In social work grad school, they offered an elective called Death and Dying. Essentially, it was a survey course of cultural norms for response to death, including funerals, wakes, memorials, through methods of grieving. Of course, there must have been a review of Kubler-Ross’ stages of grieving. I can tell you that the idea of linear stages no longer holds any weight. Each person responds in their own way and cycles around those stages, unfortunately without a road map.
“Ethnic Variations in Dying, Death and Grief” (1993, Page xviii):
“There are habits of mind and sentiments that are the products of growing up in a particular culture. Different cultures and the great world religions they embody are lenses through which reality is viewed. A lens with an amber tint reveals a world different from a world seen through a lens of different hue. To think that all human beings experience reality the same way is ethnocentric. Dying and grief are intensely personal, yet these experiences and feelings cannot be separated from who we are and from the cultures that nourish and surround us.” http://www.compassionatwork.com/art_cultural.html
I remember going to my first funeral as a child. It was for my GGP (great-grandpa) Arnold Heyman. Looking it up, he died in Sept. 1975, so I was just about to turn 10. He was 98. All I remember is standing on a lawn with other people. I do not remember clearly if a casket was lowered into a grave. And I also don’t remember a service. My mother said she has no memory of this funeral.
My maternal grandparents were both cremated. I came to terms with this being our norm in our family. I believe this is ecological, etc. etc. The only issue is there is no place to go visit my grandparents. Greg and I tried unsuccessfully to find my GGP’s grave in Albany, but we didn’t call ahead to secure a cemetary map, not realizing that such a thing existed.
My brother was cremated. Just typing that makes me feel ill. Yet, I also know it doesn’t matter because his spirit has moved on. I believe in reincarnation. I have since I first heard it was a concept. But I fully accepted it when I read Many Lives, Many Masters. Dr. Brian Weiss, a noted psychiatrist and hypnostist, discovered through regression hypnotherapy that a client had many past lives that could be accessed. Beyond that, he discovered that we have time between lives as spirits and there are Masters in that realsm that also can be accessed.
We may or may not have a memorial. I am trying to qwell the part of my spirit that wants to control that. As the sister, it’s not my place to make this decision. Josh didn’t have a wife, so his girlfriend doesn’t have the power to influence the decisions either, alas. It falls to my mother and the children being honored and comfortable.
Really the last time I saw Josh, other than once or twice in passing at my mom’s, was at the memorial for his late father, Ron Stallings, in 2009. He was a musician and this event was filled with such love, friendship and honor. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen. I was humbled to know that a man could be loved so much. I went to support Josh and as a proxy representative for my mother who doesn’t travel.
Memorial Site for Josh
The main one that has been taking most of my time is called 
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