When I attend funerals, I watch people lined up like ants locked on to a food source, hoping for inspiration to find words to heal wounds. But none come. Instead of helping, the drone of the “I’m sorry’s” and “Is there anything I can do’s?” drive stakes into already broken hearts. But still mourners line up, meaning well.
Were it not for a tear to cleanse and a heart to heal, death would always win. Though it may not make much sense, anger is real and necessary and feels like an elixir that drowns away the senselessness of someone being taken from the Earth far too soon. Yet they leave “survivors,” people who are supposed to remember and therefore keep alive the deceased in some heartfelt way.
Not that any of the funeral process really matters. Once the shock subsides, it leaves a vacuum. It’s like a butterfly becoming a caterpillar: Once it meets its destiny, there’s nothing left to do. So we grieve the loss; It’s really the only option. There is nothing to say or do that can replace the person who’s been lost. Once the “anima” has left, survivors remain, holding more questions than anything else.
What if the world ended today? Which is to ask, what if my time was up and I had to leave this world? Well, I’ve been lucky to have been draped in a cloak of unconditional love and I hope that love allowed me to have left the best part of myself so that anybody who wanted to carry me in their hearts would be able to do so.
How do I want to go out? I guess if I could choose, I’d die doing something so that someone else could live. But if it wasn’t my destiny to pass on that way, I would like to catch a twenty-ton meteorite and be incinerated all at once. Vaporized.
Once my arms stretched out to receive the falling star about to end my earthly sentence, I know that I was about to experience a purity that I’d always heard of, but never felt. Because, isn’t that what love really is, a moment when all questions become irrelevant, and life as what was suddenly ceases to exist?
