Ask the Owners: Through the Eyes of a Child

How Seeing My Dad in His Casket Helped Me Mourn His Death

Written by Diann Anderson, formerly of Anderson Funeral & Cremation Services

We are continuing in our series of articles “Strategic Evolution Blueprint for Funeral Home Owners”.  In previous articles I wrote about the importance of embracing change and having a “Strategic Evolution” blueprint for your funeral business.  I have also covered topics like rethinking consumer needs in the funeral profession, the difference between three very different funeral home business models, and why I encourage you to think outside the funeral home box so to speak and start thinking “What’s my Mission?” as it pertains to the operation of your business.  This month, I want to encourage you to reframe your thinking about ceremonies and specifically the importance of having the decedent’s physical body present for the ceremony.  My goal is to help you realize the missed opportunities from multiple perspectives when the important aspects of a ceremony are missing.  I also hope that you will be convinced of the vital role you can play in helping countless people with their grief if you start educating your staff, families, and your community why it’s good to have the decedent’s body present at their viewing and funeral ceremony and why having a photo and no body doesn’t help the grieving process.

Your Mind is a Beautifully Complex Mosaic of Thoughts, Emotions, and Perceptions

“Psalm 139:14 declares, “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.” The context of this verse is the incredible nature of our physical bodies. The human body is the most complex and unique organism in the world, and that complexity and uniqueness speaks volumes about the mind of its Creator. Every aspect of the body, down to the tiniest microscopic cell, reveals that it is fearfully and wonderfully made.”https://www.gotquestions.org/fearfully-wonderfully-made.html

Isn’t it interesting and amazing how God has designed humans to take in so many different sensory perspectives all at the same moment?  For instance, remembering exactly what the weather was like, what smells were surrounding you, what song was playing, and the conscious emotion you were feeling at the exact moment something happened that changed your life.  I bet if I said “Close your eyes, take a deep breath and slowly exhale; now let your mind drift backward to the happiest day you can remember.  Describe to me everything you can remember about that day.”  I believe that you would be able to describe many details about your happy experience.  The same can be said about detrimental experiences as well.

God has created you and I with the ability for our minds to constantly perform multisensory integration because He knew that finite human beings would need that capability to be able to deal with everything life throws at them.

Multisensory integration is fascinating, and it starts as soon as we are born.  The human brain is adept at integrating information from various sensory modalities, including sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. This integration allows us to form rich, multisensory memories that incorporate a wide range of sensory experiences.   It is often thought of as the first stage of memory that involves registering a tremendous amount of information.

As adults, we talk easily about where we were and what we were doing when 911 happened, or what the day was like when you experienced your first kiss, how your sweetheart proposed marriage or how you proposed marriage, the weather on your wedding day, every little detail of the birth of your children, or the death of your loved one.

“Memory is a way of holding on to the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose.” – Kevin Arnold

Episodic Memory is the reason you can recall specific events from your personal past, including the time, place, and circumstances surrounding those events. Episodic memory allows you to mentally time-travel back to past experiences and relive them in rich detail, often accompanied by sensory impressions.

The amount of information your mind is processing at any given time is unfathomable.  Not only is your mind storing Episodic memories, but also Emotion memory as well.

Emotion and Memory: Emotion plays a powerful role in memory formation and retention. When you experience an emotionally significant event, such as life-changing moment, your brain encodes not only the factual details of the event but also the emotional context surrounding it. Your emotional state enhances memory consolidation and retrieval, making it more likely that you will remember sensory details associated with the event.

Memory Retrieval: Your mind is continually Contextual Encoding all your experiences. Memories are often encoded within a specific context, including environmental cues such as weather, smells, sounds, and other sensory stimuli present at the time of the event. These contextual cues become integrated into the memory trace, providing additional retrieval cues that help you recall the event more vividly.

Associative Learning: Your brain is wired to form associations between different sensory stimuli and experiences. For example, a particular smell or song may become strongly linked to a specific event or emotion through associative learning. These associations can trigger vivid memories when you encounter similar sensory cues in the future.

Your mind is highly complex and capable of processing and integrating multiple sensory inputs simultaneously.  The ability to remember sensory details associated with significant life events reflects the complex interplay between perception, emotion, memory, and cognition in your brain. Your mind is finely tuned to capture and retain a multitude of sensory perspectives, allowing you to preserve and relive important moments in your life with remarkable clarity and richness.

“Memories are the sweetest souvenirs of life’s journey.”

