Paper boats and silver ribbons- creative rituals in funeral rites
When my brother Jimi died suddenly in 2010, my family chose to create a personalised funeral that honoured his life in a deeply meaningful way. Rather than following a traditional format, we embraced creative choices that reflected his personality, friendships, and values.
We held the funeral at a venue that had never hosted a funeral before, a function centre on Birrarung Marr in Melbourne. His coffin was made of cardboard (at a time when this was not yet a common choice) so his friends could write, graffiti and leave lingering final messages. A close friend sang and played Skinny Love, his favourite song on guitar as we held each other and wept audibly. We arranged the flowers and catering ourselves to reflect his unique style and emulate the hospitality and cocktail community he was part of. Guests received candles dressed with silver ribbons to take home alongside printed photos, small keepsakes for ongoing personal rituals to him.
After his cremation, we gathered on the Mornington Peninsula to scatter his ashes. Visiting this place has since become a yearly tradition. Each year on his death day, we write letters and fold them into paper boats and release them where his ashes were scattered. As a son of an avid sailor the boats seemed a fitting shape for the epithets. On the 10th anniversary, family and friends of his joined in a larger ritual. As we placed the paper boats onto a biodegradable reef and floated them out to sea, my cousin sang ‘Jimi’ by Tones and I and many of us went swimming out in our clothes, a display of the vastness of our shared grief.
Anthropologist Victor Turner used the term ‘communitas’ to encapsulate the particular feeling of deep unity that transcends social roles and hierarchies during rite of passage rituals. In moments of collective mourning, communitas can arise spontaneously. People come together, not just to say goodbye, but to feel held by one another in the depth of a shared loss. Creative rituals therefore can assist as a vehicle for this connectivity.
When I speak of creative rituals I’m speaking directly to secular rituals, as more and more Australians are identifying as not having a specific religion. But where religion and cultural rituals can often give very clear and comforting instructions around death and grieving during the period of mourning, it can therefore feel hard to design a secular ritual. This is especially true within our modern funeral industry where decisions are often made quickly geared towards efficiency and profit and often don’t allow or assist in the designing and curating of family led funeral rituals. This is where choosing an independent funeral provider or staging a supported home funeral can be so freeing, as there is now time, space and capacity for creativity. But even then, where do you start? What do you create when you have no clear instructions or set of rules to follow?
Some of the most powerful grief rituals I’ve observed or heard of are personally and creatively shaped by the deceased's values, beliefs and community. From a simple child led candle ritual to the paddle out of surfers to form a circle around an ashes scattering, mourners bobbing in the waves that the deceased once rode. I heard about the powerful ritual of a skateboarder, where a guard of honour over his coffin was made of people raising their boards. This procession finished with them hitting the boards repeatedly to the ground, making audible the enormity of the shared grief of the community. One funeral I attended was catered only by the deceased’s hand written recipes, made lovingly by the mourners. Another funeral was decorated by floral arrangements picked directly from the deceased’s beloved garden, each flower was spoken to during the service. The most common creative rituals often involve visual arts, from displaying the deceased’s art at a wake, to painting the coffin during a vigil. Creating a sculptural and decorative hanging over the days that follow a death, to mandala and craft projects created on death anniversaries that follow.
So each and every year on summer solstice, my family and oftentimes Jimi’s friends gather at the shoreline of the Mornington Peninsula. We all write letters to him, these days this includes his nephews and nieces that he never got to meet, but who continue to learn and meet him through these rituals. We fold the letters and the kids’ drawings into paper boats and just before sunset we release them into the sea. Sometimes we toast a prosecco in his honor and other times we yell and curse the fact he bloody well isn’t here. Often the ritual closes with a swim out from the shore to the sea that his ashes last touched. This yearly ritual assists me and my family to feel close to Jimi and furthermore to feel close to each other in our grief.
