That's interesting. A friend of mine's dad died about 5 years ago now, very suddenly. She was at work when she heard (we worked in the same department) and she just dashed off when she got the phone call, but called me a couple of hours later to ask me to let her manager know why she'd disappeared and what was happening. I remember phoning her just before the funeral and she was saying she was really nervous because her dad was a humanist (I'd no idea what that even was until I looked it up -
here) and he'd said he wanted a humanist funeral. Of course a lot of the family wanted the full church funeral and everything, but his wife and daughter, my friend stuck to their guns and said they were going to do it the way he'd wanted. Afterwards though she said it had been really nice, and not like the typical funeral service at all, and she was glad they'd done what her dad wanted.
Last year I went to two funerals. The first was that of a close friend who'd had breast cancer. It was particularly difficult because my mum was diagnosed with breast cancer 8 years ago, and my mum and I actually met Andrea at one of my mum's hospital appointments. It ended up with a whole gang of us who we met up with at the hospital originally meeting up every Friday morning for coffee, and those of us left still carry on the tradition, though sadly three of the group have died over the past couple of years. Andrea's funeral though particularly upset me because she was never religious at all - hated religion! (I agree with her on that one!) Her husband though insisted on having the full religious ceremony, and I was doing quite well at the funeral though I was off work ill at the time and feeling pretty crap anyway, until they started on with the readings, and there was one particular one where it was something about god talking her under his wing and caring for her for all eternity, and it was at that point I just lost it. She would have hated that. She didn't believe in anything like that, and I just felt it was so wrong. I was upset because she'd died, but at the time I was also very angry that they'd gone completely against her wishes, and it felt like betraying her.
Later in the year when my grandma died, similarly it was the full religious ceremony, but in her case, she did believe in all that. She would have loved it! Though I knew she believed, I never have done, but if anything it made me feel worse. I guess it was mainly the fact that she'd been seriously ill for a long time, and ended up living with us until the day she died, and it really wasn't a good way to go. The night she died, I had nightmares though about these winged creatures, and though I've never believed in anything like that, I just got the sense that she wasn't at rest. The religion of the funeral just brought all that back.
I guess it's in a way a tricky question of who a funeral's for - whether it's for the person who's died, or for those who are left behind. Some people see it as a celebration of the person's life, others as mourning of their passing. I guess there's no easy answer - funerals are rarely pleasant events, and always highly emotionally charged.