Four Funerals and an Autist

I understand intellectually that funerals are a social ritual and that they are not about relaying factual information. Nonetheless, it is always a struggle for me, while attending a funeral, to process what it is that neurotypical people want from a funeral versus what I want and how to avoid disrupting what everyone else seems to think is a normal way of talking about a person who has died while also processing my own complicated grief.

The first funeral I attended as a child was my grandmother’s. I was a preteen, and I had a cold. Because of my cold, I sniffled and wiped my nose rather loudly throughout the funeral. This caused a number of people, including my father, to pat my shoulder and tell me a variation of, “It’s OK, dear” and “You loved her very much and that is sweet.” In fact, I had very few memories of my grandmother before she had dementia and wasn’t crying because I was sad about her death. My real experience of the funeral was mostly boredom and frustration that I had to sit and listen to people talk about someone I had never known amidst a group of people I also didn’t know and who liked to say my name and touch me. I suspect many autistic children (and plenty of adults) have this experience with funerals.

The second funeral I’ll talk about is my father’s funeral, some decades later. I had a difficult relationship with my father. I suspect he was an undiagnosed autistic…