Makaila was sitting on the other side of the desk when I started to write Marc’s Musings this week so I asked her to interview me, to see what things, as a twelve year old she wonders about funerals.  Here’s our conversation:

Makaila:  Why did you start being a funeral director?

Marc:  I have always like helping people.  The best part of being a funeral director is to be able to help people when they need it most.

Makaila:  Who inspired you to be a funeral director?

Marc:  Uncle Bert Hills, because that’s the first funeral that I remember, my sister Bev because I wanted to change things, Uncle Clayton because it was at his funeral that I decided then to pursue my career and Pearl Graves because she left me the money that put me through school.

Makaila:  At the end of the day, are you proud of yourself?  And why?

Marc:  Yes, I am.  I give it my all.  I try to do everything that I can to make the time that a family is here at the funeral home easier for them.

Makaila:  If you weren’t a Funeral Director, what would you be?

Marc:  I enjoyed being a Developmental Service Worker.  I also thought about being a Nurse.

Makaila:  If there’s one life lesson you’ve learned while you were a Funeral Director, what is it? 

Marc:  That everyone makes a contribution to the world, regardless of their age or anything else about them. 

Makaila:  If someone famous were to visit the funeral home, who would you hope it would be?

Marc:  Opie Taylor (she didn’t get that one!)

Makaila:  Is it hard to work in a business where people are crying and you have to try not to cry because you want to look professional?

Marc:  I’ve cried with the best of them.  You can’t have feelings and not cry.

And then I turned the table and asked her a question…

Marc:  Do your friends ask you about the funeral home?

Makaila:  They ask me why you do that.

Marc:  What do you tell them?

Makaila:  You should do what you love and I guess he loves being a Funeral Director!

When you have kids sometimes you judge the seasons by the school year and so when I think that school is starting in a couple of weeks it feels to me that summer is almost over.  A drive in the country shows that the tobacco harvest has started, some of the seed corn is starting to turn and the fruit is ripe on the trees.  Last Sunday afternoon it felt like it was fall. 

The beginning of school is bittersweet for me.  Right now we have five children at home who will attend five different schools…that has the potential for five different meet the teacher nights, five different parent teacher interview nights and five different Christmas concerts.  When it comes to two of the kids schools competing against each other in sports, I’ll just have to cheer when everybody gets ahead…it will make people wonder who the crazy person is in the back! 

I remember the days of getting ready for school.  Each year we got a new lunch pail which was a square metal box with some kind of design on it, new binders,paper and pens; usually bic pens because they were only nineteen cents each.  We also got one new outfit to wear on the first day of school.  Each year I promised myself to keep my notes more organized than the last year and each year I did just that…for about a month.  There seems to be so much more for kids to learn now.  Makaila came home last year with grade six math that I’m sure I took in high school.  I don’t know how kids are keeping up.  I guess with all of the new knowledge comes new ways of learning and somehow it all works.

So back to school, back to making lunches, back to trying to make lunches more exciting and back to making more lunches…I think that I’m the Grinch of making lunches but I’ll just have to deal with it!

When someone dies, much of the concern that we show is directed to that person’s family, and rightly so.  But there are significant people in everyone’s life who will also grieve a loss…those people who we call “friends”.  Webster’s Dictionary includes the definition of friend to be a favoured companion and in that vein, it is reasonable that friends as well as families will grieve.  Friends will go through all of the same stages of grief that I have written about before, only I think that the onset may be different…it could be delayed a bit if friends don’t live together and are not in each other’s daily lives. 

For everyone, the first stage of grief is shock and disbelief which is what helps us get through those initial days and which is why the loss seems to hurt more as time goes on.  One day you will go to do one of those “friend things” and it will hit you that Jane is really not there.  And you’ll be sad and you’ll be angry and maybe for awhile you may not feel like doing “friend things” because it hurts too much or because you feel guilty for having fun without her.  Maybe without really understanding what is going on you will go to a place where it doesn’t hurt so much and throw yourself into doing things to an extreme like working or shopping or baking.  And then, as Oprah says, you’ll have an “aha” moment when you realize what’s going on and why you’re doing the things you’re doing and you can begin to heal.

