Sentimentality, Business and funerals

 The article I'm about to reference is about sentimentality and how it shows up in art and also, interestingly, business. It reminded me very much of an insight I had when I was more involved in funerals. The article tells us:

There are two causes of sentimentality in business. The first is a fear of the fragility of the audience, a worry that it won’t be able to cope with the truth. You think the truth is actually OK. But you fear that other people will get excessively agitated and upset. Sentimentality in Art – and Business | The Book of Life

 Once or twice as someone who had been asked to conduct a funeral, I realised that funeral directors don't always act in the best longer term interests of the bereaved. Now, don't get me wrong here: this is not a general 'down' on funeral directors: some of them definitely do get how their vocation is to help the bereaved and most of them most of of the time comport themselves in a professional and appropriate manner. However, just a couple or three times I felt in my interactions with funeral directors that their desire to help the bereaved had been, in the words of this article, sentimentalised. That is, they were approaching the task of offering comfort in a way that slipped over into a refusal to face a certain cold, hard, fact: someone had died. Perhaps that is even a little too harsh, perhaps what I was observing was not a refusal, rather simply a redirection or skirting round the 'elephant in the room'.

And it occurred to me that this was because there was a customer/client dimension which could prioritise short-term feelgood vibes of the service offered and so colluding in or even encouraging a degree of denial. This would be because the purpose of a funereal company is like any other company in crucial respects;

When imagining how to get other people
to like us or be loyal to our company or interested in something we’d
like to sell them, we too often feel we have to omit all the weaknesses
and rough bits. 

And, let's face it, when thought about from a bottom-line perspective, an undertakers' business is about selling funerals more than it is about helping bereaved people for the longer term. In the shorter term, it is desirable that people feel good about the service you've offered and that means the temptation to a sentimental approach is big. The longer-term perspective, however, sees that denial of a death is not going to be helpful for the growth and flourishing of the bereaved.

There is another problem that can hang around funerals and which can get entangled in the relationship between undertakers and bereaved. In some families, perhaps most to some degree, there are dimensions to the relationships between the deceased and the bereaved that are unwhole, unhealed or even downright fractious. This typically brings guilt and even anger close to the surface in and around a funeral service. This is very much the kind of thing identified in the article as a second dimension:

The second reason for business sentimentality is darker. People sometimes get very sentimental when they feel very guilty, when something pretty bad is going on just off-stage. It’s a kind of bubble wrap around brutish things. 

 Again, don't mistake my meaning. I'm not thinking of those rare times when undertakers are negligent about things like labelling bodies. I'm thinking of those situations when the unresolved tensions and guilt among the bereaved is simmering or bubbling. It is only natural then that undertakers, sensing this (who wouldn't?) want to bring out the bubble wrap and keep a lid on the emotional turmoil. An understandable desire even if unhelpful in most long-term bereavement processes.

So sometimes there has to be a way, gently but firmly, to do some things that don't collude in pretending that somehow there has not been a death. Some of the rites or ceremonies around funerals are there precisely because the harsh recognition of a death has to be made before it can begin to be incorporated into the personhood of the bereaved from that time forth. Sometimes a minister at a funeral will need to say the words 'dead', 'died', 'death' etc. even recognising that such things may bring tears. But this can be cathartic. It may usually be necessary to help people to process their grief.

PS Giles Fraser recently wrote in a way that broadly coheres with what the concern I've tried to express here is about albeit focussing more on the trend.