Bad Goodbyes: Why So Many of Us Leave Funerals and Memorials Feeling Like Something Was Missing
- Michelle Sponseller
- May 20
- 7 min read
You’ve probably been to one.
A funeral or a memorial service. Casket at the front or an urn on a small table. Either way, the service that felt borrowed from somewhere else. The eulogy that was just a list of dates and job titles. The officiant who kept calling him Robert when everyone in the room had only ever called him Bob. The strange, hollow feeling on the drive home. The sense that something important had just happened, but that it hadn’t actually been said.
If you’ve ever left a service feeling like the person you loved wasn’t really honored, you’re not alone. And you’re not wrong.
In our work, this has a name. It’s called a bad goodbye. And it happens more often than the industry likes to admit.
Why So Many Services Fall Flat
The funeral industry in this country hasn’t changed much in a hundred years. Most services still follow a template built for a particular religious framework, then carried forward into a country that no longer fits inside that framework.
This is true whether the service is held days after a death or months after a cremation. The template doesn’t change much. When it doesn’t match the life being honored, families end up with a service that feels like it’s happening to someone else.
Here is what’s usually going on.
1. The service was built around a template, not a person.
Same opening. Same prayer. Same reading. Same closing. The person who died gets dropped into a pre-built container, and the container ends up shaping the service more than the life does.
This hits memorial services especially hard. Families who chose cremation often assume the urgency is gone, there’s no body to bury, no embalming clock ticking, so they take a few weeks to plan. Then they get to the day of the service and realize no one has actually built it. Someone reaches for a template at the last minute. The result is a memorial that feels even more generic than a rushed funeral would have, because everyone in the room had time to expect more.
This isn’t anyone’s fault, exactly. It’s what happens when no one in the room is trained to build a ceremony around an actual person.
2. The officiant didn’t know the person, and it showed.
Many clergy and funeral officiants are asked to lead services for people they never met. Done well, that’s possible. Done badly, it produces the eulogy you’ve probably heard. Born in Cleveland. Graduated in 1962. Worked thirty-four years at the same company. Leaves behind a loving wife and three children.
Facts in a row. The person sanded down to a paragraph.
The difference between a flat eulogy and a moving one isn’t talent. It’s training. Training in how to interview a family. How to listen for the moments under the facts. How to write in a way that puts the person back in the room.
3. The religious framing didn’t fit.
A growing share of Americans aren’t religious. The “nones,” people who check “none” on the religion question, not out of confusion but out of conviction, are now one of the largest groups in this country. They aren’t quietly religious. They aren’t on the way back to church. They are atheists, agnostics, humanists, secular, “nothing in particular.” And their lives deserve goodbyes that tell the truth about who they were.
When their services default to religious language anyway, usually because no one knew what else to use, the service ends up being about a worldview the person didn’t hold. Families sit through prayers they don’t recognize. Scripture readings their loved one would have rolled their eyes at. The ceremony becomes a performance of something else.
This isn’t a rejection of meaning. It’s a request for the meaning to be honest.
4. There was no real ritual. Just a program.
A program is a sequence of events. A ritual is a moment that makes room for what people are actually feeling.
A lot of services have plenty of program and very little ritual. The music plays at the right times. The speakers speak. The casket closes, or the urn sits quietly on the table. Everyone heads to the reception. Nothing in the service actually invites grief into the room.
Trained celebrants are taught to build ritual into the structure of the ceremony. A candle that everyone helps to light. A name said aloud, on purpose. A pause that lasts twenty seconds longer than feels comfortable, because comfort isn’t the point. For memorial services, ritual can include things a funeral never could, a scattering of ashes at a place that mattered, an urn placed by hands the person loved, a meaningful object set beside it. These are the moments that make a service feel like something actually happened.
5. The pacing was wrong - in either direction.
Funeral, if not led by compasionate staff, can leave families feeling like they're on an assembly line. A time slot. A second service waiting in the parking lot. An officiant who barely makes eye contact because they have three more that day.
Memorials have the opposite problem. The pressure is gone, so the planning drifts. Weeks may pass. Sometimes months pass. And when the service finally happens, no one quite remembers what they wanted it to be. The momentum is lost. The clergy member is hard to schedule. The funeral home may not be involved anymore. The family ends up with whoever is available, doing whatever feels familiar.
