I have absolutely no idea how I stumbled over the Secular Celebrations & Humanist Ceremonies website, but I did. It is open on a tab in my browser and I have no idea why, but maybe that’s a good thing.

I remember planning for my mother’s funeral, which was held in the Episcopalian church she had started going to after her diagnosis of cancer. So, it was ostensibly religious, what with being held in the chapel and the celebrant being the priest and all.

I didn’t think of it as religious, though, and I think that kind of showed. :/

In planning it, I wanted myself and at least two of her siblings to talk about her during the service, which seemed to throw the priest a little. I was surprised by the priest’s determination to include a small sermon. I wanted happy gospel music; I got a lethargic organ player. A funeral home was not involved at all because no one had told me they should be (I picked up mother’s ashes and never actually had a conversation with anyone there). As with most of my parents’ end of life experiences, I was totally unprepared and woefully incompetent.

Unlike the priest or the deacon or my father or, probably, most everyone else in attendance, it did not occur to me that this was supposed to be religious ceremony. Your reply to this should be, “But KimBoo! Were you not an official lay minister of the Episcopal Church at that time? How could you NOT know a funeral is supposed to be religious in nature?”

To which I can say I don’t have a very good answer. I think it goes back to my wiring: I don’t have any emotional impulse towards the supernatural, much less religion, so it did not register as relevant. I had become a lay minister mostly out of a sense of curiosity (a whole ‘nother post) so…yeah, me: oblivious.

Of course, I’m not sure what could have been done differently. With no real “adult” figures in my life (my role with my parents having permanently reversed itself not long after I  moved home) other than relatives whom I kept at a distance and some “church friends” who didn’t really know me very well at all, I was in a position of making it all up as I went along. This was in the mid 1990s, and “googling” was not something people did. Either someone told you what needed to be done, or you went to the library and read up on it.

And while I went to the library regularly, for some reason it simply NEVER occurred to me to read up on funerals.

But these days, information is everywhere. Whatever I googled to put the Secular Celebrations & Humanist Ceremonies website in my browser was enough to get me pointed towards numerous resources on creating, participating in and attending secular funerals. It’s wonderful.

I wonder at whether I would have been more inclined to hold a funeral service for Poppa if Mother’s had not been such an emotional cluster fuck of confusion and mis-matched objectives…