Funeral for a Friend

     My wife and I are fans of Rizzoli & Isles on TNT. One of the actors on the show recently committed suicide and the show wrote his death into the storyline by having him die in a car accident. The follow up show was about continuing on with life and the tribulations friends and family go through in the aftermath of such a sudden event. I thought the show did a good job within the time constraints it has in presenting a glimpse of how some of us react differently to the death of a friend or relative. The show  lead me to thinking about the way some funerals I attended affected me and how my attitude toward the entire idea changed.

     The first funeral I ever attended was my Dad’s four days after my 14^th birthday. Between the wake, the funeral and the people that came by our house I ran the gamut of weird handshakes over that first week. I don’t think I’ve been graced with as many dead fish handshakes combined in all the years since those few strange days. I really hated the whole experience, though we did have some lighter moments that week thanks to some of the folks that spent a lot of time there in the aftermath. Little did I know then how important those moments really were. I decided I would never go to another funeral until my own and was steadfast in that way of thinking until a close friend passed on almost 20 years later.

     I was asked to get up and say a few words at his memorial service and the request really surprised me. I spent time putting words down on paper figuring it would help me focus on the difficult task at hand. I still have the pages I wrote for that day and recently stopped to read them while digging through some old scribbles I've kept. I’ve kept them around for their significance because that experience changed me. It changed the way I looked at the strange rituals we humans have around death and presented me with a new attitude toward them going forward. I finally realized that day that funerals are not for the departed. What do they care what suit you put them in or how fancy the casket is because we can’t ask them anyway. The important part of the whole ritual I came to see is the bringing together in one place those people who had their lives touched by this man. I spent a good part of that day sharing stories about him with people I had never met previously that come to appreciate him as much as I did. It was truly a noetic experience realizing that this was what the ritual was about. Our common bound shared through one individual and the lives he touched by being who he was allowed all of use to come together to celebrate and remember our friend.  I'm sure others have come to a similar conclusion , so I guess I'm a little slow on the uptake apparently when it comes to some things. We can only understand what we can understand. 

     My views on many things have changed since then though I'm still not the first person in line when the time comes for a funeral. The one thing I do know now is a funeral really is an opportunity for those of us left to carry on a chance pool our spiritual resources so no one ever truly dies. So keep sharing stories of those who have moved on to keep their memory alive. I 'm going to.