Funeral rites are as old as the human race itself. In the Shanidar cave in Iraq, Neanderthal skeletons have been discovered with a characteristic layer of Pollen, which suggests that Neanderthals buried the dead with gifts of flowers. This has been interpreted as suggesting that Neanderthals believed in an Afterlife, and in any case were aware of their own mortality and were capable of Mourning.
At the viewing, the friends and relations greet the more distant relatives and friends of the dead person(s) in a social gathering with little in the way of ritual. The viewing often takes place on one or two evenings before the funeral.
The only prescribed aspects of this gathering are that frequently the attendees sign a book kept by the deceased's survivors to record who attended and that the attendees are expected to view the deceased's body in the coffin. In addition, a family may choose to display photographs taken of the deceased person during his/her life (often, formal portraits with other family members and candid pictures to show "happy times"), prized possessions and other items representing his/her hobbies and/or accomplishments.
The viewing is either "open casket", in which the embalmed body of the deceased has been clothed and treated with cosmetics for display; or "closed casket", in which the coffin is closed. The coffin may be closed if the body was too badly damaged because of an accident or fire, deformed from illness or if someone in the group is emotionally unable to cope with viewing the corpse. However, this step is foreign to Judaism; Jewish funerals are held soon after death, and the corpse is never displayed. As well, Jewish law forbids anyone to embalm the body of the deceased.
The decedent's closest friends and relatives who are unable to attend frequently send flowers to the viewing, with the exception of a Jewish Funeral, where flowers would not be appropriate. The viewing typically takes place at a Funeral home, which is equipped with gathering rooms where the viewing can be conducted, although the viewing may also take place at a Church. The viewing may end with a prayer service; in the Catholic funeral, this may include a Rosary.
Funeral services include prayers; readings from the Bible or other sacred texts; hymns (sung either by the attendees or a hired vocalist); and words of comfort by the Clergy. Frequently, a relative or close friend will be asked to give a Eulogy, which details happy memories and accomplishments.
Tradition also allows the attendees of the memorial service to have one last opportunity to view the decedent's body and say good-bye; the immediate family (siblings (and their spouses); followed by the decedent's spouse, parents and children) are always the very last to view their loved one before the coffin is closed. This opportunity can take place immediately before the service begins, or at the very end of the service.
Note: In some religious denominations, for example, Roman Catholic and Anglican, eulogies are prohibited or discouraged during this service, in order to preserve respect for traditions.
Sometimes, the burial service will immediately follow the funeral, in which case a funeral procession (the hearse, followed by the immediate family and then the other attendees) travels from the site of the memorial service to the burial site. Other times, the burial service takes place at a later time, when the final resting place is ready.
If the decedent served in a branch of the Armed forces, Military rites are often accorded at the burial service.
In many religious traditions, pallbearers, usually males who are close relatives (such as cousins or grandchildren) or friends of the decedent, will carry the casket from the chapel (of a Funeral home or Church) to the hearse, and from the hearse to the site of the Burial service. The pallbearers often sit in a special reserved section during the memorial service.
According to most religions, coffins are kept closed during the burial ceremony. In Eastern Orthodox funerals, the coffins are reopened just before burial to allow loved ones to look at the deceased one last time and give their final farewells.
For Irish descendants, a wake is often quite extended and may include drinking and singing as it is a type of party to celebrate the persons life, it will often be reffered to as 'waking' the person who has died. An Irish Wake usually lasts 3 full days, afterwards on the 4th day the funeral takes place. Family members and friends will ensure that there is always someone awake with the body, traditionally saying prayers.
Also, etiquette dictates the bereaved and other attendees at a funeral wear semi-formal clothing - such as a suit and tie for men or a dress for women - in a darker color (usually, gray, dark blue or black). Women who are grieving the death of their husband or a close boyfriend sometimes wear a veil to conceal the face, although the veil is not common now.
In some cases (particularly the latter), the family may schedule a public memorial service at a later time.
Most funerals in contemporary Japan are conducted with Buddhist rites. Many feature a ritual that bestows a new Name on the deceased; funerary names typically use obsolete or archaic Kanji and words, to avoid the likelihood of the name being used in ordinary speech or writing. The new names are typically chosen by a buddhist priest, after consulting the family of the deceased. The new name bestowed upon them is the name they will have in the afterlife, where they will train for 49 days to become a disciple of Buddha. Most Japanese are cremated.
In Oriental cultures, the wearing of White is symbolic to death. In these societies, white robes are worn over dark suits and dresses to symbolize that someone had died and can be seen worn among relatives of the deceased during a funeral ceremony. When the coffin is lowered into the ground the mourners will bow their heads and must not watch the coffin being lowered into the ground.
A traditional chinese gift to the grieving is a white envelope usually containing money.
Some funerals in Ghana are held with the deceased put in eleborate "fantasy coffins" colored and shaped after a certain object, such as a fish, crab, boat, and even an airplane.
The place of burial amongst the Jews was never particularly determined. We find that they had burial-places upon the highways, in gardens, and upon mountains. We read, that Abraham was buried with Sarah, his wife, in the cave of Macphelah, in the field of Ephron, and Uzziah, King of Judah, slept with his fathers in the field of the burial which pertained to the kings.
The primitive Greeks were buried in places prepared for that purpose in their own houses; but later they established burial grounds in desert islands, and outside the walls of towns, by that means securing them from disturbance, and themselves from the liability of catching infection from those who had died of contagious disorders.
