Four Funerals and an Autist
Four Funerals and an Autist
I understand intellectually that funerals are a social ritual and that they are not about relaying factual information. Nonetheless, it is always a struggle for me, while attending a funeral, to process what it is that neurotypical people want from a funeral versus what I want and how to avoid disrupting what everyone else seems to think is a normal way of talking about a person who has died while also processing my own complicated grief.
The first funeral I attended as a child was my grandmother’s. I was a preteen, and I had a cold. Because of my cold, I sniffled and wiped my nose rather loudly throughout the funeral. This caused a number of people, including my father, to pat my shoulder and tell me a variation of, “It’s OK, dear” and “You loved her very much and that is sweet.” In fact, I had very few memories of my grandmother before she had dementia and wasn’t crying because I was sad about her death. My real experience of the funeral was mostly boredom and frustration that I had to sit and listen to people talk about someone I had never known amidst a group of people I also didn’t know and who liked to say my name and touch me. I suspect many autistic children (and plenty of adults) have this experience with funerals.
The second funeral I’ll talk about is my father’s funeral, some decades later. I had a difficult relationship with my father. I suspect he was an undiagnosed autistic man who managed to live a relatively normal life because he loved computers and had a strict religious upbringing, both of which masked his autism — even to himself. My father had been physically abusive in my childhood and teen years and had never acknowledged or apologized for this behavior and had continued to act in manipulative ways even into my adulthood. I was frustrated again at the funeral, where there was almost no calling out of his bad behavior, just a lot of platitudes about a handful of good things he had done. I narrowly avoided shouting out, “That’s a lie!” at a few moments. There were many people at the funeral who seemed to enjoy the recitation of good things about my father, factual or not, and I was left feeling confused. I didn’t feel as if the funeral helped me process my complicated grief; rather the reverse.
The third funeral was for a man who was a writing mentor, a relative, a friend, and also someone whose halo had been deeply dented by the realization that he had harmed people I loved by his . This funeral was, like my father’s, full of all the good things he had done (which were true to some degree) and not a word about anything bad he’d done. Again, I felt confused by those who would want a funeral to be a distorted view of the dead person rather than a more balanced picture. I am still frankly confused by this. No one wants a list of good and bad balanced against each other? Just me? OK, I guess I’m going to either have to stop going to funerals or learn to just not expect reality here. It still doesn’t help me process death to be offered up a rosy picture of someone that is close to what I would see as a lie.
The fourth funeral was for a friend who had completed suicide. At the time, I wanted there to be discussion about this reality, possibly a discussion about why someone would die in this way, how to stop it in the future. You see the problem? I keep wanting my funerals to be mostly informational, and they never, never are. They are always rituals that seem to help only neurotypical people deal with saying goodbye to someone they only want to remember the good parts of. They involve a lot of weeping, which is to be expected, and little about reality or balance or how to deal with the bad parts of a person. Do other people simply let this go or process it later? I’m still confused.
I’ve ended up concluding that funerals are not for me at all. They are a required social event where I am not supposed to speak any truths or facts and where I am simply supposed to assent to distorted views of the dead. Crying is encouraged, even if it is not real. It is like a play where I am playing a part of a grieving person. But all the real grieving, for me, at least, will happen privately. All the processing will happen either privately or with a therapist. The show is a social spectacle that will probably never make sense to me.