I was forbidden from going to my great-grandmother's funeral with my parents even though I was 11 and an extremely well-disciplined child. "We want you to remember her as she lived, not as she died" was the reason given at the time, but leaving me out of the event where people were remembering her as she lived didn't make sense to me.

When my grandfather died when I was 15, not only wasn't I allowed to go, but I had to stay home and watch my siblings as my parents traveled a thousand miles away for a week. We more than had the money for plane tickets. They just didn't want to bring us (youngest was 10, and also not troublesome).

For my other older relatives, they've all insisted on not having services, and I can't help but feel it's both an effect and a cause of the fact that my extended family is very disconnected and fragmentary.