(no subject)
I've been to three funerals in my life. At presstime I'd been to more weddings, and I'd like to keep it that way. Not just because funerals are sad because someone died, but because funerals are such awkward creatures.
Those three funerals I've been to were all old people who had lived long, full lives and just had nothing else left to do but die. My grandfather when I was 9. My great-grandmother when I was 14. My step-grandfather when I was 20. I wasn't close to any of these people. Maybe I should've been. Maybe I am a bad person for not crying when I heard the news of their death, and instead feeling relieved that I had never had a real conversation with them, because at least now i'm not missing something that I used to have.
Despite my apathy, something curious has happened at all three funerals. I get dressed up in whatever will be deemed acceptable, take a seat on some pew in some suffocatingly holy church, and listen to the pastor or whatever the christian name is for the guy who talks about your family as if he knows.
And then I cry.
The worst part is that I want to bawl. My chest is a rubber band about to snap and my face is inside an oven and my lip quivers like my hands, but I can't. Maybe a tear or two will overfill the basin, but it's really not tolerated and the rest stay deep in the wells where they belong.
This feeling, though, it's not about the person who died. It's not about missing them, or the holiness of it all, or even the collective sadness of the cathedral ceiling and the ache of the stained glass.
It's all about the idea. The idea of dying and the ideal way everyone wants to do it and how you never get to choose the way you go. It's about things that I should have said and how I am sorry I didn't know you well enough to let myself cry at your funeral.
Ideas are historically what has governed my life, and in the same way that you should not drive angry, you should not let intangibilities helm your brig.
Those three funerals I've been to were all old people who had lived long, full lives and just had nothing else left to do but die. My grandfather when I was 9. My great-grandmother when I was 14. My step-grandfather when I was 20. I wasn't close to any of these people. Maybe I should've been. Maybe I am a bad person for not crying when I heard the news of their death, and instead feeling relieved that I had never had a real conversation with them, because at least now i'm not missing something that I used to have.
Despite my apathy, something curious has happened at all three funerals. I get dressed up in whatever will be deemed acceptable, take a seat on some pew in some suffocatingly holy church, and listen to the pastor or whatever the christian name is for the guy who talks about your family as if he knows.
And then I cry.
The worst part is that I want to bawl. My chest is a rubber band about to snap and my face is inside an oven and my lip quivers like my hands, but I can't. Maybe a tear or two will overfill the basin, but it's really not tolerated and the rest stay deep in the wells where they belong.
This feeling, though, it's not about the person who died. It's not about missing them, or the holiness of it all, or even the collective sadness of the cathedral ceiling and the ache of the stained glass.
It's all about the idea. The idea of dying and the ideal way everyone wants to do it and how you never get to choose the way you go. It's about things that I should have said and how I am sorry I didn't know you well enough to let myself cry at your funeral.
Ideas are historically what has governed my life, and in the same way that you should not drive angry, you should not let intangibilities helm your brig.