In one of my favourite songs by Michael W Smith called “Friends Are Friends Forever” he sings about losing friends and he sings “We’ll keep you close as always; it won’t even seem you’re gone.  ‘Cause our hearts in big and small ways will keep the love that keeps us strong.  Though it’s hard to let you go in the Father’s hands we know that a lifetime’s not too long to live as friends”.

Over the past few weeks I have been writing about the ten stages that you will go through when you experience grief.  The first stage is “Shock & Disbelief” which is really a buffer period and it allows you to get your thoughts together.  Second is “Emotional Release” which is the ability to get rid of those bottled up feelings by crying, screaming or laughing.  The third stage is “Depression” which is when you start to realize the impact of your loss.  Fourth is “Psychosomatic Illness” when you may develop symptoms that were suffered by a loved one in the early stage of a disease.  The fifth stage is “Guilt”.  This is the stage that many people find themselves stuck in for prolonged periods of time.  Sixth is “Panic” when all of the sudden you wonder how you are going to manage now that you have lost the shoulder that you were so accustomed to leaning on.  The seventh stage is “Selfishness”.  This is the stage when you are really getting to feel worn down and you will find it hard to think of the needs of others.  Eighth is “State of Inertia” when you will feel like doing nothing and wonder what the use is of carrying on.  Number nine is “Hope” and that’s when you start to realize that the memories live on, but it just doesn’t hurt as much to think about them.

The final stage of the grief cycle is “Return to Normality”.     All of you who have experienced grief will question the word “normality” because it’s never going to be normal again.  But in terms of behavior, the word normal refers to “a lack of significant deviation from the average”.  So what this means is that there will come a time when you will become able to divest yourself into other things again.  Maybe you will find yourself being able to go to work for a day without becoming overwhelmed.  Life will never be the same, it just becomes different and you come to accept it for its own merit.

The eighth stage of the grief cycle is called State of Inertia.  This is the time when you will feel like doing nothing; the time when you will be sitting in your car, watching a train come down the tracks and wondering what use there is in carrying on.  This is another stage like depression and what you really need is friends because it becomes too easy to wall yourself off from society.  A good thing to do for yourself is to make goals.  Start with something simple; list one or two tasks that you can to accomplish the next day, whether it is cleaning out a drawer or cleaning the car and then make sure that you accomplish your goal.  You’ll be surprised how much better you will feel having done that.

The ninth stage is called Hope.  There will come a time when you realize that there is still a life for you…maybe a new life and a different life, but one that you are able to find meaningful and positive enough to carry on.  It doesn’t mean that you forget the life you had, it doesn’t mean that you get over your grief…it just means that it doesn’t hurt so much to think about the memories.

“Grief” is an emotion that we feel when we experience loss.  Death is only one kind of loss.  Other losses that make us grieve include divorce, losing your job, loss of a pet and so on…all of those things that end the life that we knew and force us to start a new one.  There are a number of factors that will affect the intensity of the grief such as the quality of a relationship, an individual’s acceptance of death and the manner in which the loss occurred.    

The sixth stage of grief that we will experience is Panic.  All of the sudden you will wonder how you will be able to manage now that you have lost the shoulder that you had always leaned on.  You will wonder how you will handle special days like Christmas and birthdays.  For some, it will mean that you will need to find a job.  Panic can be a pretty overwhelming stage. 

 I remember how overwhelming the “firsts” were…the first Christmas, the first birthday.  Every family has traditions; a big one for Gail, the kids and I is to see the fireworks on the first of July.  We have a million dollar view from our trailer and we have a fire and cook hotdogs.  I think the first of July would hurt a lot for me.  Sometimes the best way to handle those “first” times is to do something totally different than you usually do. 

  Selfishness is the next stage.  When you go through this stage, you will feel like nobody else has a problem like you do.  You can become so lost that you will find it hard to think of the needs of others.  You might think that people don’t care enough or that they are not feeling the loss with the same magnitude that you are.  Rest assured that in their own way, they are…they just may not show it in the same way that you do.

