Three Shamanic Funerals

A traditional role of shamans is to preside at or contribute to (bring the Spirits to) rituals that mark important transition in the lives of members of their communities. In shamanic cultures, the rites for honoring the death of a loved one have been practiced for generations and are familiar to all in the community. As shamanic practitioners in this culture, with our mixture of ancestries, religions and beliefs, we do not share in any single common tradition, so we must “play it by ear”- the shaman’s ear to the spirits’ guidance.

Here I describe three settings in which I participated as a shamanic practitioner in funeral rites. In each of the services my level of participation was different, as was the level of shamanic content in the ceremonies. However, my presence was requested by the families of the deceased in two instances, and by the deceased herself four years prior to her death in the third, because I am a shamanic practitioner. And because I am that, I understood it was the presence of the spirits that was being requested, regardless of whether the requestor shared that understanding.

For the first funeral described here, I was asked to be a speaker. For the second, I was requested to officiate the service at a typical “commercial” funeral home and for a decidedly non-shamanic group of mourners. The third ceremony was a shaman’s farewell, and was in every aspect spirit-led and spirit-filled.

Funeral for Cynthia

Cynthia was the matriarch of a Chinese-American family. I had met Cynthia a few times with one of her three daughters who was a client and a regular attendee at our monthly Open Healing events. When my client called to say her mother had died and asked me to speak at her funeral, I agreed, but I was concerned. I didn’t know Cynthia well and I knew almost nothing at all about Chinese funeral traditions. I also understood that those who would attend to honor and mourn Cynthia would be mostly Asian-Americans. What could I say that would be meaningful and helpful to this gathering? I took this question to my helping spirits, and learned directly from them what I was to say.

When someone we love, someone who has been an important part of our lives, dies, we grieve. This is good. In our grieving we honor the one who is lost to us. Our pain and loss is a reflection of our esteem for her. It is right that we give Cynthia her due. And as we grieve, it is also right to remember that although she is physically gone from us, her spirit continues.

Listen for a moment. Hear your breath and the breathing of those around you in this room. Know that as you do, you breathe within the body of your Creator, and your Creator breathes with you. And in this breath our Creator is ever gently calling, ever whispering, “This way, this way.” Calling gently, “Come to me. Return to me.”

Know that your mother, your wife, your friend, your sister, your aunt, lives in this breath. Just as you are aware of her absence now, be also aware of her presence. She lives on in her grandchild’s laughter, in her husband’s expression of hope, in her daughters’ efforts, in their striving to live good lives.

The next time you notice the trees swaying in the wind, know she is in that soft shimmering of leaves. When you hear the bird sing, know that she is in that song. When you feel the sun on your face, know that she is in that warmth.

Life on Earth, all human life, is a classroom. To be human is to be in a school where we learn to love, where we learn to live our lives as though the living, breathing spirit in everything, in all of us, matters — where we learn little by little the way to return to our Source. We work, grow, learn, grasp as much as we can from this sometimes sweet, some-times bitterly painful, and always too brief experience. This experience, this life, is just the beginning. Cynthia has graduated, has left this classroom, and is dancing her way to her Creator – a loving Creator who welcomes her home for a time of rest and reward and new beginning.

Listen for that rustle of the wind in the trees. Notice it. Notice that bird’s song. Rejoice in the warmth of the sun on your face. This magnificent creation, this life, this family of humans, this Earth which is our home, this sun that warms us, this breeze that rustles the trees for our pleasure, and this bird that sings this song to us are all permeated with the spirit of love. And nothing is ever really lost in this. Our connection–our hands stretching back to our ancestors and forward to our descendants–that connection cannot be broken. We just have to notice it.

I have since spoken these words, with a few modifications, at other funeral services. Since they are the spirits’ words of love, comfort and honoring, they are not limited to any one particular group of mourners.

Funeral for Doris

Four years prior to her death, Doris asked me to officiate at her funeral. She had once accompanied her friend to the friend’s healing ceremony at my home and was touched by the beauty of the soul retrieval. She called me about a year after her friend’s healing, reintroduced herself and asked if she could bring her husband, Jim, to meet me. She said she wanted to talk to me about something important to her.

When Doris and Jim arrived and she told me what she had in mind, I was surprised. Doris was healthy and active, with no apparent reason to be planning her own funeral. She explained that since she was nine years older than Jim, it was likely she would precede him in death. She wanted to make that time as easy as possible for him. Jim was clearly uncomfortable. He said,”lt’s going to be the worst day of my life. I don’t want anything to do with it.”

I asked Doris if I might interview her on tape. I wanted to know a little about her and her life if I was going to someday perform this service for her. She agreed and I brought my tape recorder into the room and turned it on. She and I talked about how she wanted this service to go. She said she would send me some poetry she wanted included, and we discussed various possibilities for her ceremony. Jim (squirming a bit in his discomfort with the subject) was there with her throughout the interview. She began telling me stories about their life together. These were sweet memories and some of them made her laugh. “That was a time, now wasn’t it, Honey,”  she said. And he relaxed a little, enjoying their reminiscences.

