Funerals and obituaries when there has been a divorce
These questions arrive in the same twenty-four hours as the death, and there is no time to work them out. Does the former spouse come. What does the obituary call them. Who sits in the front row. Nobody publishes answers, so people guess, and some of those guesses cause damage that outlasts the funeral by years.
What follows is short on purpose. There are no rules here, only conventions and consequences, and the consequences are what matter when you have a day to decide.
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If your former spouse has died
In this subject 3
Do you go?
If you have children together, you almost certainly go. Not for your former spouse, and not for their family. You go because your children are burying a parent and will remember, permanently, whether you were in the building.
You do not have to sit at the front. You do not have to speak. You have to be reachable, and you have to be somewhere your children can find you.
If there is a history that makes attending unsafe, or if the family has asked you not to come, that is different and this page is not the place to argue it. Send the children with somebody who is entirely theirs — a grandparent, an aunt — and be at the end of a phone.
Where you sit, and why it is not a small thing
The front row belongs to the current family — a current spouse, the children, the parents. A former spouse who takes a front-row seat by right is making a claim, and everybody in the room reads it that way.
The exception is where your children are small. A seven-year-old sits with the parent who is left, and that is not a claim, it is childcare. If that means you are at the front, you are at the front, and anybody who objects can be answered in one sentence: the child needs a parent within reach.
Ask, once, in advance, of whoever is arranging it. It is a two-line message and it prevents the only kind of scene that a funeral cannot absorb.
What it calls you, and what to do if it says nothing
Convention lists a current spouse and does not list a former one. A divorced spouse is normally named only through the children — “survived by his son Daniel and daughter Anna” — and that is not a slight, it is the form.
Where a co-parenting relationship was long and close, some families write “survived by his former wife and dear friend, Sarah”, and that is a kind thing when the family offers it. It is not something to ask for.
If the obituary omits your children, that is different and it is worth raising. Quietly, once, to whoever is writing it, on the grounds that the children exist rather than on the grounds that you do. Most omissions of that kind are oversights made by somebody exhausted.
If your former in-law has died
The person your children are actually grieving
A divorce ends a marriage and does not end a grandmother. Your children may be losing somebody they loved entirely, and their grief has nothing to do with the divorce.
Go if you are welcome. Send the children regardless, and do not use the occasion to test the relationship with your former in-laws. It is the wrong week.
A card in your own name, saying something specific and true about the person who died, is almost always received well. It is also the single most common thing people regret not sending.
An adult uses the funeral to settle something. A pointed remark at the reception. A conversation about money. A comment to a child about who did or did not visit at the end.
It is understandable and it is unforgivable to the person who witnesses it. Funerals are remembered with unusual clarity, and a child who watches a parent behave badly at a graveside carries that image far longer than anybody expects.
Whatever it is, it will still be there next month. That is the whole argument for leaving it until then.
Say it plainly and early, in a room where they can react however they react. Children find out anyway, and finding out sideways is worse than being told.
You do not have to have feelings you do not have. “This is very sad, and you are allowed to be as sad as you are, and it is all right that I feel differently” is honest and it gives them permission, which is the thing they need most.
There is more about supporting a child through this on the page about the death of a former spouse.