HMN 2024: What People Say After Someone Dies

?I have always been fascinated by what people say after someone dies. Funerals and life celebrations are often occasions for people to praise and extoll the person who just died. Some speakers say that the deceased will never be forgotten and they have left a hole in the human sphere that cannot be filled.

When an important political or sports or entertainment person is celebrated, the glowing words are often baffling. Sometimes the figure was highly controversial and not generally a boon to humanity. I don’t know if the praises are sincere for the speaker, or is that what attendees believe they should say? Is a ceremony of remembrance a last chance to put an angelic sheen on people who were in the public eye?

Once I was on the island of Yap in Micronesia. It was a remote spot in the Pacific but I wanted to go even farther from home when I heard there was a funeral on the even more distant island of Mog Mog. I was told that only a few Westerners had visited there in the last year. A boat was leaving for Mog Mog and I had a reservation on it.

After a long and difficult trip, the recently departed man’s coffin was carried from the boat into a thatched hut where women wept and cried in ritual fashion. Then family and friends and neighbors spoke about the deceased. As a local man translated for me, I was stunned. Some of them said derogatory things about the guest of honor, mentioning hurtful or harmful things he had done in his lifetime.

My translator explained that it was emotionally freeing to speak the truth about someone when they pass. It prevents the speaker from bearing a burden that has been carried silently for a long time. It is spoken aloud, before witnesses and the community. It is socially acceptable.

But it’s very different after the person is buried, when it is taboo to say such things. The period before burial is the time to bear one’s soul and reveal the truths about the departed. After the burial, the deceased lies in peace.

When I returned home from Micronesia I went to a party and told a few people what I had experienced at the funeral on the remote island. Soon everyone at the party gathered around, fascinated by the customs of another culture.

And then people at the party opened up about their own feelings. Several of them said they would like the truth about them told at their funeral or memorial. “I want to be remembered as I was, and not some idealized version of me,” one guest claimed.

“I actually think it would make me more aware of my actions if I knew people would be telling the truth about me after I died,” another volunteered.

Two women said they wanted to include that in their own funeral plans.

One man said his parents had been abusive and he carried those memories silently. He said he didn’t know if he would have the courage to tell the truth about his parents to people who knew them and admired them. “But maybe I will find the courage when they’re gone.”

One of the joys of travel is being exposed to different ways of doing things. It opens our minds and hearts to possibilities we never thought of or imagined, starting with birth and going right up to the end of life.