of the Children's Grief Connection Board of Directors. 

In death, the life of one-beloved will never really leave the hearts and minds of those who forever reflect, remember, commune and revisit with tenderness, smiles and tears as the soft and filtered visions ebb and flow.

The sanctity of a life lived in quintessential kindness, elegance and love must be honored and revered in the mode and manner of the life incarnate.

The rites, rituals, traditions and ceremonies embodied in THE FUNERAL have prevailed since the dawn of humankind. Although many forms of funeralization have metamorphosed, returned and morphed again with the relentless “March of the Millennia,” one phenomenon endures and transcends the shock, paralysis and sadness evoked by the death of one beloved. . . simply, to finally say “goodbye” with the love, gratitude and respect commensurate with the life now stilled forever.

Ergo, in the context of a changing profile vis-à-vis, the funeral experience, we now must deal with the emergence of “Home/Do It Yourself Funerals.” These are people who decry the need for licensed, certified college graduates who comprise the legions of Funeral Professionals and maintain that “THEY” – the uninformed and unprepared can “Go Green!” and, with slabs of dry ice, candelabras, boom-box background funeral tunes and post-visitation coffee and cookies, can orchestrate, choreograph and conduct home funerals – sans licensed professionals – with all of the panache, pomp and circumstance of a real funeral (health hazards notwithstanding) and professional licenses be damned.

Personally, I would like to ask these same “green wannabe undertakers” a question or two:

- Would you consider hopping into an airplane if the pilot (driver) had never

flown before and had no FAA license?

- Would you go to a cardiologist who was still “just practicing” and had never been to med school and thought the Hippocrates Oath was a swear word?

- Would you enroll in a series of college courses where the professors had never finished the 6th grade?

Would you go to a plastic surgeon that had never advanced beyond “playdough”?

Would you sign up for golf lessons if the instructor was a SUMU wrestler?

Doubtful!

NOTE: Stay with what you know and get the licensed funeral professional to care for your beloved.