I recently conducted an unusual memorial service. My pastor was asked to do it, but for whatever reason couldn’t. So he asked me to pinch-hit for him, as I am one of several ordained ministers among the membership of the Circular Congregational Church here in Charleston.
Apparently the woman who had died had once attended our church fairly regularly. That was, at least, the memory of her two daughters.
The request came from a young woman living in Europe whose younger sister lives in New York City. Their mother was residing in an assisted living facility in Florida when she died last spring. She had been cremated, her children waiting until they could gather to inter her cremains in a cemetery in nearby Summerville, where the girls, at a young age, had briefly once lived with their parents.
The deceased had a history of debilitating mental illness. And besides the two young women I’ve mentioned, she was also the mother of two sons, now both middle-aged men, one of whom lives on the west coast of Florida, the other in Atlanta. The men having had a different father than their half-sisters.
The young woman in Europe, who was arranging this memorial service for her mother, has a husband and step-children; her younger sister, a husband and one small child.
Until, at the memorial service, I met all four of the deceased woman’s children, it was the sister who lives in Europe who had sensitively described and interpreted her mother to me while also explaining their particular family dynamics.
Apparently the two older brothers grew up together in Florida in the care of their paternal grandmother. As the story goes, their father essentially “stole them away” from their mother when they were quite small, depositing them with his mother who became their primary care giver.
According to the brothers, their father now has yet another family, another wife and children, living wherever. Or as one of the brothers observed, rather philosophically, “Our dad seems to believe that there is no bad situation he can’t somehow manage to make worse.” I got the impression that these brothers have had, over the years, little to do with their father.
The sisters, of course, had a different father, an accomplished professional man who lived and worked in greater Charleston. Except he died at a relatively young age and is buried in the same cemetery where we had gathered to memorialize these children’s mother. Because of his wife’s mental illness, she was unable to adequately care for the girls. So the sisters grew up in a series of foster families, both in Charleston and in New York City.
While the sisters have maintained a close relationship with each other over their young lives, that has hardly been the case with respect to their half-brothers. The brothers have known they had two younger half-sisters, just as the girls have known they had two older half-brothers. But there has been little-to-no contact between these siblings throughout their lives.
So there I was, in Parks Cemetery in Summerville, conducting a memorial service for a deceased woman I never knew, an occasion which had also turned out to be a family reunion of the woman’s four adult children. Except it wasn’t as much a “re-union” as a “union”: the daughters meeting their half-brothers and their two half-sisters-in-law in a way none of those family members had ever before encountered one another.
Or as the older sister had said to me, when we were discussing–she, on the phone from Europe–her mother’s forthcoming memorial service, “So you’re a family therapist. As ministers go, you sound like just what we need. Maybe there’s some providence in all of this after all.”
We were the only people at the memorial service–the brothers, their wives, the sisters and me, the seven of us–under the funeral home awning, the grave stone standing nearby. So I suggested we sit together in a circle.
I read from the Bible and prayed, as I usually do at a funeral, formalizing and solemnizing the occasion in a way it is meant to be. But unique to the circumstances, most of our time together involved me interviewing these folk in a way that invited them to genuinely engage one another, which they seemed to appreciate and find meaningful.
Between the two brothers and their wives, they have five children, either in college or still in high school. These families, including their teenagers and young adult children, have maintained a close relationship through the years. The sisters described and shared insights into their lives and families as well.
And the children all spoke of their mother in considerate and compassionate ways. Even if she hadn’t been prominently a part of their lives growing up, or in later years. Still, they had gathered with gratitude and affection to honor her memory.
I was impressed. Having spent most of my ministry as a family therapist, I’ve been meeting with, interviewing, trying to understand and help families understand themselves for years. So I have some relative perspective on families–at their best and otherwise..
All four of these adult children struck me as notably healthy, successful, appropriate and productive people who are thriving in their lives, despite growing up in circumstances one would not necessarily consider ideal.
And I told them so. I felt privileged and blessed to have been included in such a sacred gathering of this family. Reminding me, again, of how resilient children can be–and so often are–even when faced with daunting challenges. Such as those four kids surely faced in growing up to be the quality people they seem to be.