This is the third week for us to walk through the stages of grief that we will all experience when someone close to us dies.  So far I have touched on Shock & Disbelief, Emotional Release and Depression.  The fourth stage that we will go through is called Psychosomatic Illness.  It is very common for us, after someone dies to develop symptoms that were suffered by a loved one in the early stage of an illness.  Small aches and pains that we have had a hundred times before bring on new responses in the back of our minds.  It is common to experience Depression and Psychosomatic Illness at the same time.  It is important in this stage to recognize that your symptoms may be real and you should not always pass them off.

Number five is Guilt.  This is a huge stage and it is the one that many people get stuck in…remember when I talked about a “bad grief cycle”?  We live in a guilt ridden society.  I can sit at my desk on any given day and find something to feel guilty about.  A few years ago I facilitated a Widows and Widowers Group and the guilt that I heard about more than any other was “I wasn’t there when my spouse died”.  I remember one lady saying that she was driving into town and met an ambulance heading toward the village that she lived in.  It gave her a funny feeling, but she kept going on into town.  The ambulance, as it turned out was for her husband.  I felt just as much at a loss for words then as I do now.  I wanted to tell her that there was no way for her to have known, but she already knew that and it was of no consolation.  Guilt is something that you may never totally recover from, and maybe the best you can do is to adapt your life around it.

We were sitting in the church before my mother’s funeral.  My son and my nephew, both about 13 at the time were sitting next to each other.  I don’t know who started to laugh first, but between the two of them, it became contagious.  My sister was a bit annoyed at those two boys but she just didn’t understand what was really happening.  Darrell and Joel loved their Grandma a lot and I knew that they weren’t laughing at anything in particular.  The second stage of the grief cycle is Emotional Release.  This is the ability to get rid of those bottled up feelings by crying, by screaming and yes, even by laughing…whatever positive manifestations that allow a release of emotions. 

It’s important to know that even though we will all experience these stages of grief, we will experience them at our own speed and maybe more than one stage at a time.  It’s also important to know that it may take a couple of years to work your way through a “good grief” cycle.  If you have ever heard of the phrase “bad grief”, it would relate to becoming stuck in one stage and not being able to move on.        

The third stage of the grief cycle is Depression.  This is the stage when you start to realize the impact of the loss.  This is the stage when you don’t want to get out of bed in the morning or once you get the kids off to school, you want to go back to bed and stay there.  What’s really important to know in this stage is that the people around you really do care.  So if you are reading this, and you know someone who is grieving, let me tell you that a phone call, a visit or a card are all good things.  Don’t stay away because you don’t think that you know the right things to say.  Sometimes you just need to listen.  Sometimes it’s not what you say that means so much, but just the fact that you cared enough to come.

When my sister died the year before I went to Humber College, I kept everything inside.  I avoided being around the people who could have helped me the most because I thought that when people had a common reason to grieve, they couldn’t support each other.  How wrong I was!  One of the most interesting courses that I took when I was in the Funeral Service course was called “Psychology of Grief”.  I remember sitting on the floor of my room in Toronto typing out assignments for that course; the tears running down my face partly because I was reliving a time of my life that hurt too much and partly because I learned that all those things that I had felt when Bev died were actually normal.     

There are very distinct stages that we all go through when a significant person in our life dies.  I can’t stress to you enough that it’s never too early and it’s never too late to learn about grief.  And so for the next few weeks, I want to talk about ten stages that we will all go through at our own speeds, when someone close to us dies. 

The first stage is Shock and Disbelief.  Sometimes shock is so great that people react in abrupt ways.  I know personally of a time when the bearer of bad news was punched by the person receiving the news, but generally shock makes us numb.  Shock and Disbelief is a buffer period.  This is the time when you are on your way to the hospital and you’re thinking that maybe you heard something wrong, maybe it was somebody else and maybe this is just a bad dream.  This stage allows you to get your thoughts together and prepare yourself.   It is for this reason that it is important to see the person who died because that is the single moment that allows you to face the reality and to begin working through your own grief.