in my regular “human beings are weird” musings, I have been thinking about what people do when someone dies, and why I don’t seem to be able to do the same.

That’s because yesterday, a friend called me absolutely distraught, because she had to fly home for a memorial being put on for her mother. Apparently it was being arranged by a university where I guess her mother worked. And my friend really, really didn’t want to go. I told her she didn’t have to, of course, because it’s always an option to be the family member that doesn’t go along with things. And she didn’t go.

Mine is an unpopular view, I know. But some ceremonies just don’t work for everyone, and if you’re throwing up with a panic attack about doing something unnecessary, my philosophy is don’t do it.

There are many suitable ways to memorialize the dead, of course, and I myself have done quite a number of them. I organized my husband’s funeral, for instance, and my mother’s. One funeral involved meeting with a priest who had only met my husband shortly before his death, and who gave a nice little homily at the graveside that was the best someone could do who didn’t really know the man. The other required me to sit with a bishop at the kitchen table and pick out hymns and the appropriate bits of the Book of Common Prayer (my mother was a priest herself, and got the bishop). Both of those were kind of fun. One of the reasons I’m an Episcopalian is that there are appropriate rites for everything, and you don’t have to devise some kind of fresh and original celebration. You just go to the book and run through the rite. People have jobs in the ceremony, and there is a proper order.

Oh, our kid and I put on a memorial picnic for my husband a while after his death, too; it was at the tail end of COVID, and people wanted to remember him, so I obliged. Our kid is an expert at putting on things like that, having worked for Mural Arts in Philadelphia. There was a visitor book, cards with my husband’s picture and a suitable poem, and lots of food. It was cold and damp, but everyone could walk around chatting, and I didn’t have to have too many meaningful conversations. It was fine, and it was over soon. That’s all I ask.

One friend whose husband died had a memorial for her husband at the funeral parlor’s big event space, with a slide show of photos playing, and lots and lots of speakers. Another friend put on a big party at the Mummer Museum, because her husband had been a lifelong Mummer (that’s a Philadelphia tradition I’m not even going to describe), and it was important to her to have music and dancing, she did all kinds of other meaningful things after he died, because as she told me, ritual was important to her.

Mostly, though, what I do when someone I love dies is feel awful, and all the rites and rituals in the world don’t make me feel better.

I know other people are much soothed by memorials of various sorts. There’s a bus stop pole that has had different arrangements of plastic flowers twined around it for several years now; I think a kid was hit by a car there. We had a contretemps in our neighborhood about a hideous mural that was painted in memory of a neglected baby who died, when someone proposed painting over it. Instead, they hired the artist who did the original mural, to repaint it so it wasn’t quite as awful-looking.

These things matter to people.

When my mother died, many members of the family decided to take her ashes down into the woods of the property where she had lived before she moved into the retirement community, and scatter them there in the place she loved. I endorsed the activity heartily, but I didn’t go with them, because I was absolutely wretched with grief. I did not want to bond with anyone, and I didn’t want to be happy about anything. I was sad, terribly, grindingly sad. I had been with my mother, at least once a week and usually more, for ten years, watching her deteriorate with an awful disease, managing her care, trying to figure out how to pay her bills and deal with the medical people, and attempting to get her to see reason from time to time, and I needed everyone to go have their nice memory and leave me to stew: sour, disgusted, miserable, and fed up. When I grieve, I get angry, and need to be left the hell alone.

Apparently that’s my necessary process, because I felt much the same way after my husband died.

My general philosophy about memorials, therefore, is to go to the nice codified rituals that are written in the manual, march through them, go home, and otherwise avoid trying to have closure. I don’t want closure. I want my mother back. I want my husband back. They were both difficult, interesting people, it is impossible that people so very alive could ever be dead, and all the nice speeches in the world or memorial brass plates won’t make that right.

I know, I know, other people don’t feel that way, and I will strive to be understanding about it, but I’m old enough now that I don’t think I’m actually going to change.