Welcome to the Brisson Funeral Home Website
At Brisson Funeral Home, we pride ourselves on our ability to personalize each funeral to the needs of our families, to create and customize a unique funeral to fulfill anyone’s wishes, and to provide a truly meaningful funeral experience.
Why Have a Funeral?
"When a baby is born, we rejoice. When a couple is married, we celebrate. And when someone we love dies, we pretend nothing happened". ~Margaret Mead
Ample research has shown the epidemic of complicated grieving in our society today, and the resulting problems from minimizing death's impact on our lives. Personalized ceremonies provide an outlet for survivors to acknowledge their loss and experience their pain in ways that can be full of meaning. And for many, the presence of the body at the ceremony provides an opportunity to say goodbye and move more directly toward coping with the death. The best answer to "Why Have a Funeral?" is to look at the purposes, and some misconceptions, of the funeral ceremony as explained by Dr. Alan D. Wolfelt, an internationally known grief educator and author.
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Purposes of the Funeral Ceremony
Funerals have been with us since the beginning of human history because they help us move from life before death to life after the death. Funerals:
- confirm that someone we loved has died.
- help us understand that death is final.
- allow us to say goodbye.
- help us care for the body with respect and honor.
- assist us in creating sacred time.
- encourage us to embrace and express our pain.
- affirm the worth of our relationship with the person who died.
- help us remember the person who died and encourage us to share those memories with others.
- offer a time and place for us to talk about the life and death of the person who died.
- provide a social support system for us and other mourners.
- help integrate mourners back into the community.
- allow us to search for meaning in life and death.
- transform the ordinary into the spiritual.
- reinforce the fact a death has occurred.
- establish helping relationships among mourners.
Funeral Misconceptions
Many people today don't understand why we have funerals. And what we don't understand we tend to be skeptical, even fearful. Here are some of the most common misconceptions:
Funerals make us sad. When someone we love dies, we need to be sad. Funerals provide us with a safe, supportive place in which to embrace our pain.
Funerals are barbaric. On the contrary, meaningful funeral ceremonies are civilized, socially binding rituals. Some feel that viewing the body is barbaric; however, viewing has many benefits for survivors.
Funeral are inconvenient. Taking a few hours out of your week to demonstrate your love for the person who died and your support for survivors is a privilege, not an inconvenience.
Funerals are too expensive. The social and emotional benefits of personalized funerals far outweigh their financial costs. Besides, a funeral doesn't have to be lavishly expensive to be meaningful.
Funerals are only for religious people. Not true. Non-religious ceremonies still help mourners begin to heal.
Funerals are meaningless. They don't have to be. With forethought planning, funerals can, and should, be personalized rituals reflecting the uniqueness of the grieving family.
Funerals should reflect what the person who has died wanted. No. Funerals are primarily for the benefit of the living.
Funerals are only for grown-ups. Anyone old enough to love is old enough to mourn. Children, too, have the right and the privilege to attend funerals.