Handling the Hard Cases

For all the good things we can do for families in the hard cases, we can do just as many bad things — and that’s the challenge.
Roger F. Miller

It was the kind of situation that gives clergy tremors.

A local funeral director called me to arrange a graveside committal service for a former resident of our community. I didn’t know the person. He had been living halfway across the state for many years but had relatives still in town who were marginally connected with our church.

“The service will be simple,” the funeral director said. “Just some Scripture readings, words of committal, and a prayer. Only the immediate family and a few old friends will be at the cemetery.”

The wind at the cemetery whipped the trees and tested the ropes securing the burial canopy. Topsoil from the plowed field adjacent to the graveyard blew into our hair and the creases of our clothing as we waited for the hearse and the cars carrying the family.

The appointed hour came and went. No body, no family, no motorcade — but people, lots of them! The “few old friends” that began gathering ten minutes before we were due to start had swelled to a crowd of over a hundred. One person said to me, “I’m so glad they’re having a funeral service here. I wasn’t able to see the family earlier.” Suddenly the brief committal service I had prepared seemed woefully inadequate.

I also noticed many of these so-called old friends weren’t so old. In fact, they were nearly all in their thirties or early forties. Through some delicate conversation with one of them, I discovered they were contemporaries of the deceased. This is no old man at the end of his natural life! I thought.

Pulling the funeral director aside and whispering as quietly as I could, I began a vigorous interrogation. Why hadn’t he told me a large crowd would be showing up expecting a full funeral? Why didn’t he tell me the deceased had been in the prime of life? What other little surprises awaited me?

“I wasn’t in charge of the original arrangements,” he protested, “just the burial. I’m as off balance from this as you are.” I had worked with this funeral director enough to know he was sincere, but our mutual ignorance was little comfort.

Just then the procession of vehicles made its way through the cemetery gates, nearly an hour late. As the hearse and family cars moved between the rows of markers, I asked the deceased’s aunt, standing next to me, what had happened to this young man. Over the howl of the wind, she replied, “He shot himself.”

Out went the funeral service I had been mentally preparing to replace the original committal service. As the cars came closer, I worked feverishly to formulate a service that would speak specifically to the people affected by this man’s death and the circumstances surrounding it.

The man’s widow, her parents, and in-laws got out of the cars, and I could see their grief was intense. As I greeted the family, I quickly picked up that their grief was compounded by guilt, so common among the survivors of a suicide. The funeral director opened the casket (apparently the man had shot himself in the chest), and those present filed by to see him lying there, a bottle of his wife’s perfume in one hand and a bottle of something else in the other. I did not doubt this impromptu funeral would be the toughest I had ever done.

What Makes Hard Cases Hard

In over a decade of pastoral ministry, I have officiated at nearly three hundred funeral services. The very first was for a young woman killed in a car wreck on a twisting Kentucky road. Two weeks prior, we had celebrated her graduation from high school. Two of the more recent services I’ve had were for an elderly lady, also the victim of a car accident, and her husband. The husband had been driving the car in which she had sustained her fatal injuries. A combination of guilt over the accident — he was at fault — and the feeling he couldn’t live without her led the man to borrow a neighbor’s car keys on the pretext of running an errand, get in the car, turn on the ignition, and poison himself with carbon monoxide. It’s natural, I suppose, but of all the funeral services I’ve performed, the ones I remember most are the “hard cases.”

Death comes through many doors. For some, it slips through the door marked “merciful healer” and liberates a person from pain, illness, and a worn-out body. In these cases, death makes sense; it’s easy to see how death fits naturally into the cycle of life. Any death certainly produces grief in those who survive. A natural death following a long, full life, however, tempers grief’s pain with the achievement of a life well lived and a smooth transition from one life to another.

Then there are times when death bursts through the door marked “obscene intruder.” It comes as a vicious thief who robs the victim and family of health, happiness, and much of the abundant life Christ taught was God’s intention. These deaths are untimely — suicides, accidents, murders, terminal illnesses, or stillbirths. These deaths take babies, children, young adults, and those in middle age. These deaths make no sense; they frustrate any attempts to provide tidy answers when hurting people ask why? These are the hard cases.

