The person in the casket never looks like the person I had known before. What is more, it is not how I want to remember them anyway. That isn't them not to me.
At a memorial, we celebrate that person's life while most of the funeral's I have been to inevitably come down to the point of conversion/saving the survivors. Funerals make me want to run in the opposite direction. And I am already "saved."
Ray's Funeral is better and worse.
Good things are said about Ray. Beautiful Hymns are sung, but not the one hymn I most associated with him. The one he quoted in most of his blogs. I find it odd that it is not sung. Not even as I stood at his grave. Part of me wanted to start singing "Live for others every day."
But I don't.
Instead I stand there and realize that while I knew Ray all my life, I did not know his family and the only real knowledge I have of any of them came for the book. I feel like a voyeur with them. Having watched but never participated. Feeling intrusive on their grief even though mine threatens to consume me.
I dread the knowledge that Ray was my part of this world and now it is over.
Life has a way of ending things for me.
I would be one of the first in line if you could recreate a moment in time passed where you were content and stay there for the rest of your life.
I know that in actuality I am my own world and that is were I need to live. Not in this fragile one where I am constantly the stranger.
I understand it but even in the overcast gloom of the graveyard, the birds still sing and the grass still grows and my thoughts are like blades of grass bending in the wind.
At a memorial, we celebrate that person's life while most of the funeral's I have been to inevitably come down to the point of conversion/saving the survivors. Funerals make me want to run in the opposite direction. And I am already "saved."
Ray's Funeral is better and worse.
Good things are said about Ray. Beautiful Hymns are sung, but not the one hymn I most associated with him. The one he quoted in most of his blogs. I find it odd that it is not sung. Not even as I stood at his grave. Part of me wanted to start singing "Live for others every day."
But I don't.
Instead I stand there and realize that while I knew Ray all my life, I did not know his family and the only real knowledge I have of any of them came for the book. I feel like a voyeur with them. Having watched but never participated. Feeling intrusive on their grief even though mine threatens to consume me.
I dread the knowledge that Ray was my part of this world and now it is over.
Life has a way of ending things for me.
I would be one of the first in line if you could recreate a moment in time passed where you were content and stay there for the rest of your life.
I know that in actuality I am my own world and that is were I need to live. Not in this fragile one where I am constantly the stranger.
I understand it but even in the overcast gloom of the graveyard, the birds still sing and the grass still grows and my thoughts are like blades of grass bending in the wind.
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