International Funeral Customs

I was very close to my grandfather, and when he died, my mother phoned me up to ask me to be a pallbearer. When I got off the phone, I told my husband about my mother's request, but he wasn't sure what I was talking about, being Japanese and having grown up in a society in which cremation was the norm. So I explained to him that I would be helping carry my grandfather's casket, and that this was a way that I could honor him and his life. I launched into a discussion on what it meant to be a pallbearer and what the duties were and so on and so forth.

"Will you be wearing a special costume?" asked my husband.

While I thought his choice of words was odd, I was used to his non-native-English-speaker slip-ups and assumed he meant a special outfit. I told him that I would wear what I normally wear to funerals, a conservative outfit.

"Well, you'll at least be wearing white, right?" he persisted. No, I said, I would be wearing something dark, although not necessarily black since people aren't so strict about black in the West these days. I then launched into a mini-lecture on how this differed from Japan, where a certain dye lot of black is the only acceptable color for funerals--not just any old black, but a very specific light-annihilating black with its own special name that you must ask for when buying a funeral suit. So I explained that in the West we no longer wore only black, but usually favored somber colors, though not always, and that I'd even seen my second cousin wear a summery floral print to her grandmother's funeral. On and on I went.

When I finished, my husband again asked, "You're not going to wear white?" He was fixated on this point.

I assured him that no, I was not wearing white.

He was still clearly perplexed, and I thought to myself, Well, our customs are really different; I guess it's going to take him awhile to get used to the idea of a Western funeral.

My husband thought things over for another minute, and then said , "Okay, I give up. Why is it called being a polar bear?"