I remember the funeral I did for a young man who seemed to have everything going for him — he was an accomplished professional chef, he had a good marriage, and he was expecting a baby soon. However, like Richard Corey in Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem, this outwardly successful man had found something in himself with which he could not live. One fall evening he took his brother’s deer rifle to a tree stand outside of town and shot himself. As it happened, the brother who owned the rifle arrived at the scene just in time to hear the gunshot.

Funerals for suicides are difficult not only because of the grief heavily laced with guilt but because of the societal and ecclesiastical attitudes toward death by one’s own hand. How are we to handle the funeral of a suicide if we are taught — and believe — that to kill oneself is sin?

Deaths by automobile accidents are difficult because they are untimely. Often a sense of unfairness shackles the loved ones. The bitterness was almost palpable at the funeral service of a popular young police officer from our town who was killed one summer night when his car flipped and hit a telephone pole. Because the officer was so well liked, the funeral was huge, and as I talked to people at the service, I detected less an asking of why it happened than a basic rage that it did.

Increasingly we give pastoral care to families of people who have succumbed to aids. From the most recent information, aids will continue to claim many lives. Since most victims of aids are homosexual males, at these funerals we encounter deep negative feelings toward the homosexual lifestyle. Add to this the fear aids has caused among the general population and the double burden parents often carry, adjusting not only to the death of a child but also to the newfound knowledge of his sexual orientation, and the combination makes for a truly hard case. In the one aids-related funeral situation I’ve been in, I did as much counseling with the parents regarding homosexuality as over the death of their son.

Funerals for babies and children confront us most graphically with unfulfilled dreams, dashed hopes, and unrequited love. I started 1985 with the funeral of a stillborn infant delivered New Year’s Day. It was a terrible despair I felt as I stood at the podium next to a tiny white casket and tried to comfort a desolated family. I thought of my own two children and how I would feel if one of them died.

The Challenge of the Hard Cases

Few ministerial duties provide as great a challenge and opportunity as these funerals. In a hard case, the funeral becomes more than a ritualized leave-taking from the deceased. When done effectively, the bereaved can experience firsthand a sense of God’s care and concern. This caring cuts through the worst pain and provides the strength to withstand it. People can feel free to be angry with God, secure in the knowledge their anger will not drive God away. They can express their feelings, knowing they will survive the pain. Ultimately, those who go through the most difficult grief experiences may emerge stronger in their faith with the aid of good pastoral care. That is, of course, if we do our job well.

For all the good things we can do for families in the hard cases, we can do just as many bad — and that’s the challenge. Poorly given, ministry can have a definite counterproductive effect on those in grief, actually damaging the emotions and spirit. The bereaved may feel estranged from God and the church family just when closeness and nurture is needed most. When grieving people perceive any insincerity on the part of the pastor, they tend to think, The minister doesn’t care; God must not either. The grief process may thus be arrested for a considerable length of time. Symptoms of grief such as anger, guilt, and a sense of loneliness may be intensified.

Not long ago the director of our community mental health agency asked me to talk with a young staff member whose father had died two months previously. She told me that in reaction to his grief he was making work difficult for clients and the rest of the staff. I talked with the young man and found he was distressed about the anger he was venting on everyone. He revealed that the minister who served the family during his father’s illness and funeral seemed more concerned about the details of the will and the settlement of the estate than about the pain of the family members. No doubt this young man was angry about other things as well, but his anger increased as he perceived the awkward ministry to the family as a lack of caring.

What to Avoid

In difficult funerals, what is most effective becomes clear when we consider what should be avoided.

Don’t be the “answer man.” A mystique surrounds our work, much as in the field of medicine. We spend years of preparation and more years of practice to answer life’s most basic and imponderable questions.

It feels good to have people seek us out for answers. When we are confronted with a hard case, however, there are no easy answers. Nothing we can say or do will bring back a dead son or reverse a car accident. No answer we give will make a suicide easy to think about.

