Treating the Dead

"Billy Jean...is not my lover..."

I can hear the stereo from my second story apartment. The end fades out and a series of voices announces to an overlapped background "This is Kiss," "Kiss," "Kiss!"

I guess now that he is dead he's popular enough for mainstream radio again, if only for a short time.

I think there is a huge societal misconception about the purpose of funerals and tributes. Funerals are not for the dead.

I don't see how the dead could possibly care. Consider all the possibilities: if the person is in heaven they are too busy with that eternal bliss to really care about what how many people are lined up around their coffin, if the person in in hell they have much larger concerns, and if there is nothing in the world after this, or if the person is reincarnated etc then the person will have no way to know at all what's going on. No matter how you cut it the dead are not impacted by their funerals. This is why funerals are not for the dead, they are for the people left behind.

There are three ways funerals impact the living. The first is the sadness that the deceased are no longer about and that we will miss that person.

The second is that funerals and death in general represent a frightening reminder to people of their own mortality and the frailness of all that they hold dear. This has a lot of implications and lead to a lot of actions which can mostly be summed up with the words "people suck."

The third effect is most interesting to me. Its the tendency of people to sit and cry and feel bad about not telling the deceased how much he meant during life. People wish that whatever petty argument had been could have been put aside. They wish they had told the now-deceased how much they loved him, and how much he mattered to them. They cry, then they go home, and make the same mistake with the rest of their loved ones.

We, as a society, do not tell people we love them when we do. We tell them about American Idol, shoe sales, and sports scores but when was the last time you told a close friend how much you appreciate that person? Even when we do it tends to be a passing cliche sort of thing: we tell people on their birthdays because its the thing to do, or we say it as a nice way to explain that we're hanging up the phone now.

This issue is marginally less severe with family and unmarried significant others. The people who we never managed to say "I love you" to are our best friends it seems, even though it definately isn't any less true than it is for your siblings.

So, go tell them. I'm pretty sure if you can sum up the guts to do it, you'll make your friend's day. Go tell them now, so you have no regrets someday when you lose them.