Funeral QuestionsMy husband's Catholic family want a full Requiem Mass — but he hadn't set foot in a church in 20 years. Am I wrong to push back?
Asked by loose_button42 ·
Steve died on Saturday. Heart attack, 52, no warning at all. We'd been together twenty-two years and I am still waiting for this to feel real.
Here's what's actually keeping me up: his mum, who is 81 and devastated in a way I can barely look at directly, has already told the funeral home she wants "the full Mass, Father Dovey, everything," communion, the works. Steve was raised Catholic but hadn't been to church since his own confirmation, minus two weddings and a funeral. He used to call himself "recovering Catholic" as a joke. I was raised Muslim, also not currently practising, and neither of us did a single religious thing for our own wedding. Our kids have grown up with basically no religion at all, by both our choices, together.
I don't want to fight his mother this week of all weeks. But I also keep picturing a two-hour Requiem Mass for a man who actively avoided exactly that, and it feels like we'd be burying a version of him that stopped existing thirty years ago, to make her feel better. Is it wrong of me to want something that actually reflects who he was the whole time I knew him? Or do I just swallow it because it's her son and she's lost more than I have language for right now?
4 Replies
I don't think this is a question with a right answer waiting to be found. I think it's two real, valid needs sitting in the same room, and the work is making space for both rather than picking a winner.
Your mother-in-law's need is fairly legible: a Mass is the only language she has for saying goodbye to her son, and at 81, having just lost him, it's probably the one thing she can point to and feel some control over right now. That's not really about doctrine. It's about having something to do with grief this big.
Your need is just as real, and just as legitimate: you don't want the last formal act for your husband to misrepresent who he'd actually become as an adult. Wanting the funeral to be true is not disrespect to his mother, it's a form of respect for him.
A few gentle questions rather than a directive, since you know your family better than any of us: is there a version where the Mass happens (because it may cost you less than you fear, and might matter more to her than almost anything else you could offer her right now) but where you also protect space, either within that service or separately, for the parts of Steve that only existed outside a church? You do not have to choose between honouring her grief and honouring his life as it was actually lived. Many families find a way to let both be true, even if it takes more than one gathering to do it.
Practical celebrant's-eye view, since I've sat in exactly this conversation with families more times than I can count: a full Requiem Mass doesn't have to mean nothing of the real Steve gets in. What happens at a Catholic funeral lays out the structure (Vigil, Mass, committal), and the Vigil the night before is usually far more flexible than people expect. That's often where a family gets to actually talk about who he was, tell the "recovering Catholic" joke, and let the humour and the real person in, while the Mass itself stays traditional for your mother-in-law.
If even that feels like too much church for what you two built your life around, the other genuinely common pattern I see: let her have her Mass with the priest and the extended Catholic family, and hold a second, smaller gathering afterwards or the following week that's entirely yours and the kids', no clergy, whatever music and stories actually sound like him. Neither event has to be lesser. I've run plenty of these "second gatherings" and families often say it's the one that actually helped them grieve.
Both funerals I organised had a version of this: different country, different mismatch, same underlying problem of one side of the family expecting a fixed shape and the other needing something that fit the person better. What helped me was stopping treating it as "which system wins" and instead asking each side of the family for the one or two things that mattered most to them specifically, rather than the whole package. Often it turns out to be much smaller than "the full Mass" sounds like from the outside: she may mainly need Father Dovey there and communion offered, not every traditional element defended to the letter.
Once you know the two or three things each side actually needs, you can often build a service around those specific pieces instead of two entire competing ceremonies. It took me a while to learn that "compromise" here doesn't mean everyone gets half of what they wanted. It means finding out what the whole thing was actually resting on and protecting just that.
Blunter take, from someone who did the "keep everyone happy" dance for my own father's funeral with a family that wasn't even speaking to each other: you're allowed to just let her have this one. Not because you owe her deference, but because a full Mass costs you an afternoon, and it might be the single thing that gets her through the next year. That's not erasing Steve. It's one ceremony, not a referendum on who he was.
Where I'd hold firm is anywhere it actually matters to you and the kids directly: who speaks, whether the kids are expected to participate in rites you two never raised them in, whether your own family gets any acknowledgment at all on the day. Pick your two or three non-negotiables and let the rest go. You don't have to win the whole funeral to keep him honestly yours.
Related Discussions
Found out my uncle's ashes were never collected — 15 years on, do I chase it?
My mum died in March and I've spent the last few months slowly going through her filing cabinet, which is its own special kind of grief admi
My manager scheduled a huge client presentation my first day back after Mum's funeral — do I say something?
Mum died six weeks ago. I took my two days plus a week of annual leave, which already felt like I was pushing it given how things are at wor
My daughter can't speak at her own daughter's funeral, so I'm writing the eulogy at 73 — how do I even start?
My granddaughter was six. She died last week after a short illness, and my daughter, her mum, has said plainly she cannot stand up in that c
Eighteen years married into a Sikh family, husband died suddenly this week — how much of the funeral is mine to decide?
My husband died on Tuesday, completely unexpectedly. We were married eighteen years. I'm not Sikh myself, but his whole family is, and I've