For children of my generation, a death in the village was a major event. Its exceptional nature certainly contributed to this. It was a small village, and funerals weren’t common. The deceased had a deathly expression, a yellowish hue, the smell of wax, dim lighting, prayers, and small glasses of mistela or fortified wine. One of the pranks I remember was being able to touch the corpse. It was relatively easy, since children weren’t forbidden from attending the wake or the funeral. The older people keeping vigil might not have known whether we were related or not.

When, as a grief therapist, I’ve been asked about children’s trauma in the face of death, I couldn’t help but recall my own childhood. We create trauma now by passing on phobias.

The funeral was a major social event, even in large cities. People in the neighborhood, without WhatsApp, communicated very effectively. The channels were open. Especially if the deceased was young or the death was unexpected. It was an occasion for the church to be filled with people, both inside and out.

With the arrival of funeral homes, burials gradually shifted away from the neighborhood or surrounding area. Comfort and practical considerations, such as closing the funeral chapel at night to allow family and friends to return home to rest, became more important. Little by little, the tradition of holding a wake for the deceased at home was eliminated. There was a time when the funeral home service was combined with a burial at the parish church. Even then, large crowds still attended.

But for practical reasons and to avoid a double trip – parish, funeral home and cemetery – not only the home wake was eliminated, but also the farewell ceremony at the parish.

In this era before cremation had debuted, the cult of the dead was maintained in cemeteries which, during the dates of All Saints, gathered multitudes; the funeral mass was still maintained in the parishes, there being a certain link between the community and the family of the deceased.

Later came cremation, which in most cases took the place of the cemetery. Secular ceremonies also emerged, shifting away from the faith of the deceased and toward a style of farewell focused on sentiment, praise for the departed, and personal anecdotes, rather than the supplicatory prayer of the Church, entrusting the soul of the one who has gone before us to the hands of a merciful God. The spectacle and the dramatic gained ground over prayer and trust in the living and true God.

This led to the suppression of the essential element of a farewell, which was to pray, to entrust the departed person to God. This removal of the sacred from secular ceremonies led many to eliminate all farewells altogether. Speeches and eulogies became unnecessary in light of the experience of being with the deceased. Whatever might be said at the ceremony, the deceased had either already heard in life, or, lacking belief in God and eternity, it held little meaning. They realized that if there was no afterlife, what was the point of speaking to a dead person?

The process continues when it is established that there will be no farewell ceremony before the burial or cremation of the deceased. The phrase “without ceremony” is used. Not long ago, at the funeral home where I work, there were nine deceases that day. Three were Catholic, one was secular, and one belonged to another religion. The remaining four were without ceremony.

If we add to the absence of ceremony the subsequent absence of rituals—since the bodies are cremated and usually placed in open spaces, without any further symbolic meaning for posterity—we can affirm that the deceased tends to be forgotten. The memory of the deceased will be very intangible, both in the physical space of the cemetery and in the subsequent rituals. It is not surprising that there is a rush to process grief, and that someone who has lost a loved one, who in the first few days receives a lot of support along the lines of “I’m here for whatever you need,” suddenly finds themselves in a situation where “don’t cry anymore because they wouldn’t like it.” This leaves the bereaved alone and makes them responsible for their distress, because they remain emotionally unwell, because they choose to. In my town, mourning was regulated by wearing black and by the veneration of the garment itself. It was an outward invitation to be considered a mourner. Now, grief is repressed, since expressing it in public is frowned upon. Funeral masses, novenas, Gregorian masses or anniversary masses are so scarce that it is increasingly rare to offer masses in suffrage for the deceased.

Clearly, we live in a different society than the one I grew up in. A few days ago, it so happened that just before the children’s catechism class that day, there was a funeral. I asked the children who had ever seen a real coffin. Less than half had.

The barometer of how we experience saying goodbye to our deceased loved ones indicates that we are heading towards oblivion. There is a phrase that is often repeated in civil ceremonies, referring to the life of the deceased: as long as we remember them, “you will live on in us,” “no one dies until they are forgotten”… thus acknowledging that eternity will be very short: until the death of those who remember them.

The Church prays for the dead at every Mass, and especially on All Souls’ Day. What matters is not our memory, which fades with age, but God’s memory, which is eternal. When we make the present the sole meaning of life, and this is threatened by illness and death, we experience great frustration. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why our society consumes so many antianxiety medications.