Finding help when making funeral arrangements

Who was there to support you at the time of arranging the funeral?

Most of us are numb.

Many people have never arranged a funeral or a burial before. Even if there is to be a cremation instead of a casket burial, there are many arrangements to make and regulations that must be followed, reports to be filed. Some cremations also have a funeral or memorial service. Many urns are buried.

Usually all must be done quickly because the funeral is held in a short time frame of a couple days. So when death happens, you need help.

You need your family, your pastor if you belong to a church, and you probably need quite a lot of help from a funeral director. In my case, I needed two funeral directors — one here and one in New Hampshire.

My dear husband Baheej was very interested in the rituals and traditions surrounding death. This was because he grew up in the Holy Land, in a traditional culture where the bereaved got lots of support and social protection. And he had already noticed it is different here.

Baheej was already in the USA studying and teaching when his own parents died. He found there were few, really no protections for him personally. Few people even knew. And even if they had heard, they assumed he would be OK and get past it in a few weeks.

Sadly all our parents die. So people say things like “now at rest.” Such cliches as “thoughts and prayers” are not enough.

In his hometown of Nazareth, in the Holy Land, and in all traditional cultures, there are many supports — people dress in black for months, sometimes a lifetime; they wear black armbands; they know each other's families, know the deceased and what has happened, etc. The elderly women take care of the sick and the dead. The family knows what to do. They take care of everything needed.

Here Baheej was on his own. I was fairly young, in my 20s, so even I didn't really understand.

In the historic Greek Orthodox Church, St. Gabriel, in Nazareth, The Holy Land, our ancestor Priest Khleif, who built the church, has the only grave inside the church. It's an aboveground crypt. It's a living part of our family history, built on top of the grotto where, as the story has it, Mary was told by the Angel Gabriel of the coming of Christ. So the whole business of birth and death is a living part of the local culture.

When it came time to write his doctoral dissertation, Baheej decided to do it on death in American society, more specifically on “The Sociology of the Mortuary.” He was particularly interested in the problem called “death denial.”

It means many people here don't even want to talk about it, much less know what to do when death strikes.

Baheej was especially interested in the role of the funeral director in American society, one that turns out to be important to many families. Even to me when I needed them.

Baheej joined the local Rotary Club where several funeral directors belonged and recruited them to help him understand their own role and support to a family after a death. Eventually Baheej did a systematic set of interviews with a sample of many funeral directors to understand their role during the initial death, funeral arrangements, and burial.

There are lots of oddly funny and awful stories and jokes about funeral directors. In one old episode of the vintage TV show, “The Golden Girls,” the four women housemates go to a funeral home to plan a funeral for a neighbor who had no family. The funeral director was all about money and tried to sell them a very expensive casket, starting at the most expensive, and was using pretty high pressure sales tactics. You may know of some such cases, but it is not the norm.

In my case and experience, there was no pressure. Just lots of help — the funeral director showed us what caskets he had, explained what was needed in terms of planning and logistics, and let us decide and choose.

The funeral director knows what papers to file, how to arrange everything with the church if a church is involved, will respect your religious traditions and practices, will make everything work on schedule, will even procure the many death certificates you will need for a deluge of after-funeral paperwork with banks, insurance, pensions, and on and on.

After the funeral service, I needed airline transport for the casket from Chicago to New Hampshire for the burial, and our funeral director in Chicago arranged all of that, and he worked well with our other funeral director at the New Hampshire end; it went very smoothly. All this help was invaluable.

Funeral directors often get a bad rap because of all the expenses. But I actually got a refund. A month after the funeral, my Chicago funeral home sent me a $1,200 check because I had over paid. How about that for honesty.

Once in New Hampshire, the second funeral home was also very helpful. How would one know you need a cement ground vault for the casket, or how to make all the arrangements for actual burial. We have a Khleif family plot there, but someone had to handle the logistics. These practical arrangements are a very hard part of grief. You must do them with all the help you can get.

After his father's death, Baheej wrote: “I start seeing signs of funeral homes I never noticed, elderly women watering geraniums in graveyards. Gravestones that looked cold suddenly seethe with blood and tears.

“I think of Nazareth where there are no funeral homes, where elderly women are the last to handle the living and the dead. Where people are born at home and, when they die, are carried out in caskets through the front door. Where there is always one last desperate attempt by the widow and children to keep the casket at home, then from being carried out of the church. Where they scream “NO” to the pallbearers with all the intensity of love.”

It's different here.

The point is: Baheej found that funeral directors play a vital and positive role in supporting families during the funeral and burial here in the USA. So the next time you hear those mean jokes or stories about funeral directors, think about this — They are members of your community, with families of their own; they are taking on some very needed support roles in our society; and they manage a lot of the initial chaos of death, funeral, and burial — helping countless families every day.

• Susan Anderson-Khleif of Sleepy Hollow has a Ph.D. in family sociology from Harvard, taught at Wellesley College, and is a retired Motorola executive. Contact her at sakhleif@comcast.net or see her blog longtermgrief.tumblr.com. See previous columns at www.dailyherald.com/topics/Ander

son-Kleif-Susan/.