'Selfies at Funerals'

A guy I work with posted a video to Facebook of his mother being lowered into the ground this summer.

 

Is that Donovan McNabb? Did his mother die from too much Chunky Soup?

 

Salon is taking up the debate:

In defense of funeral selfies

http://www.salon.com/2013/10/30/in_defense_of_funeral_selfies/singleton/

 

Working Slate's corners, I see.

 

Last fall, we lost my dad's uncle, who was the family sage. At the gravesite, my mother was taking photos, then recording with her phone. I wanted to kill her. Then, I found out she was sending it to my dad's sister and family, who are missionaries in the Philippines and couldn't get home for it.

So I'm not sure what to think.

 

Notice that about all of these people are 13-15 (or so) kids, mostly girls. I don't get the whole "fish lips" thing. I have a niece who changes her twitter pic about once a week to a new selfie, and she's always doing the "fish lips" "I just ate a skunk turd" look. WTF?

 

Makes me want to beat the shit out of somebody, just on general principles.

 

I don't know about self portraits, but photos and recordings of funerals don't seem like anything new. I've seen them from grandparents on both sides of my family. Funerals for people I never knew, like great-grandparents, etc. Maybe one picture of the deceased or of the arrangements, mostly pictures of people together because sometimes families just don't seem to get together unless it's a wedding or funeral. I even found an audio cassette of a funeral service. This is not new. Or I have a weird family. Whatevs.

 

Bradley, I don't think it's weird or uncouth to take photos at funerals, and I don't know that anyone else here or most people out there would think it is. We took some group shots at, for example, the luncheon following my dad's funeral. We even smiled in them. It took some negotiating, but we even permitted my dad's brothers and sister, eventually, to snap photos of him in his casket. (Ostensibly to send to his mother, but we knew beforehand that they had also openly and casually snapped photos of my aunt in repose the year before. I don't know if it's a southern thing or just a family thing.)

I know it verges on "get-off-my-lawn" territory to some, but what is bothersome here is the narcissism of taking a particular type of photo, a "selfie," at a funeral and basically live-Tweeting it with some horrendous effort to attach a profound statement to it. Look at the one, and I paraphrase: "Love my hair today. Hate why I had to have it done. #SadDay."

I imagine a lot of us just didn't realize how ubiquitous "selfies" were among young people. They apparently just snap them everywhere they go, and then post them online as kind of a running diary of their life. It's humorous, because it just would not even occur to them to make an exception in this case. It's just how they live.

 

On my mom's side of the family, taking pictures at funerals (of the person in the casket) has always happened. It's just a part of the process, I guess. But I hate it with a passion. My mom lost both her parents a couple years ago and when I'd visit, she'd have the funeral pictures just laying around willy nilly. And I learned long ago not to go flipping through any of my grandparents' photo albums unless I was prepared to see casket pictures. Horrible.

 

Meh, if they're dead, their souls already are stolen.

 

I never knew photos of the person in the casket was a thing until last year, when a friend's elderly mom died and my friend emailed out a slideshow of photos. The beginning of the slideshow was normal - photos over the course of her mom's life - but then there was a photo of the mom in the casket and a group photo of the children and grandchildren standing next to the casket. I found it incredibly disturbing.

The selfies are in a different category of disturbing.