Is it just me or does this actually seem kind of low?
They say your social cluster is 150 people, so you should be going to about 2 funerals every year (this ignores age-clustering, but that's counterbalanced by the fact that you often go to funerals slightly outside your cluster and the fact that the cluster changes over time).
It's an interesting shift. A loss, I think.
When my grandfather died when I was 15, not only wasn't I allowed to go, but I had to stay home and watch my siblings as my parents traveled a thousand miles away for a week. We more than had the money for plane tickets. They just didn't want to bring us (youngest was 10, and also not troublesome).
For my other older relatives, they've all insisted on not having services, and I can't help but feel it's both an effect and a cause of the fact that my extended family is very disconnected and fragmentary.
My parents are / were just very distant from their families, didn't make much effort to tie their children into their adult social networks, etc.
I went to the only funeral I was ever invited to lol.
America's average lifespan is 77. When you're 16, your parents are perhaps 46, and their parents are maybe 76.
And a lot of people live for 10+ years after retirement, so your teachers might all be alive too.
If you've got a big extended family, or you're part of an organisation like a church where 16 year olds come are getting to know 70+ year olds, you might have gone to more than 6 funerals.
But generally? At 16 your parents, their friends, your aunts and uncles, your 16 year old friends, their parents? Good chance they're all still alive. Your grandparents - maybe, maybe not.
"Should" seems right, but in practice, do young people have this? How? (Thinking of the US here.)
When I was a kid, this came through church. But church attendance among the young has fallen off a cliff, with (to my knowledge) no replacement.
The thing that made me sad about this article is that it made me realize how lacking I am in community. My eldest child is six, and I can't think of more than a couple people who are likely to pass from natural causes by the time she is sixteen, who we are close enough with to definitely know about their funeral. And I have no idea how we would find out about the funerals of people we aren't so close to. It's not like there is a local paper with obituaries that we read...
Of course the elephant in the room is that when I was a kid, the coordinating organization for this was my family's church. Without having that community fixture, I find myself unsure how this sort of thing actually works.
Even now, there aren’t anywhere near 150 people whose funeral I’d attend.
For me, funerals and similar services are more for family and close (or at least close-ish) friends. My social cluster might number 150, but there are many in it for whom I'll pass on my regards & regrets from afar rather than attending a funeral or wake.
Are you attending 2 funerals every year, even averaged over a couple of decades to allow for clustering? I can think of one year when there were three, but that nowhere near makes up for the years when there were none or just one.
In fact, the actual number includes a significant decrease due to excluding "funerals I would've gone to if I didn't have a more important funeral to go to" and "people who moved away before they died". Thankfully in recent years remote recording is usually a thing in some form (live or not, video or just audio; the quality depends significantly on the funeral home).
For us it was only normal to go to funerals for family members, and my parents' generation is getting up there but still alive. So only your four grandparents are what you'd usually expect by that age.
I never even heard about deaths in friends' families unless it was a reason they were missing school.
> Is it just me or does this actually seem kind of low?
Not for someone who's young and mostly disconnected from their grandparents' generation. In my case, my family lived far away from pretty much all my relatives, which meant I'm not very close to any of them and going to a funeral meant lots of short-notice plane tickets.
I think I've only gone to two funerals in my life: one grandparent who died geographically close to use when I was a kid, and the father (who I never met) of a friend of mine.
I think it would have been better if it had been different, and I had gone to more funerals, because now my lack of exposure adds a whole extra layer of awkwardness onto dealing with death.
The scenario I was thinking of to get to more than "five or six" funerals by age 16, was to have "always go to the funeral" parents who took you to the funerals of grandparents and great aunts/uncles living nearby.
I go to much fewer than 2 funerals per year. But now that I'm 55 it will likely start picking up.
Nowadays many families have just one or two kids and everyone is spread over all of country and world.
> They say your social cluster is 150 people
Maybe yours is.
Yes, it's low.