Recently I read a sermon a fellow minister had delivered at the funeral of an aids victim. The thrust of the message was that this untimely and tragic death was perfectly understandable — it was God’s punishment for the victim’s lifestyle. I wondered: Was this “answer” to the question of why this young man had to die really helpful to the family and friends left behind?

We must rid ourselves of the notion we can fix painful situaations by providing answers to questions that are unanswerable.

Don’t treat this as “just part of my job.” Some time ago I sat with the family of a dying woman. Prior to our hurried summons to the hospital, she had been proceeding along a normal postoperative course of recovery. Her vital signs looked fine. Then a weak spot in her aorta ruptured. There was nothing anyone could do. As her blood pressure dropped dramatically and her pulse faded, her family and I sat silently together in the waiting room, bound to one another by our feelings of shock and helplessness.

With us sat another minister, pastor of the church where one of the woman’s daughters attended. I had called him at the daughter’s request so he could lend emotional and spiritual support to her. What he did instead was fidget in his chair and glance frequently at his wrist watch. When the woman finally died and the daughter, disgusted despite her grief, told the minister he could leave, the clergyman compounded his mistake by offering to stay longer. The daughter icily informed him that wouldn’t be necessary. It was a long time before that woman went back to church.

I don’t believe the minister acted as he did because he didn’t care. Rather, I believe he behaved that way because he was feeling as uncomfortable as the rest of us. It would have been far better to acknowledge his discomfort at the outset and let the rest of us support him while he supported us at the same time. He certainly should have refrained from the false offer of further assistance, which came off sounding forced.

At the funeral, don’t give a canned presentation. Recently I took an informal survey of the funeral directors in my area to check their perceptions of clergy effectiveness in problem funeral situations. Their responses were discouraging, to say the least.

One funeral director told me, “It seems as if most of the ministers come in with a service that’s cut-and-dried no matter what the cause of death. For every service they use the same Bible passages, the same prayers, and the same messages. It’s almost as if they don’t care.” Virtually all the other funeral directors echoed the sentiment.

This disturbs me. If the funeral directors are sensing a lack of caring on the part of the clergy, what must the families be feeling? Do they think we are there just to perform a perfunctory service, an empty ritual? Since feelings are magnified by grief’s pain, I wonder if the people who need us most, those in the hard cases, feel angrier, guiltier, and lonelier for our having been a part of the process.

I sat through the funeral of a suicide victim in which the minister made no mention of the suicide and said the name of the deceased only once. The rest of the service was read out of a book. I felt as if I had been led to the table but denied permission to eat. It’s true that different medicines work for different ailments, and no one drug can cure every sickness. It is no less true that a canned funeral service that takes no consideration of the unique circumstances of the death will seldom be helpful to people hurting in a hard case.

I believe we resort to canned services because of our discomfort; the prepared, impersonal service appears an easy way out of the situation. We become far more effective in handling the hard cases when we allow ourselves to grieve along with the bereaved. The best thing we can do as we prepare for each difficult funeral service is to ask ourselves what it is that gives us the most courage and strength, given the way we feel about the situation. It is as true in ministry as in anything else: we work best with what we know and have ourselves experienced.

What We Can Do

So what can we do?

The funeral service is the place where we can define the boundaries of grief. We acknowledge the loss of the deceased, we recognize the feelings we experience as a result of the loss, and we offer hope that this most terrible time will pass and we will be able to affirm life as good once again. With that in mind, there are several things we can do.

Tailor the service to the family at hand. The message that worked for the loved ones of the “church grandpa” will be ineffective for the family of the child who succumbed to leukemia. When preparing the service, I try to keep the family and circumstances in mind. If possible, I get to know something about the deceased and his or her family prior to the service. How the person died will, more than anything, determine the cut of the funeral service as I tailor it to the needs of those attending.

Mention the cause of death. Earlier I wrote of the services I did for the woman who died in the car accident and her husband who committed suicide as a result. As I began the second service, I said something like this:

“Ten days ago, we gathered here to receive God’s strength and comfort as we acknowledged the loss of Betty Wilson. Her death in an accident left us shocked and hurting. No one felt the pain and shock more than her devoted husband, Hank, and so, tragically, three days ago, Hank ended his own life near his home.”

