Death and funerals bring out the best and the worst in people
Death and funerals bring out the best and the worst in people. The moment death enters a room; it strips away the social varnish. Whatever was already in a person, love, fear, resentment, generosity, unfinished business, rises to the surface with almost chemical purity. The same is true for the living who gather around them. Death is a solvent. It dissolves pretense. Death doesn’t create character, it reveals it.
Having attended the bedside of many souls at the moment of crossing, I have witnessed literal fist fights over the body of the deceased and conversely those who have danced, laughed, and sung in celebration as the shared road of suffering comes to an end. Families who have been holding vigil for months finally breathe again and those who have been sitting in a stew of past resentments coalesce into a seething open wound.
In the aftermath of the crossing battlelines get drawn. Families and relationships unite or fracture, sometimes both. The crossing doesn’t just end a life; it reorganizes the living.
When someone dies, the living often fracture into roles:
The Protector - tries to control everything to avoid feeling anything
The Historian - clings to the past as if it’s the only thing left
The Outsider - suddenly becomes central or suddenly becomes erased
The Accuser - channels grief into blame
The Avoider - disappears emotionally or physically
The Peacemaker - tries to hold the center that the deceased once held
I could write an entire book about the dynamics of post death physics and what it does to families. It’s not about being morbid, it’s about understanding what we are holding at the human level. The moment of death is a catalyst, not a conclusion. It reveals the architecture of a family’s soul.
People don’t understand what they’re carrying like, the weight of unspoken resentment, the burden of being the “responsible one”, the guilt of not being present, the shame of being relieved, and the confusion of conflicting emotions.
I have heard stories about secret family members (or families), stolen belongings, affairs, even murders. The death of the anchor releases all vows of silence, and the containment field created to house the secret identities and protect the innocent.
I avoid funerals for a number of reasons. For me, funerals are not neutral spaces, they are broadcast chambers like a confessional on a reality TV show. The deceased are commonly present and decide while in a roomful of family members, that they want to speak their peace, illuminate family dramas, and speak the truth of a lifetime hidden into the shadows. Because I can hear them, I become the unintended receiver of all that transmission. Most people at a funeral are dealing with their own grief. I’m dealing with everyone’s.
Funerals, or as they are more commonly known “Celebration of Life” is rarely a celebration, it’s a curated mythology. They are rituals of narrative, ceremonies in which the living gather to construct a version of the departed they can bear to hold. In the hours and days after a crossing, the truth of a life becomes too heavy, too complex, too contradictory to carry raw. Families reach instinctively for mythology.
The story is as ancient as time itself. Long before funeral homes, before eulogies, before floral arrangements and slideshow tributes, humans were carving their mythologies into stone. The landscape of Egypt is littered with monuments to leaders and their greatness, towering pyramids, carved obelisks, walls covered in hieroglyphics that proclaim victory, virtue, and divine favor. Those inscriptions tell only one story; the story the living needed to believe. They say nothing about cruelty, corruption, or the human failings that shaped the ruler’s actual life.
Life is a complex dance, a choreography of relationships, roles, expectations, loyalties, wounds, and unspoken agreements. We move through it with rhythms we inherit, rhythms we resist, rhythms we refine. Every family has its own tempo. Every relationship has its own beat. Every person carries their own internal metronome. Death is the ultimate musical shift. It doesn’t end the dance. It changes the music.
With each crossing a new life, new dance begins. We become the choreographer, composer, and architect of a new self. When a crossing occurs, the dance we have been performing, often unconsciously, often shaped by the expectations of the one who has just left, comes to an end. The music that guided us, constrained us, or comforted us falls silent. In that silence, something extraordinary becomes possible. For the first time, we are no longer dancing to someone else’s tune.
Death knocks the living off balance. Without the loss of balance, without change we would not evolve. Humans do not evolve in comfort; we evolve in disruption. When someone dies, the story we’ve been carrying, about them, about ourselves, about the relationship, about the past, rises to the surface with startling clarity. Death in all its forms, forces the living to confront our stories, resolve our conflicts with grief as a lens.
Death is the great equalizer. It doesn’t matter if you are rich or poor, powerful, or forgotten, adored or despised. It comes for everyone, kings and beggars, saints and skeptics, healers, and destroyers alike.
For the living, death is the great disruptor. It knocks us off balance, dismantles our certainties, and forces us to confront the truth of who we are and what we’ve built. It doesn’t matter how much we own, how much we’ve achieved, or how carefully we’ve constructed our identities, death strips away the scaffolding and leaves us standing in the raw light of transformation.
In its quiet, uncompromising way, death teaches us what life refuses to; that evolution is not optional. That balance is temporary and change is sacred. That love is the only currency that survives the crossing. Because, In the Light, We are All Love