My 93 y/o MIL has been in the hospital due to recent stroke and still has COVID. She was hospitalized for COVID about 2 weeks ago but released to NH. Prognosis on Thursday was she had 3 to 4 days left on this Earth. The hospital called yesterday saying hospice would be in touch and that the Prognosis remained the same. She's incoherent, not eating, has ripped out feeding tubes despite being sedated. My mother in law has NPD and has a history of poor relationships with others and relatives. She has no real connection to anyone. She has been abusive to my husband all his life. He is coming to terms with a lot of their history and I am so proud of him. My husband does not want any type of funeral services, just cremation. She did say she wanted to be cremated in the past. It just seems weird to me not to have a service. He has had her cell phone since December when she went into NH and not one person has called. This is one of his reasons for no services. Not sure why this bothers me. She has been awful to me all the years I have known her and had done things even to our children (now adults) mostly trying to turn them against each other and against us. Anyone have experience with this?
She wanted us to remember her by getting together with our adult kids and our niece and nephew’s family for a dinner together. (My husband’s brother, their father, had died previously). We did this and also got everyone together when the stone was set in the cemetery and the ashes buried. All this to say, I don’t think it’s too uncommon anymore not to have a service, especially since the pandemic. Perhaps something like this would be a good fit for your family, to mark this passage and support each other.
There is nothing wrong with that.
And for the record , it’s going to take your husband time to wrestle with closure over his mother’s life more so than with her death .
Our solution was to have a simple graveside service with a brief prayer by a clergyman. Her caregivers and children were there. I made a CD or DVD with pictures of her from her youth through her old age. It included photos of the beautiful knit items and clothing she'd created. We sent it to people who might have an interest, such as distant cousins that she'd kept up with occasionally in the past. They could play it on their computers and TVs.
There are better and less expensive ways to honor the deceased than to expect everyone to hop on a germy airplane and fly 3000 miles to listen to an organ playing "Amazing Grace" followed by a germy buffet lunch. And then back onto the germy plane. We're so over it!
BUT....
Sometime this summer arrange a gathering of friends and relatives and have a no pressure, laid back gathering. Call it a "celebration of life" if you want.
"We" are so inundated with the "Hallmark" life that if we don't have that we think something is wrong.
There is no "right or wrong" about how we chose to have our funeral.
Support your husband and other family members. It sounds like she may have been a bit of a challenge.
It is very sad that she pushed away those who loved her especially your husband who sounds like an amazing human. 🙏
For my own partner, his mother was very difficult his entire lifetime with her. He was nothing but relieved of his Sunday call when she was gone. She was at peace, finally, and so was he. Sadly this is simply the fact for some of us.
Seems to me that her wishes for cremation should be honored. The funeral establishment will honor that wish and will even take over the disposal and spreading of her ashes for the family.
He got Parkinsons, was competely broke and owed all sorts of money, even the home they lived in had an underwater mortgage because he just kept borrowing money against his equity because he was a lazy deadbeat lose.
Yet when he started falling due to his condition he thought we were going to run over there at all hours of the day and night (we lived 6 miles away) to pick up his 6'4" body when he refused any outside care and wouldn't assign a PoA and wouldn't apply for Medicaid -- after he had me fill out the entire application then refused to sign it when he realized he'd have to give up his measly $963 SS income.
Fast forward to us reporting him to APS who got him a court-assigned legal guardian who transitioned him into a Medicaid facility where he passed just hours after we brought my MIL to visit him. The county cremated him and no one wanted his remains, not even his sons. He had made no real friends. He got what he planned for and what he cultivated his whole life.
You feel bad about your MIL because it is unimaginable to decent people that one can be so awful as to die and literally no one cares. But your kids are watching and had some interactions with her. If you do anything with her remains, it'd be for the sake of what your kids see and interpret. I think you're the only one that can answer this.