Are funerals hard to deal with?
Funerals are always hard. Dealing with people who are grieving is difficult because when they've loved there's always going to be pain, so it's about waiting with people. I do find funerals of young people the most difficult, especially in cases of suicide, where the family feel hurt and angry and carry a lot of guilt. I have found myself unable to bring up my own resources; that's when I find myself dependent on God, because I don't know how to tell a mother whose 14-year-old daughter has died, who she had kissed goodbye to that morning going to school, and then gets a phone call to say the daughter's in hospital, and then she's dead within a matter of hours after that. I don't know what to say to a mother who's already lost an infant at a young age, and then loses a son in his 40's, and she's grieving. I really don't know, and because I don't know, rather than doing pious stuff, and all I can say is, "you're in pain, you're in pain," and be with them in that pain. My hope is that my presence and my commitment as a priest and as a person of faith will be an assurance to them that God hasn't left them, even though it feels like God's abandoned them. That's where I say, "God, I don't know what I'm doing here, but I'm doing it for You. I hope you're able to use me; work through me here." Quite a few times I've had to do that. It's better than becoming pious and saying that you'll see your daughter afterwards or something like that. The difficulty I find is that I haven't been through a person bereavement, in terms of my own parents or siblings or something like that, and so I have to rely on a lot of intuition. It would be false for me to say I understand what you're going through. But I can bring experiences of where there has been, because we love and we've experienced pain, so I bring that feeling into situations.
