Maybe a unpopular opinion these days, but ceremonies are important to me.
When I was planning my wedding, I noticed a trend of people wanting the least ceremony or shortest ceremony possible. Get the vows over and done with and then focus all the planning on the reception. I enjoy attending weddings like that, but for me, the wedding ceremony was the most important part. I wanted every detail of it to be meaningful and personal. It was about 35 minutes long, which I don’t think of as insanely long, but it wasn’t just the bare bones, either.
I did maybe feel a little guilt about that because the prevailing attitude I’ve heard from many other couples is that they don’t want ‘all the fuss’ over them or people to have to sit and pay attention to a boring long ceremony. I think ceremonies are seen as old-fashioned.
I’ve also heard similar attitudes about funerals. “I don’t want anyone to make a fuss over me. Just put me in a box. Just donate me to science. I don’t want anyone spending time crying over me. Why would I want a big ceremony? I’m dead.”
I totally think that both weddings and funerals are industries with hyper-inflated pricing and with too many cultural expectations to spend a ton of money. But for me, the areas that feel excessive to me aren’t in the ceremonies themselves.
I’m someone who deals weirdly with change sometimes. When my family moved from the house I lived in for 17 years growing up, it was a difficult adjustment for me. Starting college was a difficult adjustment for me. Moving out of my parents’ house for good was a hard transition, too, even though I was really excited about it. I had trouble sleeping for months. Heck, even closing night of a show I’ve been rehearsing for months tends to be hard on me. And I’ve noticed that when big life changes happen to me, sometimes it takes a long time to fully accept them. I’ll wake up thinking I’m in a different home, or I’ll think about getting in touch with someone only to remember they’re no longer alive.
I did not have that problem with the transition to being married because there was so much time dealing with the preparations, planning, and ceremony that I felt very present that day and had fully absorbed what this next step in my life would mean to me.
To me, even if you don’t have a religious tradition you practice, ceremonies are a way to make sure you stay present in the moment and absorb its meaning, which is helpful to me as someone who’s often kind of zoned out and thinking about a zillion things at once. They’re a way to officially mark life changes, a pre-determined turning point. They mean you’re sharing the same experience with many other people rather than just coming to terms with it on its own. Weddings help you re-conceptualize a person or people you know as part of a new family. Funerals help you re-conceptualize a person you know as having moved on from the world. Heck, even the weird little rituals surrounding midnight on New Year’s are a way to refocus and conceptualize the year ahead.
My favorite YouTube channel is Ask a Mortician. I think the host of the channel, who is a big advocate for personal choice surrounding death and what happens to our bodies after death, is a really inspiring personality and someone who’s made me think a lot more deeply about some of the big transitions that are generally seen as the biggest and scariest of all: end of life. Watching her videos while planning my wedding WHILE during a pandemic definitely made me think about the Other Major Ceremony, not in an anxious and foreboding way but in a thoughtful way.
When I do die, I do want a funeral. I do want a ceremony. I want people to be able to have a shared space to process their feelings. I want people to gather and take time to think about my life and think about what things will look like moving forward. I personally want people to have allotted time set aside to accept and understand that I am not around anymore instead of trying to do that by themselves. I don’t think it needs to be expensive or lavish, and I don’t want a lot of money spent on it, but I do want some time spent on it.
I have no problem with people who don’t need ceremonies to process these things. I think that’s cool and great. But I just wanted to speak up for those of us who do appreciate ceremony as a sort of shared ritual to process transitions. I don’t think you’re boring or self-indulgent or overly superstitious if those things are meaningful to you. There are DOZENS of us!
