Funeral Festival In America Summary

I chose to read the book Funeral Festivals in America: Rituals for the Living by Jacqueline S. Thursby. This work explores numerous aspects of funerals and the customs that surround it. Although some of it was hard to follow and seemed a bit jumbled, I was able to get a sufficient amount of information from it that I believe will help me become a great funeral director in the future. I was able to extract a few great lessons from the work, the first being the fact that all people unconsciously seek a transformative experience. I found that this is an experience that provides deep knowledge but isn’t necessarily accessible to the person until they have that experience. In other words, you may be given a lot of information about something, but until it actually happens in your …show more content…
Thursby definitely believed it was one of the most important parts of the grieving process. Although it was hard for me to grasp as being an essential piece of the puzzle, I quickly learned that it has been used for centuries as a form of comfort and remembrance. The book explained that the most popular food in past decades were funeral biscuits, although they are not seen too often in this day and age. They were used amongst British and German Americans and later adopted in the United States. They had symbols such as hearts, skulls, and hourglasses (p. 89). Foods that I found important in the United States today are casseroles, salty foods (which come from China, Indonesia, and Japan), rice, and more. I think studying the foods of funerals was so interesting to read about because I have been to multiple funerals and only one included a banquet afterward. After doing some thinking, I remembered that it was a Catholic funeral. Thursby said that these types of funerals are known for their extravagant feasts after burying the