68-Year-Old Mortician: 10 Things You Should NEVER Do At A Funeral

There is a spot in every funeral chapel where the director stands. Back left, near the door, a few feet behind the last row of chairs, where he can see the whole room without being in it. I stood in that spot for thirty-four years. And what you learn back there is that almost nobody behaves badly at a funeral — decent people just do a small number of very specific things wrong, over and over, and almost none of them ever find out. Some of what follows has real research behind it and I name whose. The rest is my own judgement after thirty-four years, and I say so when it is. In this one: why staying away because you do not know what to say is the worst of the ten, and what ninety-four bereaved people told researchers actually helped; why "let me know if you need anything" is a task and not an offer; the sentence to stop halfway through; why you should never ask how they died; who gets to decide whether you see the body, and what eighty bereaved people in a British Medical Journal study said about being talked out of it; what the research on children who lost a parent actually found about funeral attendance at thirteen and twenty-five months; the ordinary objects that must never go in a casket before a cremation, and the crematorium survey that explains why we ask; photographs and livestreams; the family member who mentions the will on the day; the fifty-seven per cent figure on how fast support disappears; and the one about funeral processions that is a safety matter, not a manners one. Then the other half — seven things people think are rules and are not. Crying. Laughing. Black. Flowers. Whether you were close enough. Whether you can leave early. Sources: Lehman, Ellard & Wortman (1986), Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology; Chapple & Ziebland (2010), BMJ 340:c2032; Weller et al. (1988), JAACAP, and Fristad et al. (2001), Omega; Gale & Mulley (2002), Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine; the Cremation Association of North America's model cremation law; the New York Life Foundation 2017 Bereavement Survey; and MWL Law's fifty-state survey of funeral procession traffic laws. Funeral law and traffic law vary by state. Nothing here is legal advice, medical advice, or a rule about how anyone should grieve.