Three funerals

I went to three funerals this past weekend.  To give my actions context, I have to say that I usually do not go to funerals unless I feel it is very necessary.  Particularly in the last two years, I have found it difficult--almost verging on impossible--to attend funerals at all, even if I might have otherwise thought my attendance was necessary. For years before that, I would send a card or go to the viewing to give my condolences, but skip the funeral.  I cry too much at any funeral and usually come away with headaches that last for the rest of the week.  So for me to attend three funerals was unusual.  And I am glad I attended all three.

At one funeral, a friend put her arm around me and said she was surprised I could even come to a funeral since my mother had died so recently but, truthfully, it was less traumatic for me to go to each of these funerals this weekend (although they were still very sad and somber occasions for me) than any funerals have been for me in as long as ten years or so.

There seems to be a lot of talk at times about how long a funeral should be.  I believe a funeral should be however long it turns out to be.  There is no rehearsal for a funeral and there is no re-do.  There is no learning curve and generally not a lot of advance notice for planning.  I say if people have a problem with how long a funeral lasts, they should get up and leave whenever it is that they feel the funeral should be over and just leave the rest of the group to go on paying tribute to the deceased.  What else does the grieving family feel like doing that day?  Cooking?  Cleaning?  Going to doctors' appointments? Mowing the lawn?  What exactly does the grieving family need to rush through the service to accomplish?  Not a thing.

I thought a lot about my coming back to the place of my childhood to rub shoulders as an adult with the adults of my youth.  Truly, that is something everyone should have to do.  As an adult, I have had to revise my opinion of some of those adults from my youth, some for the better and some for the worse.  It has been good for me to overcome old and childish prejudices and aversions and come to really like some people and it has been really disappointing to me for some people to topple from various sizes of pedestals that I had earlier built for them.

At the funerals, I also thought a lot about the "back story"--the story behind each person's life that gives context to me for what those acquaintances and friends do and say and what provides context for those people's choices and life paths.  On the one hand, if you live among people you have known since birth, it is likely you also know their "back story."  On the other hand, as I am discovering more and more, you can know people for your entire life and still not even begin to know their back story.  Sometimes elements of the back story suddenly illuminate one's understanding of that person.  Sometimes the illumination is slight and sometimes it is huge.

I thought about how the adults of my youth are passing away.  And, by the same token, I realize that I am on the same conveyor belt that has been carrying them to their departure.  We have all been hurdling along toward the edge of the earth as we know it, and yes, the temporal world is flat and we will all go over the edge at some point.

I have given up trying to explain to my children how different the Tri-cities were when I was in my youth.  They do not get it, just like I did not get it when the adults of my youth yammered on about that topic. I realize that there was indeed a "ward family" and where we had the ward family and the people in the community all mixed up together as one in this Tri-City, it might have been even more "family" than not.  I grieve at the loss of those adults who were in the LDS ward of my youth. I have struggled to describe to myself how these people fit in with my life, an attempt to pigeonhole them. I certainly do not see many of them as casually as "acquaintances" but I cannot claim they have all air-brushed me into their family photos, either.  Many of them are somewhere in a subset just beyond my extended family but not far beyond, and some of them are closer than some in my extended family.  I really miss them once they are gone and I remember them fondly.

I thought a lot about voicing to people the good you see in them as you see it and not regretting later that you left the good things unsaid.

I thought a lot about the kids I went to school with--some of them I knew from Kindergarten through twelfth grade.  Most of them are in a subset a lot like the people who were in the ward of my youth--somewhere in a subset just beyond my family and some not very far beyond at all. If someone had told me at high school graduation that once I left the Fine Arts building after graduation that I would NEVER see some of my classmates again, or I would see some of them maybe once or twice in three decades, I would not have been able to believe it after seeing them daily for all of my then-life.  But it has become a truth.

I thought a lot about friendship.  A person said to me at one service, "You've always been our friend."  Well, in my heart I guess I had been, the way you mothball a friendship when you never see the friend and then eventually have only the past in common.  Perhaps I could have been a better friend but maybe I was all the friend that life allowed.  They have certainly had need of friends over the years, I gathered.

The Germans give a very narrow definition to friendship and I am sometimes prone to do that in my own life.  However, what do you say about people who were once your schoolmates or ward family but with whom you have lost contact?  You are not strangers, really, and yet your friendship is not current.  I find that once I like someone, I nearly always continue to like them in that same way despite distance and years.  But the relationship does not stay static, except in the heart, perhaps.

I came home from one funeral and happened to open a book I had checked out from the library.  At the front of the book was this quote that leaped out at me and immediately dovetailed with some of my funeral musings:  "For there is not a just man upon earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not."  Ecclesiastes 7:20.  I thought a lot about the circumstances that we are born into, our faults and failings, our good qualities and the good-parts version of our lives, and our eventual entrance into the Great Beyond.  I thought of how most of us do about the best we can with what we are given and with what happens to us along the path that life and our choices take us.  All of us experience faults, failings, disappointments, sorrow, difficulties, and all those shared experiences of mortality.  We are all probably doing better here than we think we are doing.

One weekend; three funerals; lots of time to think.