Memorial services for bad relationships and Ethical Wills

This American book contains fairly conventional advice about funerals but some radically interesting ideas for memorial rituals and stories of unusual ones.

There's the woman called Sophie who organised a memorial service for two grizzly bears named Field and Sissy in British Columbia. Children and adults sat on logs and stumps outside in the Rocky Mountains. Sophie and friends conducted the service and included a reading from an Environment Canada manual, a eulogy, a poem, some silence and some discussion.

And I liked Father Pat O'Byrne who suggested that his friends take a memorial hike after he died. Everyone was invited, via a newspaper, to put on their hiking boots and head to Forget-Me-Not Lake in the Rocky Mountains. At the lakeside, people participated in a memorial worship and prayer.

Best of all, there's the ritual that two children used to remember a bad relationship with an abusive father who died of a heroin overdose. Here is this story in the author's words.

A ritual in memory of a bad relationship

Living in their adoptive home, the twins periodically heard from their birth father. But one day, he went to jail after being charged for armed robbery. He died there of a heroin overdose. The children learned about his death after the funeral. The news began eight months of therapeutic intervention and patience and anger and love.

At the end of eight months, the children and their adoptive parents discussed the possibility of a ritual to mark their father's life and death. Barry's adoptive mother, Mary, said "For Barry it was a major process to work through his feelings about the death ... the ritual marked the closure of this process."

With the help of a minister friend, Karen, the ritual was discussed and planned. Karen asked the children for suggestions about what they might like to do. Barry said he wanted to read the story of David and Goliath from the Bible.

Mary recalls that Karen then asked the children to make a list of both good and bad things they had lost in the death of their birth dad, recognising that some, in the death of this violent and abusive man, would not be missed much. "Barry made his list 'invisible' but said his dad would know what was on it. One thing he did say was that he was sorry his dad never had a chance to fix himself and they never had a chance to be friends."

It was an informal ceremony. Karen talked with the children and said a short prayer. Each child had an opportunity to talk about what they had written. The papers were then burned, followed by the burning of sweet grass as a sign of healing, cleansing and letting go. (This ritual is part of the children's Native heritage and one with which the children were familiar.)

"Barry then read David and Goliath, from a Bible storybook which he had long treasured," Mary says. "He prefaced the story by saying that the reason it was important was because it showed God didn't always choose the big tough guys to do God's work. Sometimes little kids were important. (The story behind this was that Barry had on one occasion tried to stop his dad from beating his mother. Unlike David, he did not prevail against this giant.) We closed with another prayer, and then went to visit the grave.

"In many ways the biggest part of the ritual was getting there - the preparation the children did in order even to reach the point of being able to acknowledge the death and move on, the preparation and discussion of what we would do, and the walk through the cemetery to the grave site. I remember Barry walked both ways alone, at some distance from the rest of us, and returned to the group very peaceful. We went for ice cream before returning home.

"It took a long time for Barry especially to be able to ritualise the event - that's the biggest learning for me out of all this, I think, that the ritual marked a point of letting go, and that it could not have happened at the time of the death itself."

Although this ritual was designed for specific children, it could certainly be adapted for any of us who find ourselves in a similar situation.

Ethical Wills

The following possible contents for such a Will are only suggestions to get people thinking of their own personal messages: