Dear Hope: How can I memorialize my loved one when a traditional funeral doesn’t feel right?

Dear Hope, How can I memorialize my loved one when a traditional funeral doesn’t feel right?

There’s this moment after someone dies where everything goes strangely quiet. The world has stopped spinning and life feels like it’s paused. Your heart is numb and raw. People bring food. Someone prints a program. The funeral home hands you a list of options like you’re picking out paint samples in an aisle at a home improvement store. 

And you just stand there. 

Heart cracked open, hands shaking, life as you know it changed forever. 

What kind of flowers?

What kind of casket?

What kind of music?

As if any of that could possibly capture the tornado of love and pain ripping through your chest. No time to stop. To think. To wonder what they want and what you want and how in the world you are going to get through this. 

Funerals are supposed to be the thing that helps. 

They’re meant to be the sacred pause. The ritual. 

A place to gather, to say the impossible out loud: they’re gone. 

And for some people, they work. They soothe. They hold them just as they need to held. 

But maybe they don’t do that for you. 

Maybe, for you, the funeral felt like watching someone else’s movie. Maybe it felt too clean. Too rehearsed. Too damn quiet for the person that died. 

It might not have been the holy, “normal” goodbye – it was just a few rows of chairs, some bad casserole while strangers sniffled politely giving their condolences. All while you clenched your jaw- to keep from screaming. 

If the funeral didn’t help, or didn’t feel right, I want you to hear this:

You’re not grieving wrong. The funeral just wasn’t made for you. And you can still choose another way.

Grief doesn’t come with a program. 

If doesn’t ask for an RSVP.

It crashes in and demands something real. And sometimes real is a party. Like an all-out, blasting music, eating their favorite take-out party. Or it’s a small dinner with close friends. Or keeping their hoodie unwashed ‘cause it smells like them. Or getting a tattoo. Or going on that trip you two always talked about. 

Sometimes it’s nothing at all. Just surviving. Waking up. Breathing. That counts too.

You don’t have to memorialize your loved one in a way that makes other people feel comfortable. You don’t have to fit your grief inside a pew or dress it up in lace and platitudes. 

You can build your own ritual. One that holds the shape of your love. One that speaks their name in the way only you can. One that honors them the way you know they would want to be honored. 

Forget what the world has told you it needs to be. You knew them best. You loved the hardest. You can decide how to honor that.