I’m going to say a counterintuitive and perhaps shocking statement.  I agree with this quote but with the addition of ALL memories.   I believe that memories have the potential to be sweet souvenirs of your life depending on how you view the path and outcome of your life travels.  Every experience despite its details presents you with the opportunity to gain knowledge, endurance, empathy, perseverance, problem solving ability, better judgement, a spirit of gratitude, the ability to forgive and to love people better if you allow it.  Let me explain…

Top of Form

“We didn’t realize we were making memories; we just knew we were having fun.” – Winnie the Pooh    

Isn’t that quote so true?   If you were to ask me if I had a time in my life when I was having fun, I would say yes but it was brief.  Looking back, I remember having a joyful life filled with lots of fun and family love until I was seven years old.  My sweet memories are filled with my father’s big personality and how much love he showered on me.  We were a typical post WWII family living in the Midwest.  I will preface that with; we were a typical large Catholic post WWII family of five children born in a fifteen-year span of time living in a small town in the Midwest.

My dad’s back story was not unlike a lot of men of that time.  He was the thirteenth child born to Polish immigrants.  He quit high school just prior to graduating his senior year to enlist in the Navy and served our country in the Pacific.  He was a very hard-working guy who loved God, our mom, all of us, our country and local community.  Our family was spread out – three boys and then two girls.  Our life was a wonderfully simple late 1960’s existence.  Playing outside all day long until being summoned to the supper table by my dad’s shrill whistle at 5:00 pm sharp from our front porch.  Our whole neighborhood relied on my dad’s whistle to call all the children home for supper.  It was a wonderful routine.  He was the guy that would hook up a long line of sleds to the back of the station wagon after a snowstorm and pull all the kids on the sleds up and down and around our neighborhood.  He taught me how to roller skate and ride a bike.  I was his constant companion on Saturday morning outings to the hardware store and he prayed with me every night before bed.

“We didn’t realize we were making memories; we just knew we were having fun.” – on March 17^th 1968, my parents were going to have a “date night”.  They were going to a St. Patrick’s dance and my dad had gone to a lot of effort to make that evening very special for my mom.  He purchased flowers for her, and he put on his best suit and waited for her in the living room.  He turned on the television to the Larwence Welk show grabbed my hand and told me to stand on his feet.  He proceeded to dance me around and around the living room.  It was magical and my memory recorded it as happening like a split second because my mom appeared, and he kissed me goodbye, and they left.

Very early the next morning I opened my bedroom door, I saw my mom’s sister coming out of their bedroom.  I was completely shocked and bewildered.  I asked her why she was in their room and all she said to me was “Last night your daddy went to Jesus.”  I woke up my younger sister and told her what our aunt had said but we didn’t have any understanding of what it meant.  We stayed in our room with the door closed because we were afraid.  I heard more and more adults coming into our home, but I was afraid to come out of our bedroom.  I stood with the door cracked open and tried to listen to what was being said.  My memory of the next few days is fragmented and consists of my memory of my aunt buying me new black patent leather shoes and white tights.  No adult took me or my little sister aside and explained what was happening.  I didn’t even know why my aunt was buying me shoes and tights!  I pieced together that our father had died at the St. Patrick’s dance of a heart attack.  My mom was not functioning and stayed in their bedroom.  No one talked to me about his death, visitation, funeral etc. All of us children, including my older brothers, did not talk to each other about what had happened.  We were deep in shock and excruciating pain of losing our dad.  Our family had disintegrated in the blink of an eye.

My next memory was being in the car with my oldest brother Dave.  Dave was a sophomore in college at that time. He pulled into a parking lot, parked the car and told me to get out and follow him.  We were at a funeral home and I had no idea what was going to happen.  No one explained to me what to expect.  Dave and I walked into the funeral home and into a large room with a casket at the front.  I could see from the doorway there was a person in the casket.  I walked closer and knew instantly that it was my dad.  This realization made me rush to his casket because I thought he looked like he was sleeping from a distance.  When I got close, however, I knew for certain that he had died; he looked like dad, but even in my young age, I recognized that his spirit was not there – it was only his body and not my dad.

Ceremonies and Rituals Provide us With a Sense of Significance, Community Connection, Tradition, Emotional Expression, and Religious Significance

The following day was my father’s funeral ceremony.  Because of his age and involvement in our community, his funeral was packed.  My whole second grade class attended the funeral and stood next to me.  I remember feeling ashamed of my grief and tears but at the same time feeling supported and validated because every one of my classmates were there standing shoulder to shoulder with me.  They didn’t understand the whole significance, but I could tell that they were feeling a sense of sadness with me.

