All Souls Day to honour those who died

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This article was published 01/11/2021 (1792 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

St. Matthew’s Anglican Cathedral will be hosting a special ceremony on All Souls Day Tuesday to honour parish community members who died over the last two years.

All Souls Day takes place each year in one form or another, said St. Matthew’s Dean Don Bernhardt, but the parish was unable to host a ceremony in 2020 due to COVID-19 public health restrictions. On Tuesday, the parish community is invited to gather for a memorial celebration at 7 p.m. at the Cathedral to commemorate the lives of those who have died in 2020 and 2021.

“This is a community coming together to celebrate all of our souls,” Bernhardt said. “We need to come together and recognize that this loss is important and it hurt us.”

St. Matthew’s has an established tradition of celebrating All Souls Day, he said, but the service has been transformed by COVID-19. The pandemic has inspired them to create a more deliberate service that helps the parish family come together and grieve.

All Souls Day at St. Matthew’s will be reminiscent of a funeral, and Bernhardt will be using the funeral office. The service will reflect what a typical All Souls Day represents, but at the same time, COVID-19 has created a need to emphasize that the last two years have been a time of loss, grief and isolation.

“It is the funeral that has been lacking and we will do the funeral. We will do the thing that we couldn’t do,” Bernhardt said. “This is for our parish family.”

Proof of double vaccination and masks will be required during the service.

Bernhardt said funerals and remembrances of life rituals play an important role in the grieving process. Many parishes across Brandon, Manitoba and the world have seen members die over the last two years, and it was not always possible to properly celebrate their lives.

“We need the support of each other. We need to be able to say, ‘this person was important and their loss hurts us. But yet, we will move forward,’” Bernhardt said. “We still take the time to celebrate who they were and who they are.”

At last count, Bernhardt had 18 names from the parish who will be honoured on All Souls Day, some of whom were longstanding “lights of the parish family,” while others were with the community for a short time. In all cases, they were a part of the St. Matthew’s family and always will be, Bernhardt said.

COVID-19 has been a challenging time, Bernhardt said. Preventing the spread of the virus transformed how funerals were organized, and in some cases outright prevented end-of-life celebrations.

“We thought that this year because we can now begin to gather in better numbers than we could, we needed to celebrate two years’ worth of people because … for a lot of these folks, they didn’t have any funeral at all because we couldn’t meet or they could only have five people or 10 people,” Bernhardt said.

Funerals are always a difficult day, he said, but in the past, people had the comfort of a recognizable path — the death, working through the grief and the trauma, the funeral taking place right away and then you can begin moving forward.

While there have been times where families were distanced at the time of death preventing an immediate funeral, COVID is different as it was a time people were craving to come together but were unable to. Others faced planning services that limited guest numbers to five or 10 people, leaving family members out.

While necessary, Bernhardt said, public health measures created funerals that did not feel right due to these exclusions, adding to the grief many were experiencing.

He noted there is an additional difficulty this year on All Souls Day because many people have been working through their grief process. People never truly move on from the death of a loved one, but they can travel a path of healing where they can accept a new reality with a loved one no longer in their lives.

All Souls Day can be a reminder of this loss and become a blow to the grief process.

“I’m hoping that we can recognize that this will potentially mean there will be work for us to do afterwards in making sure we are checking in on each other to make sure we are OK. To make sure that those who had a death that happened 18 months ago are still in a good place compared to where they were 18 months ago and this hasn’t caused them too much pain,” Bernhardt said. “We have trauma and grief mixed in a way that we’ve not seen before.”

Bernhardt said the All Souls Day service will serve to start a conversation regarding how funeral services will take place in the future because the pandemic has shown that celebrations of life can be postponed to take place at a time that allows more guests to gather and mourn.

“There will be a new way of having to look at how we deal with death, how we deal with grief, how we deal with the interim space of when the person passes away and when we come together to celebrate the passage of their life,” Bernhardt said. “They recognize that it is important to come together to celebrate and to cry, to mourn and remember … I’m thankful that we’re finally able to gather in numbers that will make this possible.”

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