With that opening statement, I immediately established the unusual circumstances that brought us together. It frustrates a family when a pastor talks all around the cause of death without addressing it directly. In some cases, the circumstances will be obvious, as in the death of a child. In other cases, however, part of our effectiveness lies in enabling the survivors to admit “John was killed in a car wreck” or “John was murdered,” or even “John killed himself.” Mentioning the cause of death gives everyone present the chance to start recovering from grief from a more-or-less common starting point.

Of course, I need to exercise sensitivity and care, and discuss plans with the family ahead of time. In the case of the man who committed suicide, I checked with immediate family members before saying anything publicly. Since the circumstances of his death were common knowledge anyway, they felt it would be most appropriate to acknowledge the suicide. Given strong emotional attachments to concepts like suicide and aids, it is essential we discover the most tactful yet honest way to present the cause of death. In the case of the aids victim, I obtained the consent of the family before reading as a part of the obituary that he had died of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (that was honest, yet not so scary sounding as aids).

Acknowledge this is an abnormal time. This helps the survivors place their unpleasant feelings into perspective. Often, a grieving person will feel as if he or she is losing touch with reality. Time and again I’ve had surviving spouses tell me, “I feel like I’m losing my mind. I won’t be able to function normally ever again. I can’t think straight and I can’t remember a single thing.”

Our honest acknowledgment can help the bereaved see this is something we do not normally encounter; it is a time for unusual feelings and reactions. There is good reason to feel spiritually and emotionally out of kilter when one we’ve known and loved dies suddenly and tragically.

This acknowledgment offers, too, the hope that feelings will return to normal once the worst of the grief is overcome. That in itself can be a great comfort to people who are thrown into a spiritual vertigo by a tragic death.

Allow for honest ventilation of feelings. The death of my father in 1981 was a pivotal experience in both my life and ministry. Dad died at the age of fifty-five from lung cancer. At my own request, I co-officiated at the burial service. When I made that arrangement, I had no idea how difficult the service would be. I stood at the grave facing my family and friends and invited them to share my feelings, feelings like the writer of Lamentations when he wrote:

I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of his wrath; he has driven and brought me into darkness without any light; surely against me he turns his hand again and again the whole day long. He has made my flesh and my skin waste away, and broken my bones; he has besieged and enveloped me with bitterness and tribulation; he has made me dwell in darkness like the dead of long ago. He has walled me about so that I cannot escape; he has put heavy chains on me; though I call and cry for help, he shuts out my prayer; he has blocked my ways with hewn stones … my soul is bereft of peace, I have forgotten what happiness is.…” (Lam. 3:1-9, 17-18

In the case of a murder, suicide, child death, or other difficult situation, certainly there should be anger. Often guilt or other feelings will manifest themselves. By reminding people these are a sign neither of mental instability nor a lack of faith, we can provide a place from which the bereaved can begin working back to where things are normal and life is good.

Emphasize God’s presence. Even though grieving people may be angry at God to the point of rage, God’s love is still important to them. The effective pastor is the one who can help the bereaved through Scripture, prayer, and message to know that God is present, not as the oppressor but as the comforter on the side of the oppressed. While we may not know why a fatal accident happened, or why a child contracted leukemia or a woman killed herself, we do know that God is present and on our side.

In addition to lifting up God’s presence through the promises of Scripture, we may also point to God’s presence as we find it in caring family members and friends. I have seen friends surround widows and others at the cemetery and infuse those hurting people with their strength through touches, hugs, firm clasps of the hand, and other expressions of caring. This is the most effective thing I’ve found to pass along to family members and friends of hard cases.

As pastors, we are physicians of the spirit. We bring talents, training, and special gifts to the hard grief cases just as doctors take their talents and skills into difficult medical cases. An openness to the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the sensitive use of the pastoral skills we possess, and a willingness to share the grief journey of those we serve can place us in partnership with God — who truly brings forth miracles in the hard cases.