Burials, Funerals, & Health

Stan, Barry, and the Health Chatter team chat about burials, funerals, and health. Listen along as the team reflects on their personal experiences and how these experiences influence health and well-being.

Join the conversation at healthchatterpodcast.com

Brought to you in support of Hue-MAN, who is Creating Healthy Communities through Innovative Partnerships.

More about their work can be found at http://huemanpartnership.org/

Research / Talking Points:

One thing we all have in common is being born and dying

Link to illusion of immortality episode and other death related episodes

Grief has been shown to weaken bereaved persons' health
Health conditions and later deterioration of health can lead to death and the need for a funeral

Communicable illnesses and pandemics like COVID-19 can lead to the inability to perform death related rituals like funerals

A study in India found that the inability to perform rites and rituals during COVID-19 negatively impacted bereaved families, prolonged their grief, and reduced their wellbeing (Hamid & Jahangir, 2020).
A review examining how funeral practices impacted bereaved families’ mental health, grief, and bereavement found that the benefit of funeral rituals depends on the ability of the bereaved person to say goodbye in a meaningful way (Burrell & Selman, 2020). → suggesting the funeral itself is less important than the meaning behind saying goodbye
During the COVID-19 pandemic there were many restrictions in place to limit the spread of disease that also limited family’s ability to meaningfully say goodbye

Couldn't say goodbye in person at the bedside
Couldn't gather for a funeral or memorial service

Funerals can help buffer grief through social support, faith, and religious rituals

Irrespective of culture, religion or value system, death is usually followed by a funeral service (O’Rourke, Spitzberg, & Hannawa, 2011)
Generally, in the short-term people do not only respond positively to funerals due to emotional experiences in the first months after a loss but people do continue to look back on the funeral with positive thoughts, even after years.
Funeral services/memorial services serve to:

a funeral offers a venue for the culturally accepted expression of loss-related emotions and marks a transition in which the irreversibility of the death is emphasized.
provides a starting point for recovery and renewal
rituals can become vehicles in the processes of transformation, transition, and continuity—processes forming the basis of adjustment and recovery following bereavement.

While some feel immense benefits from funerals, others may not experience the benefit of these types of services

Research shows the level of participation in a funeral had no effect on the level of grief experienced → While funerals can be a helpful tool for coping, research has shown that there is not a significant relationship between the level of participation in a funeral and an objective index of grief adjustment.
Many bereaved individuals experience the most intense emotions between three and 24 months post-loss, long after the funeral or memorial service took place.
In these months, when social support decreases, rituals may be helpful in coping with the loss

Other rituals related grief can be just as helpful for coping as a funeral or memorial service:

Rituals can also help mourners stabilize their mental worlds after a loss
On average, women performed significantly more rituals compared to men
Significant differences in the number of individual rituals used were found between people with different religious affiliations,
Examples of rituals:

lighting a candle
individual grief counseling
sharing stories about the deceased with others
creating a place/object in memory of the deceased
visiting a gravesite
listening to music of the deceased

The unaffordability of disposal of human remains is a topic that is seldom considered or discussed

In 2024, the median cost of a funeral with a viewing and burial was around $8,300, while the median cost of a funeral with cremation was around $6,280.
Around 2.4 million funerals take place in the US each year, and the funeral services market is worth between $16 billion and $20 billion annually
four out of ten Americans would have difficulty covering an unexpected $400 expense, and 12% would be unable to pay the unexpected $400 by any means
Although there are ways in which the consumer may mitigate cost, planning for a funeral or burial is expensive and complicated, and the consumer is frequently inexperienced and vulnerable.
Mourners are hit with thousands of dollars of costs for just the funeral, not including any end of life healthcare costs
Few options remain for those who are economically constrained and are unable to afford funeral, burial, or cremation expenses → some body donation programs exploit this gap

the body donation industry and its exploitation of grieving families

a legal commercial market exists for the purchase and sale of cadavers and dismembered parts.
The loved ones of a decedent stand to make no profit on remains that are commoditized to generate a substantial return for Body brokers who generally receive cadavers for free.

brokers stand to make as much as $5800 selling the whole cadaver

Mourners are told that their loved ones bodies will be used for research or education but there is little oversight over medical donation as a whole, and little guarantee that donated remains will be used for the intended purpose.
For example, bodies donated to Tulane University in 2004 were shipped to a broker who then passed them to the Army for landmine experiments.
Body donation programs have been exploited by human remains traffickers for decades, leading to the mishandling, dismemberment, and sale of donated bodies.
Even Harvard has faced accusations of mishandling donated remains

Facts that put the “fun” in funeral

Wearing black dates back to the Roman times when individuals would wear dark togas
The word funeral was first used in the 1300s: The word ‘funeral’ is believed to have first been used by Geoffrey Chaucer, who is often considered the father of the English language. It appeared in writing in his Middle English work The Knight’s Tale, in which he refers to a ‘funeral servyse’ after a character passes away. It was published in 1386, making it the first written use of the word funeral that we know of.
Flowers and candles were first used to mask unpleasant smells
Elephants and chimpanzees both have been known to bury their dead, by throwing leaves and branches over the deceased members of their families.
Approximately 6,400 burials are conducted annually at Arlington National Cemetery, which is an average of about 28 burials are performed each day.

Sources

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9850318/

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07481187.2019.1686090#d1e149

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9277332/

https://scholarship.richmond.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3267&context=lawreview