Funerals

This year I've had to attend two funerals, one for my grandmother and one for my mother-in-law. Neither was a surprise, and both were painful. They say these things come in threes; if so I can wait.

Both of the funerals were bittersweet. They were celebrations of lives lived with courage and grace, attended by family and friends. Strangers whose stories you have heard but never had a face to match to. An underlying sadness that the vital connector for our disparate lives is no more.

My wife and her sisters are now having to sift through the boxes of paperwork that even a normal, too short life accumulates. Their mother was a very organized person, and a lover of writing, journals, correspondence, short stories and two published novels, so there is more than might be usual. It is a form of closure, I suppose.

I feel useless now, same as I did for my grandmother. All I can do is stand ready in case heavy lifting is required, or a pickle jar needs opening. I can be a source of calm for my wife, a shoulder, a maker of coffee and burner of meals that she doesn't feel like making.

She says she's grateful, so I try to be more calm and shoulder-y. I can't help but think that this is dreadful practice for later in life, when these things become more common, but I don't want to think about it. They say the stages in your life can be marked by what formal occasions you attend, the gateways of our lives. Children go to Confirmation or Bar Mitzvah, young men and women graduate, then start going to all the weddings of their friends, then the showers for their kids, then the funerals. All of my friends who are likely to get married and have kids have done so. After that it's mainly funerals. It feels like I've reached the funeral stage, and I can't wait for the next generation to start up the graduations and weddings so I can vicariously feel more hopeful.

Even a celebration of a life well spent is a reminder that life is meant to be spent, and to be careful how you spend this one life.

 

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