Celebrants who work outside both of those pressures can give a family the time the moment actually requires, and the structure a memorial needs even when there’s no timeline forcing it. The interview that runs sixty minutes instead of fifteen. The days of revision. The conversation the day before the service to make sure the family still wants the second song. These things matter. Families feel them.
Why Bad Goodbyes Stay With Us
Funerals and memorials do important work. Researchers have understood this for decades.
A meaningful ceremony helps mourners begin to integrate the loss. It is often the first concrete experience of the new reality. The first time the absence becomes a fact you can feel in a room full of other people who are also feeling it.
When the service fails to do that work, the grief doesn’t get a foothold. Families leave feeling unfinished. Sometimes they spend years feeling like they never really said goodbye, because, in an important sense, they didn’t. The ritual that was supposed to mark the loss didn’t. The moment passed. The casserole dishes got returned to the neighbors. Life kept moving. But something in the family stayed unmoved.
A bad goodbye isn’t just an aesthetic problem. It’s a missed opportunity at one of the most important moments of a family’s life. And the people who lived through it tend to remember, for the rest of theirs.
What a Meaningful Ceremony Looks Like Instead
A well-led ceremony, funeral, memorial, graveside, celebration of life, doesn’t require religion, a particular venue, or a big budget. It requires intention, and someone trained to hold it.
Here is what changes when families work with a trained end-of-life celebrant.
The service is built around the actual person. Their voice. Their humor. Their contradictions. The story of the love. Not a template.
The eulogy is a story, not a resume. A trained celebrant knows how to interview a family. Knows which questions open the real material. Knows how to find the moment that matters and put it on the page so the room can feel it.
Ritual is built in deliberately. Candles, readings, music, communal gestures, silence. The urn placed by a grandchild. Ashes scattered by a river the person fished every Saturday. A memory table arranged by the people who loved her. Chosen for this person and this family, not pulled from a generic playbook.
The framework reflects what the family actually believes. Religious. Secular. Blended. None of the above. Whatever is honest. The ceremony stops being a performance of someone else’s worldview.
The ceremony can happen anywhere, on any timeline. The funeral home chapel the week of the death. A graveside the next morning. A park three months later when the out-of-state family can travel. A backyard. A beach. A beloved restaurant. The bench at the trailhead where he proposed. The setting and the timing become part of the meaning.
The celebrant has time. Time to listen. Time to prepare. Time to get the name right. Time to make the family feel held, not processed.
You Don’t Have to Settle for One
If you are reading this in the early days after a loss, or planning ahead for someone you love, or sitting with a goodbye that still doesn’t feel finished, please hear this.
A meaningful, personalized ceremony isn’t a luxury. It’s not reserved for famous people or wealthy families. It just requires hiring someone whose actual job is to know the person well enough to tell their story well.
That is what I do.
Work With Me
I serve families across Central Michigan and travel as needed.
Funerals. Memorial services, held days or weeks or months after the death. Graveside services. Celebrations of life. Ash-scattering ceremonies at a place that mattered. Religious, fully secular, or thoughtfully both, built around the person you loved, not a template.
If you waited to gather, because of distance, weather, family timing, or simply because you weren’t ready, that’s not a problem to fix. That’s a memorial we can build well, on your timeline.
No pressure on a first call. We talk. You get a sense of how I work. You decide from there.
If a Bad Goodbye Stayed With You, That Isn’t Random
Some people read a piece like this and feel something settle. The grief, finally, has a name.
Others read it and feel something else. A quiet sense that they could do this work. That they could be the person who makes sure other families don’t have the experience they had.
If that’s happening as you read, pay attention to it. The realization that funerals and memorials can be done better, and that you might be the kind of person who could do them better, is one of the most common ways people arrive at end-of-life celebrant training. Loss that becomes calling is a real path. It’s the path many of us have walked.
I’m the End-of-Life Instructor at the Celebrant Academy. Our End of Life Ceremonies course trains celebrants to create services that actually honor the person who died. Six weeks of live instruction. Twelve students per cohort. Built for people who believe families deserve better goodbyes, and who are willing to do the work to deliver them.
Michelle Sponseller is a Certified Master Celebrant and Certified Funeral Celebrant based in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan. She specializes in personalized end-of-life ceremonies - funerals, memorials, graveside services, and celebrations of life, religious or secular, and also officiates weddings and other life-milestone services. She serves as the End-of-Life Instructor at the Celebrant Academy.
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