Poets and Final Farewells

Mr Commonsense @fopminui

In the Netherlands, when a person dies with no family or friends to attend the funeral, the ceremony is not left to silence. A civil servant is present, representing the community. And beside them stands a poet.

The idea was born to prevent the final farewell from becoming a purely bureaucratic act. The poet receives the few available details: a name, a date, perhaps a job, an address—sometimes only a single, minimal fact. From these fragments, a text is written especially for that life.

During the ceremony, the poem is read aloud. It does not celebrate achievements, nor does it invent affections. It carefully gathers what remains. It turns an anonymous goodbye into a human gesture.

It is not a grand public ritual. It is something simple, almost invisible. Yet in that moment, the deceased is no longer alone. Someone speaks their name. Someone acknowledges them. And perhaps this is the deepest meaning of the initiative: to remind us that a life, even when it ends in silence, deserves to be farewelled by a voice.

 I was the presider of at least 500 funeral and memorial services through my decades of ministry. Some of them were huge, attended by hundreds of people to the point of "standing room only." Others were quite small, including one where I recruited congregation members to attend for a lovely shy man who had no living family or friends. There were a few of almost runaway emotion,  including anger, and others that were so emotionless that a chill came over the space. I've conducted only a few services in retirement including the recent memorial for a neighbout in his 20s who died following a drug overdose. 

I do feel that every life should be honoured, if possible, and I've noted a number of times before in this blog that I'm unsettled so many lives are going unrecognized or mourned in a communal way, especially post-COVID pandemic. 

I was quite taken by the description, above, of the funeral practice for those who would otherwise go unmourned with a poem for the deceased. The phrase: "It turns an anonymous goodbye into a human gesture" is particularly meaningful. 

Do we need a Funeral Poets Farewell Society? Maybe.