Funerals of the socially prominent were usually undertaken by professional undertakers called libitinarii. No direct description has been passed down of Roman funeral rites. These rites usually included a public procession to the tomb or pyre where the body was to be cremated. The most noteworthy thing about this procession was that the survivors bore masks bearing the images of the family's deceased ancestors. The right to carry the masks in public was eventually restricted to families prominent enough to have held curule magistracies. Mimes, dancers, and musicians hired by the undertakers, as well as professional female mourners, took part in these processions. Less well to do Romans could join benevolent funerary societies (collegia funeraticia) who undertook these rites on their behalf.
Nine days after the disposal of the body, by burial or cremation, a feast was given (cena novendialis) and a libation poured over the grave or the ashes. Since most Romans were cremated, the ashes were typically collected in an urn and placed in a niche in a collective tomb called a columbarium (literally, "Dovecote"). During this nine day period, the house was considered to be tainted, funesta, and was hung with Yew or cypress branches to warn bypassers. At the end of the period, the house was swept in an attempt to purge it of the dead person's Ghost.
Several Roman holidays commemmorated a family's dead ancestors, including the Parentalia, held February 13 through 21, to honour the family's ancestors; and the Lemuria, held on May 9, 11, and 13, in which ghosts (larvæ) were feared to be active, and the pater familias sought to appease them with offerings of beans.
The Romans prohibited burning or burying in the city, both from a sacred and civil consideration, so that the priests might not be contaminated by touching a dead body, and so that houses would not be endangered by funeral fires.
The Romans commonly built tombs for themselves during their lifetime. Hence these words frequently occur in ancient inscriptions, V.F. Vivus Facit, V.S.P. Vivus Sibi Posuit. The tombs of the rich were usually constructed of marble, the ground enclosed with walls, and planted round with trees. But common sepulchres were usually built below ground, and called hypogea. There were niches cut out of the walls, in which the urns were placed; these, from their resemblance to the niche of a pigeon-house, were called columbaria.
Burial was not always permanent. In some areas, burial grounds needed to be re-used because of limited space. In these areas, once the dead have decomposed to skeletons, the bones are removed; after their removal they can be placed in an Ossuary.
"Burial at sea" means the deliberate disposal of a corpse into the Ocean, wrapped and tied with weights to make sure it sinks. It is a common practice in navies and sea-faring nations; in the Church of England, special forms of funeral service were added to the Book of Common Prayer to cover it. Science fiction writers have frequently analogized with "Burial in space".
Cremation, also, is an old custom; it was the usual mode of disposing of a corpse in ancient Rome. Vikings were occasionally cremated in their longships, and afterwards the location of the site was marked with standing stones. In recent years, despite the objections of some religious groups, cremation has become more and more widely used. Orthodox Judaism and the Eastern Orthodox Church forbid cremation, as do most Muslims. Orthodox Judaism forbids cremation according to Jewish law (Halakha) believing that the soul of a cremated person cannot find its final repose. The Roman Catholic Church forbade it for many years. But since 1963 the church has allowed it so long as it is not done to express disbelief in bodily resurrection. The church specifies that cremated remains are either buried or entombed. They do not allow cremated remains to be scattered or kept at home. Many Catholic cemeteries now have columbarium niches for cremated remains, or specific sections for those remains. Some denominations of Protestantism allow cremation, the more conservative denominations generally do not.
Hindus and Buddhists nearly always cremate their dead. Hindus bury their dead in the case of young children, and after mass disasters when there is not enough time or cremation fire-fuel available such as after the industrial gas escape disaster at Bhopal and the 26 December 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami disaster.
Recently a new method of disposing of the body, called Ecological funeral has been suggested by a Swedish biologist. Based on cryotechnology, its main purpose is to give the body a possibility of becoming soil again.
Rarer forms of disposal of the dead include Excarnation, where the corpse is exposed to the elements. This was done by some groups of Native Americans; it is still practiced by Zoroastrians in Bombay, where the Towers of Silence allow vultures and other carrion eating birds to dispose of the corpses. It is also practiced by some Tibetan Buddhist monks where it is sometimes called "sky burial".
Cannibalism is also practiced post-mortem in some countries. The practice has been linked to the spread of a Prion disease called kuru.
Mummification is the drying of bodies to preserve them. The most famous practitioners of mummification were ancient Egyptians: many nobles and high-ranked bureaucrats of the old Egyptian kingdom had their corpses embalmed and stored in luxurious sarcophagi inside their funeral mausoleum or, in the case of some Pharaons, Pyramid.
The decedent may, in most U.S. jurisdictions, provide instructions as to his funeral by means of a Last Will and Testament. These instructions can be given some legal effect if bequests are made contingent on the heirs carrying them out, with alternative gifts if they are not followed. This assumes, of course, that the decedent has enough of an estate to make the heirs pause before doing something that will invoke the alternate bequest. To be effective, the will must be easily available, and some notion of what it provides must be known to the decedent's survivors.
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Some people dislike the clutter and display of flowers at funerals, and feel that there is an unseemly competition in the number and size of the floral arrangements sent. Many newspapers refuse to print an Obituary that requests that flowers not be sent; to do so would be to offend the florists' industry. Many obituaries, however, contain notices regarding "memorial gifts" to a Charity. It is usually understood in these situations that a gift to the charity made in memory of the decedent relieves the donor of the social duty of sending flowers.
Making an anatomical gift is a separate transaction from being an organ donor, in which any useful organs are removed from the unembalmed cadaver for medical transplant. Under a Uniform Act in force in most jurisdictions of the United States, being an organ donor is a simple process that can often be accomplished when a Driver's license is renewed. There are some medical conditions, such as amputations, or various surgeries, that can make the cadaver unsuitable for these purposes. Conversely, the bodies of people who had certain medical conditions are useful for research into those conditions. All US medical schools rely on the generosity of "anatomical donors" for the teaching of anatomy. Typically the remains are cremated once the students have completed their anatomy classes, and many medical schools now hold a memorial service at that time as well.