Loss of loved ones is always traumatic and always requires sort-term and long-term emotional recovery. In situations where the family has the opportunity to hold a funeral ritual and also to include the remains in whatever particular way their culture prescribes, the funeral ritual provides an opportunity to fully (and publicly) express grief in the manner that (at least) eliminates the unconscious (or repressed) grief of loss that can otherwise re-emerge long after the typical grieving process. Families who have certainty about the loss of their loved one also have the opportunity afforded by psychological closure to begin the long-term process of emotional recovery to the normalcy of life without acute emotional sorrow or worry.
By contrast, in situations where their surviving family members lack certainty about the loss and have no opportunity to hold a funeral ritual, surviving family members may not have an opportunity to fully (or publicly) express their grief sufficiently to remove it from their unconsciousness; they may hold residual grief much longer after the loss and experience it unpredictably much longer than the typical acute phase of grief. There is almost certainly a form of catharsis associated the full expression of grief made possible by funeral rituals that is absent otherwise.
More importantly, the closure provided by the funeral ritual and by actually witnessing the burial (or disposal) of the remains of the deceased allows the survivors to fully accept that the deceased individual is gone permanently. That...
Meanwhile, surviving family members of soldiers designated "missing in action and presumed dead" (for example) have no such certainty. In that regard, the less certain the conclusion about death is the less closure the family can derive from the circumstances. They may be forever caught in between the grief that corresponds to the loss and the hope of mistake and eventual reunion. In essence, they never have the opportunity to fully accept the loss, to fully express their grief, and to begin recovering from the state of mourning.
Conclusion
Whereas the family of an individual who they had the chance to bury can begin recovering within the next year (or less), the family of the individual lost and merely presumed dead must live in a perpetual state of periods of mourning and periods of hope; even worse, they may also be continually plagued by fears of what could be happening to their loved one in the event they are not deceased. Ultimately, death is always traumatic on the survivors; however, the certainty of the funeral ritual helps survivors fully accept their loss and begin the process of recovery from grief.
Sources Consulted
Levine, Carol. Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Bioethical Issues. 12th Ed. Dubuque
Iowa: McGraw Hill. 2008.
Sagan, Carl. Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium. New York: Random House. 1997.
