The Funeral

You just get one blogger this week... Wait! Don't let the title scare you. He's fine, he's just busy, so he left me to my own devices. I chose to take the chance to tell you how I'm really feeling, right now.

Thank you for being here.

Her Take:

Hi Friend. I hope you don’t mind the heavy ones because even as I’m just hitting the first key strokes I can tell you that this feels like it’s going to be heavy. If you do mind, I understand, and that’s ok. But can you stick with me at least until you know why I feel like it has to be that way? That would make this feel so much better. 

I don’t handle death well, I guess. At least that’s a thing I’ve heard has been said about me. 

And, ok. It might be true. Or! Or-or-or-or-or maybe, just maybe, I’m a rare and unusual person who deals with it EXACTLY the right way and that other person is wrong. Right? I’m just saying it’s possible. 

Either way, here’s what’s going on: last Thursday morning I was sitting at work and realized that I had forgotten to message my kids and arrange things to make sure everyone was going to be on time, properly dressed, and ready to go for my Aunt’s funeral. I sent that message, the details of it aren’t that important, from the chair behind my desk in the office where I work, and then I sat starting at the screen for a full minute or more. Not moving, just lost. 

You see, I had found out about my Aunt passing two weeks earlier in that same office and was walking down the hall, fresh from lunch, the next day when I learned when the funeral was happening and, yes, I had thought about it … about her really… in the days since but that was the first time I had stopped to think. The very next day we were going to say goodbye and I had to be there, and do that. 

And don’t let me get it twisted, ok? My Aunt and I were not that close, so I’m really afraid you’ll get the wrong idea here and offer sympathies that I don’t deserve. She was a complicated person to me, a person that I didn’t fully understand, and her relationship with my Mother, her sister, was as complicated as the relationship between siblings maybe should be. It was her example, in fact, that gave my Mother the chance to demonstrate one of her most important lessons: that you love the people in your family, even when it’s hard to understand them. 

So, I had to ask myself, why the dramatic tailspin? 

I wasn’t just upset that my Aunt had passed, I was (am) upset that people die at all. 

And, more succinctly, upset that I can’t control the fact that I get so damned upset about it. 

It’s both ironic and a little selfish, I know. 

There’s something so fundamentally Not Right about how my heart aches when I think of someone passing on, and it feels like a weakness. I cry too easily, get too sentimental, and fight all of that ending up with a mess of a human that virtually no one, not even the fool who married me, can really reckon with. 

This is a moment that I allow myself to sink fully into, like quicksand, and I won’t predict how long it will take for me to find the surface again. Friend, I don’t know why I’m telling you this. Maybe it’s totally self serving, maybe it’s my way of saying that I want us to mourn as loudly and as long as we need for our own souls. Whatever it is, I’d said it and we can move ahead. 

Well, almost. In a fit of my most grotesque melancholia, I wrote a poem to share with you. 

I was thinking about my Aunt when I wrote it, but it’s really for everyone I’ve lost. 

It might also be for you and whoever you've lost. Thank you for being with me.

The Funeral

We knew. 

We knew that they were crafting you wings

And that one day soon

Too soon

You would fly

Well above us and leave us here

On the ground

Missing you. 

Of course.

Of course they would be of gossamer threads

Light, airy contraptions, 

So fine

You would alight

As if you had always flown before

And we’d stay

On Earth. 

It’s true. 

It’s true that no matter what we knew

The moment came at last

Too soon

You were gone

Set adrift on new wings 

And we’re here

Looking up. .