HW 55 - Culminating Project - Care of the Dead

For my project on the care of the dead I decided to interview my family. Unfortunately they didn’t want to be filmed. I wanted to hear about what my parents wanted to happen after they die because after hearing the first funeral director who came in he really made me think about what I wanted to do. I went to my mom and asked her, she flat out said “god forbid Lora! Please don’t talk about death” This struck my mind. I thought back to when death was always brought up, my mom felt the need to change the subject as soon as she could. This made me change my project to why are people afraid to talk about death? I asked my family this and they all seemed to have the same exact answer. “Its like a curse”. They feel that if talking about it enough, it’s going to eventually happen. Then I brought up the point “well aren’t we going to die anyway?” Then they gave me a look.

When I visited my grandmother recently I brought up the topic to her, and what I was thinking of doing when I pass on. She got up and hit me. She said “Never talk about you dying, say god forbid a thousand times over”, and I did. She didn’t want to talk about her plans or anyone in the families for that matter. But I find her using death as a way to get what she wants. She will tell me “I’m old”, “I don’t have enough time”, “I’m going to be a little star in the sky looking down on you” in order to get the family to do what ever she wants, and not surprisingly we do it. We do it because in the slight chance she is right I don’t want that feeling of “she told me so” or for her to feel we wouldn’t care if she died.

I wish that when I was younger my family had been very open with death. When my grandmother passed away it was very hard on the family. It was the biggest loss I had ever had; I didn’t know how to handle it except through mixed emotion. I know now that home funerals help with the grieving process, I also know what’s going on to my loved one while in the mortuary, all this insight I learned from this unit will help me in the future with the grieving process and help me talk about it before it happens, so I can get closure.