This is my story from my seven-year-old perspective.  Think about that.  If a seven-year-old has the capacity to process the benefits of having the body present and a meaningful funeral ceremony, why would anyone think that there’s no importance to having those kinds of rituals?

“It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.”  – John Steinbeck

Our society touts that children are tough, children are resilient, children bounce back and many more crazy statements.  Now you may be understanding why I feel so strongly about the power of having the body present, if possible, for public viewings and funeral ceremonies.  Let me explain more so that you have an even clearer understanding how beneficial it was to me to see my dad in his casket.

I have been given the wonderful opportunity to study under Dr. Alan Wolfelt and earn my Death and Grief Studies Certification.  One of the most surprising things I learned was that even as a young child, I experienced most of the grief symptoms adults experience when they lose their spouse of many years.  Children are silent grievers because they tend to act out their grief and not speak about their feelings or be given the opportunity to speak of their feelings.  Children are forgotten grievers because adults tend to discount a child’s ability to process and understand the loss of their loved one.  Adults believe that children are coated with Teflon and the death of their loved one just bounces right off them.  This is a false assumption and devasting to the child. Depending on the relationship with the decedent, children can experience grief on a very deep and profound level.

I cannot express in words how devasting the loss of my father was to me, my mother and my siblings.  Our family was intact in bodily form minus our father, but our family was totally blown up.  Our family went silent.  I was experiencing a grieving phenomenon called yearning and searching.  I quite literally was looking for my dad and hoping he would walk in the door at any moment.  Every time I would start doing that, my little mind would flash back to viewing my dad in his casket and I would tell myself to stop because he really wasn’t coming home because he was dead.  I lost a whole year of school because I could not cognitively concentrate.  I spent all of third grade sitting in the back of the class listening but not participating.  I colored through each day with pastels and all I remember that year was how beautiful the colors looked to me.    I had feelings of abandonment but again, when those thoughts crept into my mind, I remembered him in his casket and that brought me back to the reality that my dad did not intentionally leave or inflict this pain on me.

Rebirth but Still Grieving – About one and half years after the death of my father my acute grief melted away.  I distinctly remember how that felt.  I started “seeing” people again and wanting to have friends and be part of my school community. When I say I started seeing people, I literally mean that it was as if I looked up and saw that there were children around me and I wasn’t alone.  It was like a light switch flipped on and I cognitively recognized that I could be happy on some level.  This path of grief was starting to feel lighter, but I also remember knowing that I was forever changed and there was no going back.  I was now experiencing secondary grief due to all of the changes in my life, and I still had to revisit my memories of seeing my dad in his casket when I needed to bring my thoughts back to my reality of living my life without the physical presence of my dad.  My grief journey became part of me, it touched every aspect of my life.  As I stated earlier, our experiences can be used for good.  My experience with grief taught me at a very early age the brevity and fragility of life.  That nothing should ever be taken for granted and life is a gift.  It has given me the opportunity to gain understanding and knowledge to help others.  My mom said we were survivors, but I think it’s more like running a race and enduring the pain to get to the finish line and then celebrating that we made it over the finish line.  My experience has also given me a spirit of gratitude for the people I have been given to love no matter how brief our time together.  I know that death does not have the final say.

Use This Story to Teach Your Care Team Why It’s Important to Have the Body Present

I cannot tell you who the Funeral Director was who brought my dad into the care of the funeral home, who bathed, embalmed, dressed, casketed and cosmeticized my dad, but I am forever grateful for that person’s work and dedication to our profession. I am also grateful that because of a Funeral Director practicing our profession, I was given the opportunity to see my dad one more time after he had died.  I am grateful for all of the work, time, an professional dedication that a Funeral Director put into my father’s public visitation, funeral ceremony, and his burial.  I do not know what would have happened to me if I had not been given that gift of seeing him and connecting the reality of my circumstances.  The impact of the very meaningful funeral ceremony and burial that my young eyes witnessed have left an imprint on my memory and God has used that experience to heal my soul.

Thank you for reading my article and I hope that you have found something to implement that will help you move forward enriching your business and the lives you touch.  I am looking forward to continuing this journey with you and sharing more insights and expertise in our next exploration. You have but one life to live and you have been placed in this timeline of history for a purpose.  What you do each day matters and has the potential to make a positive difference in the lives you touch. If you have a question or need a boost in moving forward, please call me at 815-299-0100 because I would love to help you achieve your goals.

With warm regards,

Diann Anderson