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| Yes | 74% | 425 votes | Total: 575 votes | |
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Add to FavoritesI can tell you the answer to this question. I can tell you the answer because, when I was a child of two, my father died and, when I was nine, my father's mother - the person I loved more than any other person in this world - also died.
My mother didn't believe children should attend funerals; therefore, I attended neither my father's nor my grandmother's.
I grew up with only a tiny scrap of memory of my father who was an Army Non-Com - a veteran of both WWII and the Korean Conflict and a former Merrill's Marauder. When people asked me about my parents and I told them my father was deceased, they would say they were sorry. I would always reply that they needn't feel sorry for me because I didn't really remember my father and never felt a true sense of loss about him.
I lived for 50 years with that opinion...
For some reason which I cannot, even now, explain, I decided to take flowers to my father's grave one Memorial Day. I'd never been to visit his grave in my entire life but, this particular Memorial Day, I was determined to go.
My mother had always told me my father was buried in Golden Gate Cemetery and, so, on the Friday before the Memorial Day of my fiftieth year of life, I called Golden Gate Cemetery to find out the exact location of his grave. To my amazement, I was informed that my father was not buried there and, after checking with the Veteran's Administration, I discovered that my father was actually buried in the Presidio Army Cemetery in San Francisco.
So, early on that Memorial Day morning, I set out on the 60-mile journey from my house to the Presidio. Eventually, I found my way to the top of a hill overlooking San Francisco Bay where the cemetery is located and - armed with the plot number of my father's grave - I searched row by row until I found it on the very end of a row right next to the street.
I parked my car, got out and paused for a moment to take in the view...
I could see Alcatraz Island below me and the Marin Headlands beyond as the fog was just beginning to creep over the Golden Gate Bridge.
"He's probably got the best view in all of San Francisco", I thought to myself.
Standing before his grave - still holding the flowers I brought with me in my hand - I read the words chiseled on the uniform, white, marble stone. There were my father's first, middle and last names, his rank, the state in which he was born and the division of the Army to which he belonged.
That's when it hit me: My father was really dead. That was HIS name carved with brazen finality into the stone. There could be no mistake... My father was irretrievably, totally and undeniably dead.
I remember falling to my knees beside my father's grave and burying my face in my hands as I sobbed, uncontrollably, for what seemed like an hour.
After all this time, all these years, I suddenly realized there was a little two year-old girl buried deep down inside my mind who, up until that very moment, still believed with all her heart that, someday, her father would come back to her.
I remembered things I hadn't thought about since I was a child: How, at one point, I'd told myself my father wasn't really dead, that he'd run away from my mother and me and my mother had been keeping the truth from me to spare me the pain of his abandonment. How, at another time, I'd toyed with idea that my father was some kind of secret agent and the government had faked his death so he could carry out his missions in anonymity.
All of the silly, childish scenarios I'd made up in my young mind in order to keep from having to face the awful, final, irrevocable truth: My father was dead.
Doubled over with grief, crying on the grass of the Presidio Cemetery, I realized that, beneath a half-century of life, there was a little girl who still clung to a dream of what it would be like on the day when her father knocked on her front door, identified himself and claimed her as his child. A little girl who imagined how she and her father would cry in each other's arms as he hugged her tightly, told her how much loved her and how sorry he was for having been separated from her for such a long time
To her, it must have seemed as though her father just went off one day and never returned. I'd never even known that little girl existed but, she DID exist. She was just as real as I was.
Never given the opportunity to grieve over my father's death, I'd never cried or mourned. In her attempt to shelter me from the 21-gun salute, the folding of the flag draped over my father's casket and the lone bugler playing "Taps" as they lowered my father into his grave, my well-meaning mother had taken away any chance I might have had at the time to process through my grief and start the mending process.
In seeking to "spare" me, my mother hadn't really spared me at all. What she did, instead, was delay, by fifty years, my own personal journey through the grief.
The following Memorial Day, I went to visit my grandmother's grave...
Learn more about this author, Jean C. Fisher.
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No
When it comes to what's best for a child, there are exceptions to many rules. However, I consider it unwise and sometimes unhealthy for children under the age of 10 to attend a funeral.
Although they might be devastated by the loss of a loved one, most adults who have spiritual beliefs recognize death as merely the end of one phase of our existence. Even though they are being reared in a home where religious or spiritual beliefs are very prominent, most young children cannot yet conceive of a similar view of death. Seeing a family member in a casket creates a bit of cognitive dissonance. If Grandpa is sleeping, why doesn't he get up when I talk to him?
Two experiences in my own family support this. My material grandmother declined suddenly over a few months. Although the cause of death was never spoken aloud, I later learned it was cancer. At age eight, I grew to hate visiting her in the hospital every other night as her illness progressed. The remains I saw in the open casket at her funeral were those of a person perhaps half her size before she became ill. The face and even the hands must have belonged to someone else. I had nightmares about the funeral for months.
Not long after her death, my father's uncle entered the hospital for exploratory surgery. Diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, he died about six weeks later. Although the children in the family were allowed to visit him when they were accompanied by an adult, this practice stopped after just two weeks. We were never given a reason why but suspected his rapidly deteriorating condition would somehow scare us.
The casket was open during the funeral. Once again, the loved one in it hardly resembled the family member we knew. The sandy hair had turned black from cobalt treatments. The 250-pound frame weighed perhaps 100 pounds at most. And the scariest of all: a two-inch autopsy scar at the edge of the scalp.
Add to this picture a crying widow who kept grabbing the hands of the deceased. The children in the family were not given any choice about whether to attend this funeral and were encouraged to go up to the casket and kiss or at least touch the corpse. None of us was more than nine years old, and all of us believed that our uncle was gone forever - period. Seeing the coffin lowered into the ground on a cold, snowy day was equally frightening. This time, I didn't have nightmares for months. They lasted five years.
Although most children recognize by age seven or eight that the human life cycle goes from infancy to gray hair, they aren't prepared to witness death first-hand. Their reaction so often is fear at what they witness at a funeral.
There are several alternatives that parents and grandparents can provide so that the child experiences closure when a loved one dies. They can explain their own beliefs about death and the afterlife and discuss in simple terms what a funeral is and why it's held. They should make sure to add that when the child is older, he or she will be able to choose whether to attend a funeral. It's important, however, not to say anything to cause the child to think that he or any other loved ones will soon be dying unless, of course, another family member is terminally ill.
Despite how much the adult who has suffered a loss is hurting, the objective should always be to console the child. One way to do this is to create a memory book of scrapbook about the deceased. Placing photos of this individual - especially any pictures that include the child - around the child's room is another reminder. Giving the child one or two items from the deceased's personal effects if they have a special meaning can bring comfort. Continuing to talk about the special person with the child is another way to help a youngster grieve when a loved one dies.
These actions also help prepare the young child for the first funeral he or she will attend while older. In the meantime, let children remain children.
Learn more about this author, Vonda Sines.
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