Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone… [M, 2-13-23]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter— Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone… [M, 2-13-23]

 

“Please don’t talk about me when I’m gone…” That’s a Sidney Clare song lyric from 1930. These days, folks aren’t saying “Please.”

I check the obituaries in several newspapers online. Increasingly, they contain a line like this, “According to the wishes of [name of deceased], there will be no funeral or memorial services.”

Why does [name of the deceased] get to decide that? The service is not for [name of the deceased]. It’s for the survivors. They should get to decide that.

And how nasty is that, anyway? I’m going to decide what you kids and grandkids and parents and siblings and friends can do even after I’m dead!

It reminds me of why my friend, Scott, left the ministry and became a coffee shop owner.

“The day after Thanksgiving, a woman came to see me. She said that on Thanksgiving Day, the family had gathered at her mother’s, as always. Her mother had cooked a big meal, as always. Everybody was seated at the table. Her mother brought in the turkey, put it on the table, sat down at her place, pulled a pistol out of her apron pocket, put it to her head and killed herself.”

Scott said, “I had nothing at all to say to her. I knew I was in the wrong profession.”

Well, I was in that profession for about a hundred years, and I wouldn’t have anything to say to her, either. Nobody would. Oh, a psychiatrist or psychologist, or even a preacher, could put a name to what she did, and catalog the ostensible reasons that she did it, but that is no help to a person who is going to live with that image and all its possible meanings for the rest of their life.

Doing something like that? To your whole family? I don’t think there are any words adequate to describe that kind of desperation, aggression, hate, sadness, loneliness, nastiness, sinfulness…all mixed up together.

I wonder about that woman’s funeral, and the person who conducted it. I’ve done a lot of difficult funerals, but never for someone who was so intentionally unkind to all who would be gathered there for that service.

There are a lot of preacher jokes about that sort of thing. They never reflect well on the preacher. Like the woman who wanted the preacher to do a funeral for her cat. He refused. She offered a thousand dollars. He said, “Well, you did say that cat was a Methodist, right?” Or the preacher who didn’t want to do a funeral for a man who was too nasty to think of anything good to say about him. They offered a thousand bucks. So she did it, but the best she could come up with was, “Well, at least he wasn’t as bad as his brother.”

[Back when I first heard these stories, it was only $100, but that’s not enough anymore to make the joke work.]

Back to the original intent of this column… the deceased being the one to decide on whether they should have a memorial service… no, and it’s not just because I want the thousand bucks for doing the service.

I’m sure someone will say, “Well, they never let me make decisions when I was alive, so finally I get to make one.” No! If you couldn’t stand up and tell folks that you were a real person without blowing your brains out at the Thanksgiving table, or demanding no memorial service, you forfeited your God-given right to be a person. Christ died so you can be a real person. This is your final chance, not to say “No,” but to say, “I am a person because God made me and Christ died for me. The rest of this stuff doesn’t matter. Let ‘em talk about me anyway when they want when I’m gone.”

John Robert McFarland