funeral revelations

A girl stands in the pews of a church. She is surrounded by family she has not seen in years – most of whom she hasn’t spoken to since she was standing in this exact place six years ago. She stands in a silence accompanied by the breath of her parents and the trembling hum of the air conditioning. It’s a cold, late May afternoon. The eerie and seemingly unnecessary chill of the church provided her no further solace. The opening of the double doors in the back of the room breaks the silence. The girl cranes her neck back and follows the casket as it moves through the center aisle. For a moment, she feels sick. She feels the sort of nausea that comes with the awareness that there is simply a dead body in a box in the same room she is standing in. A hollowness forms in her chest because in that moment she begins to grieve. Though she isn’t grieving the loss of her great grandfather – she barely had a relationship with him outside of Christmas Eves and the occasional Thanksgiving. She was upset about his passing of course, but she wasn’t quite grieving. This grief came from the all-consuming realization that the life she had known prior to her great grandfather’s passing was a chapter of life that could never be revisited. She stands in the consciousness of how permanent the loss of life truly is. The idea of anything being permanent scared her. The pastor’s voice interrupts her train of thought. The service is beginning. 

The pastor opens with the words he had prepared – likely a version of the speech he had given at other funerals. He delivers a stock speech of words in an attempt to console broken, grieving hearts. The words resonate with those who are listening. The pastor has a certain satisfaction knowing that he helps in the healing process for those who have lost a loved one, but at each funeral he is only further reminded of the inherent temporariness of life. Something about the regularity of this speech makes his stomach churn. 

The girl thinks about how the last time she was standing here she had been mourning her grandmother – truly mourning. She recognizes the pastor’s voice as the same voice she had heard all those years ago. At the beginning of the service, the girl felt little to no emotion at all. She was sad, but more so sad at the idea of death itself as opposed to her great grandfather’s passing. She feels guilty for this. As the service progresses, the odd familiarity of his voice brings back the emotions she felt on that September morning. The blood from her cheeks disappears. Nausea and dizziness and frustration and helplessness engulf her like a wave. She misses her grandmother so, so dearly. 

Her eyes begin to form tears. She tries to conceal her sudden outpour of emotion through a series of rapid blinks and subtle head tilts. For whatever reason, she does not want her family to know that she felt sad. Almost bashful of the fact that she was still grieving, after six years, at her great grandfather’s funeral of all places. Tears inevitably begin to stream down her cheek, but she just let them fall and linger on the bottom of her chin. 

The girl is not religious and doesn’t believe in any variation of God, but in this moment, she so badly wants to believe. As if believing in God would bring the girl closer to her grandmother because she believed. As if the existence of God would give justification for her grandmother’s death. That her death was something other than the amalgamation of a decade’s worth of sickness. Maybe God took her for a reason. In which case she would feel resentment towards this God. The internal conflict she created in her head over the contemplation of this supposed God’s actions begins to exhaust her. The people around her flip open the pamphlets that were handed out prior to the service. She does the same, finds the first hymn, and starts to sing The Lord’s My Shepherd. 

While mindlessly singing along, she considers how vividly she remembers the pain she felt in the days after her grandmother had passed. The shock, disbelief, and denial that morphed into utter heartbreak and hopelessness. She feels everything in that moment just as she did years ago. The physical manifestation of her pain takes shape through hotness in her cheeks, an empty feeling beneath her ribcage, and an erratic heartbeat. The last six years she spent everyday processing and attempting to heal after her grandmother’s death. She thought she made significant progress in moving towards the elusive stage of acceptance. This sudden, sharp influx of pain makes her begin to believe otherwise. 

She realizes how grief isn’t an emotion that is felt for one moment and then is gone the next. Or even one that is processed linearly in a consequent series of phases. The girl had been in a perpetual state of grief since her grandmother had passed. Though not as potent in some times as others, her grief sat idly under her skin. It simply resurfaced and buried itself given the circumstances of her life. She now understood that the statute of limitations for grief didn't exist – that there was something innately human about the ceaseless impact grief has on us. Perhaps she would never come to accept her grandmother’s death, because to accept would be to move beyond grief. To accept would be to live life without the indeterminable ache for her grandmother to return – somehow, someday. The girl would eternally long to feel the safety of her grandmother’s grasp just once more. To feel her breath on the nape of her neck. Her heartbeat on her chest. 

The service was now over. The pallbearers make their way to the front of the room. The creaks of the benches are followed by the sound of shuffling feet. Moving glacially, everyone makes their way outside while following the casket. The girl feels the shock of the sunlight and the coldness of the air as she opens the door. In this moment, she faces the reality of life. That in a way, life and death are synonymous because they exist in the same plane. That to acknowledge death is to recognize the existence of life. To acknowledge life is to accept its brevity and the inevitability of death. That it was possible to accept the concept of life and death, while also rejecting the life and death of people she continues to love and grieve. That she could move forward in life, even when the ones she cared for the most dearly no longer could. That she must move forward.