It has sparked some heated preaching about whom funeral are really for .
In thepost, redditoru/RevolutionaryIdea203tells a story about their sister, who declined to attend their friend’s funeral because of a specific phobia.
“My sister and I are pretty close, and we were friends with Kat,” u/RevolutionaryIdea203 writes. “Kat recently passed away, and her funeral viewing [is] this weekend. My sister Sammy has a fear of the dead. She strongly believes in ghosts and even has trouble with any meat due to her beliefs.”
“I called her up and told her I can pick her up on Saturday since I knew she was having car trouble. She informed me she will not be going. I asked why, and she told me she can’t be around a ghost. I asked if she was joking and told her she can just stand in the back, but everyone is expecting her to go. We are close friends with the family.”
“I told her she needs to go or she will blow up all her relationships, including me. She said that won’t happen, and I told her that family will never forgive her, and I don’t think I will either, since we have known her for years. She hung up, and I got a call from my mom for making her cry and being a jerk for telling her what will happen if she doesn’t go.”
So TL;DR: OP’s sister, Sammy, has a phobia of ghosts and the dead, so she refused to go to their friend Kat’s funeral. OP called Sammy and told her that she would be blowing up her relationship with both her family and the friend’s family if she didn’t show. So now OP wants to know if they were wrong for saying that.
The general consensus is that OP is indeed a jerk. Many commenters reasoned that it sounds like Sammy has a legitimate phobia, and forcing her to attend is not a good way to get her to overcome that phobia. Additionally, they argued that funerals aren’t for the deceased, they’re for the living to grieve, and Sammy wouldn’t be able to grieve if she was fighting panic the whole time.
However, some people argued that OP was correct for shaming Sammy about not attending for the same reason: Funerals are about the living. So since they’ve known this friend and her family for a long time, Sammy should be there to support them in any way she can.
But others countered that argument by pointing out that forcing someone to attend — especially because of a phobia — means that they likely wouldn’t provide very good support to the family anyway.