Four years had passed when Jim called me to tell me Doris had died. There had been no laughter or joy in the long months of illness preceding her death. But four years later, I still had that tape filled with her voice and her laughter and their memories together. In a private moment after her funeral service, I gave the tape to Jim.

As a part of this funeral, since it was one of Doris’s requests, I assisted Jim in a “spirit canoe” ritual, in which he traveled to the spirit realms. There he was to say his farewell and then assist (release, really) his beloved Doris in her movement toward the Light. Before I began the actual service, I set out eight folding chairs in the center aisle of the funeral home chapel: one at the head of the “canoe,” followed by two abreast, then two more abreast and two more, and a final chair at the “stern.”

When the time came for this ritual, I explained to those present what we would be doing and asked if there were any who would be willing to accompany Jim in the canoe. Seven men, Jim’s Veterans of Foreign Wars brothers, dressed in their VFW caps and sashes, immediately rose, snapped to attention and took their places in the canoe.

They sat down, closed their eyes and I began drumming to launch and gently propel the canoe. As he lifted his arms to guide Doris on her way, Jim sobbed; his VFW brothers in the canoe wept, everyone wept. The man in the rear seat leaned forward. His eyes were closed, but his arms were open, reaching to support his friend.

Ceremony for Taylor Cheyenne

This funeral rite was for a student of shamanism who succumbed to leukemia. On the day of her ceremony, all of her apprentice circle sisters – Dara, Jana, Tammy, Kathy- and brother Eric met at my home.

Prior to our gathering Dara journeyed, and in this journey Taylor came to Dara and asked, “Will you wear my robe? “Dara expressed her willingness to do so, although she didn’t fully under-stand the request. Then she heard the spirits singing to honor Taylor and her beloved power animal, a fox known to Taylor as Twila.

Taylor Cheyenne, Taylor Cheyenne, She walks a golden path, with Twila by her side.

We walked in procession to a spot about three miles from my home and by the American River Taylor had so loved. Each of us took a turn bearing the urn holding Taylor’s ashes as we walked. We sang the song the spirits had given Dara. Not long into our walk, Dara mentioned that her legs were aching. She said she didn’t know why they should ache so, but it was hard for her to keep up with us. We changed our pace to accommodate her. A mile or more along, Dara was clearly struggling in pain and then in tears that she was “holding us up,” that she couldn’t keep up. She was in considerable distress.

(Later, when we were back at my home, Dara told us of feeling “apart” from the rest of us. She described her feelings of loss, of being left out, of frustration at being unable to keep up with the rest of us as being nearly unbearable, more so even than the mysterious and increasing pain she was experiencing, and that was making it so difficult for her to walk. And later still, we came to understand that Dara was “wearing Taylor’s robe,” as she had agreed to do. All this pain, loss, alienation and grief were what Taylor had experienced in her final weeks of life, when she had been too ill to fully participate in, and eventually too ill to attend, our biweekly apprentice circles which had meant so much to her. When the day was over, Dara’s pain and distress left her.)

Our destination was a small clearing in the woods by the river, and very near the shared nesting grounds of great blue herons and snowy egrets. The spirIts had led me there the day before and I had prepared it by hanging ribbons the colors of the rainbow on seven of the surrounding trees, delineating our ceremonial circle, and by laying stones in a small circle for an altar in the center. When we arrived, though tall trees enclosed us, a shaft of sunlight beamed down directly into the little circle of stones in the center of the clearing.

We placed the items we brought to create an altar. We hung Taylor’s eye-curtain, her medicine pouch and her rattle on a tree nearest the center and began our rites. We clapped stones together in a drumming rhythm to call the spirits and to announce our purpose of honoring our fallen fellow shaman and friend. We sang to her.

(Jana told us later that as we drummed with our rocks and sang she had an odd thought of “What am I doing here?” come up in her. It prompted her to open her eyes. When she did, right in front of her in the middle of our circle, hovered a hummingbird holding a fluffy white egret feather in its beak. As Jana watched, the hummingbird dropped the feather, which floated down gently into the altar circle. It banished Jana’s question; she closed her eyes again, and joyfully continued drumming. Dara also witnessed this little miracle.)

We drummed and sang, spoke our memories of Taylor, then scattered her ashes among the trees near the river-bank. It was an in-between place, fitting for a shaman’s repose.

We sat there in the clearing for a time, eating together what we had brought along to share. Tammy spoke for us all, I think. She said, “I know now what I want to have happen when I die. I want it to be just like this.”

I think too, that this is how sacred tradition comes into being. This is the beginning of common traditions, at least in our northern California shamanic community.

This article is reprinted from SSP’s Journal for Shamanic Practice Volume 3, Issue 1, Spring 2010