In 2016 my grandmother died and I never went to her funeral. I probably didn’t cry as much as I should have and I didn’t even attend the spreading of her ashes. Does that make me fucked up? No, well yes, but that’s another story… I just found out that apparently, I’m not the only one who feels weird about funerals.
A survey conducted by Royal London and featured on Refinery29 found that one-third of adults between the ages of 18 and 34 would have no problem “attending” a ceremony virtually, compared with just 23 percent of those between the ages of 35 and 54.
Do we (a.k.a people from aged 18-35) prefer a virtual computer funeral because we don’t want to be at a real one? What is it about being physically at a funeral vs virtually that makes it so different. Reality. Virtual funerals filter the real from the fake. We feel separated, maybe we even think to ourselves “I’m not there so it can’t really be happening”. We suppress the feeling of sadness with fake happiness.
I understand that attending virtual funerals and not attending a funeral are two different things but maybe they come from the same root issue.
We avoid our problems!
Being sad sucks, like a lot. So rather than deal with our problems, I personally, would much rather suppress those and be happy today. (I hope that you know that this is very very unhealthy). When we suppress our feelings we aren’t facing them. We aren’t even forgetting them, we are just keeping them at the back of our heart rather than the forefront of our heart. That is possibly worse than dealing with our problems in the beginning. So, yeah it has been 3 years since my grandmother died and now I cry about it. I’ll see the jewelry she gave me of hers and cry or hear her laugh and have a panic attack. And it sucks more than just going to her funeral and crying then. Getting all of that sadness and anxiety out then. Mourning at that moment rather than having flashes of mourning throughout the entirety of my life.
But death isn’t the only thing we suppress. Luckily we suppress a whole lot of other shit too! Abuse, heartbreak, panic attacks, depression, anxiety, etc. I guess my only advice is to deal with things as they come. They happened at that moment for a reason and we need to deal with them at that moment. Talk about it, find communities of people who have gone through those things, therapy, your parents, friends, anyone and anything. Trauma catches up with us and we need to follow its path before it suffocates us entirely.