Funeral for a Friend’s Father

And thoughts about my own

Today I attended the funeral of a friend’s father. Though I’ve known her since high school, I had never met her dad, so the funeral did its job; it made me wish I had.

The mourners, his children and grandchildren, told stories about a man who never missed their kids’ and grandkids’ sports events and recitals, someone who always had a one-liner, who flirted with women (his line: “If you were six months younger, I’d marry you”), and joked with servers in restaurants. He had a great singing voice and loved Frank Sinatra. He had lots of friends and an active social life. Like my dad, he was a smoker; unlike my dad, he didn’t quit. But my dad’s aortic stenosis couldn’t have been helped by his previous three-pack-of-Kools-per-day habit.

If you took away that man’s golf and ukelele, he could have been my own father. I left missing them both.

It’s impossible to put the fun in funeral. Nothing is pleasant about watching people try to hold it together while they talk about their flawed saint. I remember trying to do it for my dad. I’m lucky to come from a line of hilarious people, so my eulogy began, “My father could sleep anywhere,” and I pointed to the casket as evidence. (Read about him here and his eulogy here.) The congregation’s laughter was comforting for them and for us. Likewise, my friend and her siblings had a lot of funny stories to share, and they broke the tension of sorrow.

As I sat in the very last pew, I began to see myself as a funeral reviewer. Or, rather, I decided at that moment what I wanted and didn’t want.

First, I’m Jewish, but I’m not religious. I don’t want a funeral at Sol Levinson’s, like nearly every funeral I’ve ever attended. I don’t want the officiant to be someone who doesn’t know me. The rabbi stumbled over simple sentences, primarily because he didn’t know the deceased and had only spent the exact amount of time with his family as our rabbi spent with us when my dad died. (I already wrote my own obituary.)

Since I’m going to be cremated, there will be no pallbearers. A traditional funeral may be something people need to address their grief, and, after all, funerals are for the living. But I don’t want one. My friend Michael Yockel would have loved his memorial service at Sherwood Gardens. People spoke and told beautiful and hilarious stories, sang songs, and read poetry. That’s what I want.

My friend’s father gave her an envelope ten years ago. It was a note to his funeral goers, and it began like something I would say: I’m so happy to see such a huge crowd. I’ll leave my note with Utah soon, because you never know.

In my Jewish community, the shiva house is where you go to spend time with your grieving friend. So why did I go to the funeral? If I had been closer with the whole family, I’d have done both. But the funeral gave me a chance to hear about someone I didn’t know, to understand my friend’s loss, and to know how to comfort her in the future.

When my dad died, a lot of my friends showed up for me at both the funeral and the shiva. Many of them knew my father. During those several days, I was hardly alone for a minute, except in sleep. When it was all over, the sudden dearth of people, of diversion, of comfort, left me so alone in my grief that I cried for a week.

In other words, the grief doesn’t end when we stop receiving people. That’s just when it begins.

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