Funerals and visitations
Go, even when you feel you barely qualify, because families remember for decades who came. At a visitation or wake you may stay only fifteen or twenty minutes. Sign the guest book with your full name and your connection to the person who died, greet the family and keep it brief: "I am so sorry. I worked with your father for six years, and he was kind to everyone." One specific memory is the best thing you can offer. Leave out "He is in a better place," "Everything happens for a reason" and "I know how you feel," and never ask how the person died. At the service, sit behind the front rows, which are kept for family. When the obituary names a charity in place of flowers, give to the charity. Flowers are generally not sent to a Jewish funeral, where food for the family's home is the usual gesture.
Weddings
- Choose a gift from the registry and have it shipped to the couple's address, and set the amount by your own budget and not by the cost of your dinner.
- Arrive twenty to thirty minutes before the time printed on the invitation, and if you are late anyway, wait at the back until the procession has finished.
- Keep your phone away during the ceremony, and post no pictures until the couple has posted theirs.
- Sit where the place card puts you, eat something before the second drink, and leave the microphone to the people who were asked to speak.
- Find the couple and the hosts to thank them before you leave.
A service in a faith not your own
Follow the congregation, standing when it stands and sitting when it sits. Nobody expects a visitor to kneel, recite or sing. In many churches communion is reserved for members, so stay in your seat and let others pass. Some synagogues, mosques and temples ask visitors to cover their heads or remove their shoes, and coverings are usually offered at the door.
What they have in common
Graduations, award dinners and memorials run on the same rules. Be seated before the start, keep the phone dark, and stay to the end, which means you do not leave a graduation once your own graduate has crossed the stage. In a receiving line, give your name, say one sentence and move along.
Tip Mark your calendar for three or four weeks after a funeral and call the family then. The casseroles and the visitors have stopped by that point, and the grief has not.
