Unique Funeral Ideas:

Planning a Fitting Celebration of a Young Man's Life

BY ARLENE HARDER, MA, MFT

When a young man without religious affiliation died suddenly, his family created a celebration that accurately shared highlights of his life.

This picture was taken several years ago when our grandson, Eli, and a friend of his accompanied my husband and me on a houseboat trip on the Sacramento Delta. The last day of our vacation we rented a motorboat and let the boys drive it while one of them water-skied.

We had also allowed the teenagers to steer the houseboat, which they enjoyed doing, along with going down a slide into the river. However, when we saw the looks on their faces as they drove the speedboat, we realized it would have been cheaper to stay in a motel and just rent a speedboat every day.

Our grandson's pleasure in driving the boat — and his joy of life — was obvious on that trip, so with this photo we have a special memory of him. However, it is hard for me to put this picture on Support4Change because it is the picture we chose for his funeral program. Each time I see it I am reminded of the pain it represents, the gulf between what was and what is, and tears come easily to my eyes, as they do now. If I didn't know that tears are a healthy way to experience grief, I might not be able to continue sharing the planning and carrying out of a unique funeral idea. But I hope these pages will inspire you to plan a service that reflects a person you want to honor and remember.

He was only nineteen on July 5, 2004, when one of his best friends, someone whose life he had twice saved when surfing, fell asleep at the wheel and crashed into a tree, killing Eli instantly.

Let me tell you how the planning for his service came about.

To help you understand the context, I'll go back fourteen years to Patrick Point State Park north of Eureka, California, where our son, Dave, married Betsy Henry in an outdoor ceremony overlooking waves crashing on rocks below. At that time she had two small boys, Eli and Ian, whom we were glad to consider our grandsons. About a year after that, Dave and Betsy (also known as Cat) had a son, Ki, and we looked forward to seeing how this family of three boys would turn out.

While their life had its ups and down and Eli had gotten into trouble, as many teenagers do, he was finally blossoming into a successful college student and looking forward to his sophomore year. However, he was finally showing the promise of his intelligence and interest in many things. This is what made his death particularly painful, which I tried to express in the eulogy, which was written as a letter from the family and read by a friend.

When he was killed, the family, as you would expect, was devastated and we came to their house in Arcata to share our grief and memories. Eli's biological father, Rob, came from Hawaii and Rob's father and two sisters flew in from Michigan.

At that time Betsy wasn't affiliated with a church and had no idea how to go about planning a memorial service, let alone have the energy to do it. She had enough difficulty making decisions about more immediate matters, such as whether to have him cremated or buried, and bringing his body from the area where he had been killed.

Soon I was aware of the value of having a religious or cultural tradition so that many of the details and decisions surrounding a funeral can be made more easily. When you belong to a church or spiritual congregation, you don't have to start from scratch when a death occurs suddenly. But that's what we had to do.

I volunteered to spearhead the planning because I had experienced several funerals in my family and had just the month before attended a memorial service of my ninety-nine-year-old father-in-law. That service, although the minister who gave the eulogy did not know him, had been a traditional Christian service and there were a number of precedents on which the family could rely when planning the funeral service and program.

Since Eli did not belong to a church or synagogue and was only beginning the process of forming a religious or spiritual viewpoint, we had to make decisions we felt would be consistent with what we did know about his views.

Fortunately, there was a wonderful woman, Nichole Franks, who happened to be the head of the funeral committee in her synagogue and lived less than a mile from Dave and Betsy's house. Consequently, the service took on a somewhat "Jewish" flavor with the saying of the Kaddish, but it was primarily an eclectic blend of several traditions, as you can see by following the links on the right.

In any case, with Nicole's help (she generously offered her computer and knowledge of local services) and the musical help of the Arcata Interfaith Gospel Choir and musicians who had known Eli, including his guitar teacher, we pulled together a unique funeral service that everyone agreed was an appropriate celebration of Ei's life.

If you check out the links on the right side of this page, you will see the components of that service. As you will see, we chose to have the service at a public beach and serve lunch at the community center across the parking lot.

I hope you can tell that it is a good illustration of a unique funeral celebration that truly reflects the person being remembered. In fact, even though you didn't know Eli, I think you will come to know him through the eulogy, poems, readings, and songs of the funeral program.

It is my privilege to share our story with you and I hope it will make it easier for you to some day create a memorial service for a person you love.

© 2006, Arlene Harder, MA, MFT

A UNIQUE FUNERAL SERVICE FOR A UNIQUE YOUNG MAN

INDEX

The second obituary to appear in the Eureka Times-Standard and a piece called The Garden of Life, printed in the funeral program though not read during the service.

Memorial service program cover and list of the service, which was held at a local beach. The Arcata community is relaxed and casual, so having a fancy event would have been out of character for both the family and the wider community.

Readings from The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran and the Art of Blessing the Day

A friend read "A letter from the family," which was the eulogy, and another friend read Each of Us Has a Name. The poem reinforced the reality that we were honoring a unique person who carried a special name during his nineteen years on earth.

Waiting for the service to begin — Participants in the memorial service sat quietly on the beach where Eli spent many long hours surfing. Note the nineteen long-stemmed red roses representing each year of Eli's life.

This surfboard is a powerful symbol of Eli's hobby and it stands next to a table that served as an "altar" or centerpiece for the service on a beach.

Songs Eli enjoyed were played by friends, his guitar teacher and an uncle of his

Eli's mother joined with the Arcata Interfaith Gospel Choir in singing hymns of comfort and hope. This nondenominational choir was consistent with Eli's nontraditional religious views.

Eli's parents carry his ashes to the ocean. This picture demonstrates how three people came together to share a painful experience

A Buddhist chant, sung by the choir as friends cross a stream to watch the scattering of the ashes, is one of the highlights of the ceremony

Eli's parents remove the lid from the wooden vase as they prepare to return Eli, both symbolically and in reality, to the waves he loved

In the area where lunch was served, an extensive array of pictures reminded the mourners of how much life Eli had squeezed into nineteen years. A number of people brought their own picture displays as well as flowers from their garden. The informal atmosphere was very much what Eli would have wanted.

One of the best uses of the Internet is to have friends and family share remberances about a loved one through a newspaper obituary section. In the Times-Standard newspaper of Eureka-Ferndale, Eli's grandfather sponsors a permanent place on the newspaper's website so that anyone wanting to tell others what Eli meant to them can add comments by clicking on View/Sign guest book on the newspaper's page of Eli's obituary.

AN IMPROVEMENT ON THE MEMORIAL SERVICE WE COULD HAVE MADE

It was cold the day we went to the public beach and made arrangements to reserve the community building for a catered lunch, so we thought it would be a good idea to have the band on the porch. We also thought the people would want to go to the shelter of the building to share their stories of Eli.

Because it was the middle of summer and I hadn't brought warm enough clothes, I had even bought myself a pair of long johns. However, on the day of the service it was sunny and very warm, offering lovely weather for the scattering of the ashes.

We thought people would want to share, as a large group, stories about Eli. What we hadn't realized was that after the ashes had been scattered and people moved to the building for food and the band brought their instruments there as well, the mood shifted. The people were more interested in talking with one another than in sharing as a whole. If we had it to do again, we would have had people share their remembrances of Eli before the ashes part of the ceremony. This would have given more people a change to let all of us know what Eli meant to them. He was a marvelous, well-liked young man and will be greatly missed.