No More the Insane, Memory Lane Runs in the Other Direction

There's rarely anything to say to someone at a funeral beyond, "I'm sorry". Sometimes you can get by with "I'm *so* sorry". But there's also rarely anything you can say in response to "I'm sorry". Phoenician in a Time of Romans went with "That sucks", which is actually what I've been saying all week. It's got sincerity, accuracy, and even some novelty going for it, though it is possibly not something that goes over too well in a church funeral.

Catholic funerals are odd, too. It's essentially a mass, like any other Sunday, except that there's this body doing centerpiece duty, in much the same way that you sometimes get a Christmas tree or Easter lilies or whatever front and center. For most of the mass, they close it and put a drape over it, in the way that military funerals use flags. And it mostly just sits there and is referred to from time to time, but, just until the end, generally in an allusionary fashion. In fact, if you aren't familiar with Catholic funerals, you might get the impression that the funeral mass is being said for Jesus.

It's a little hard to connect the big shiny box with someone who helped raised you, someone who you were named after, someone who always found something to love about you even when you were at your most unlovable. It's hard to connect the shiny box under the ecumenical tablecloth with someone you've seen telling jokes, or sick with the flu, with the arms you remember always being wrapped around you, with the hands that taught you to do things. It's really hard to connect it with the voice.

It was for me, anyway. I hadn't seen her in over a year, and that's my fault. I live away from my extended family, and we don't get along that well. Or, rather, we get along best at a distance of at least a couple hundred miles, where we don't talk often enough to get into fights, or to deal with any of the mistakes we've all made that are past correcting. Of course, it's a mistake in and of itself that can't be corrected, but you have to balance it with the other mistakes it keeps you from making. Family is complicated that way. No decision gets made in a vacuum; there are always good and bad reasons to do or not do anything. You make your choice and you accept the consequences.

For my part, I know that they're disappointed with what I am. I may overestimate the amount of disappointment, but maybe not. And I can't make them understand that I'm *not* disappointed with what I am. My grandmother was never disappointed with me. Or at least she never let it show, which is all I would have asked for. But I'll be the first to admit that it hasn't gone the way any of us expected it to go, and I expected her to be disappointed with me, which it didn't seem like either of us needed.

I'm not giving her enough credit, of course. She was never anything but generous in every way, and I'm sure she'd have found something to be pleased about even with me. I'm not sure why I didn't give her the chance, but I would guess it was a decision based more on the rest of the factors involved in family visits.

We're already well into TMI territory here, but I dissociate a lot, and it still doesn't entirely feel real. That's going to take some time, I know. At some point, I'll start dealing with it, and at some point I'll figure out how, and at some point things will go mostly back to normal. It hurts right now, but not in the way that I know it will later.

Funerals are strange, anyway. Not just Catholic ones. I understand what the point is, or at least half of it. I know we're gathering together to in some way honor the person who's died, but I have to admit I've never seen how it helps to be standing over a collection of minerals in a fancy box. If there's something after this, the dead have moved on already by the time we start buying them flowers. If there's not, there probably isn't much point anyway. To be honest, it would have made more sense to me to send the flowers to my mother, who is still around to enjoy them. And that's where the other part of a funeral comes in, the part I get but can't help with. We're there to comfort each other in grief. I understand that. But, it's not something I know how to do. The offline me doesn't have a delete and a save key, and is poorly medicated to boot. It's socially inept and just says incredibly stupid and thoughtless things (even the online me does that on a regular basis, and it *does* have a delete key and a review function). But it just makes people feel worse, including myself. Nobody needs extra stress at a funeral, or any other time.

Funerals give me no closure. They merely delay the point where I stop trying to plan out things and stop trying to be who I'm not, and actually get down to remembering, and grieving. The distraction is welcome, the additional stress is not.

My mother took the flowers that I had sent to the funeral home with her, as it's Lent, and there can't be flowers left in the church for masses. She decided to do it without any prompting from me, so hopefully it actually was something that helps her. They were a basket of mixed purple ones. It was somewhat short notice because I am not an organized person, but I think my grandmother would have liked the purple, and I liked the basket because I think of death, or at least I want to think of death, as a journey, as moving from one place to another. Cranes symbolize that for me, beyond the traditional associations, and so do flowers or plants in carriers, with handles. I'm sure that sounds stupid, but so do most spiritual and religious things, I guess.

The other interesting thing that sometimes gets done at funerals is that after the casket is lowered into the grave, the family and friends are invited to throw a handful of dirt into the grave. It's part of making a funeral into a celebration, because this person will be resurrected, so it's not really like death is permanent, and you're just helping Grandma to her next thing, and glad that she's "with Jesus now". I kind of suspect it's the sort of thing that your priest or other religious leader tells you you believe, and you maybe go along with it, even if you have your doubts. There's better comfort, but there's colder, too. Since I believe in reincarnation, I tend to view it as burying a dried flower that's got strong seeds in it. Either way, I do think my grandmother would have appreciated that symbolism.

There may be more later, or there may not be. Again, don't feel any compulsion to try to dream up something useful to say. You'll get stuck at "I'm sorry", and I'll have to say "Yeah, me too", and it seems to save us all a lot of angst if we just assume it's all been said already. I will say, and I maybe should have said it before, that if you have something you actually *want* to say, that's okay. Sometimes it takes us a long time to think through things and when we've come to a particular revelation about something, the rest of the world has moved on and we have to just fit it into our mental attics and try to catch up. Epiphanies don't just drop neatly into casual conversations, I've noticed. I just didn't want anyone feeling like they had to come up with something to say that hadn't been said before. This is a blog, not a greeting card. Speak up when you want, and the rest of the time I'll just rant to myself, and maybe a bit to my grandmother and other people you can't see, now and then.

The title of this post is taken from the song "Cemetery Row" off of the self-titled/untitled album by The Minus Five, sometimes referred to as "The Gun Album". You can get yours here. I've loved it since it came out, but this last week it's been exceptionally comforting in ways that are very hard to define. My taste in music is awful at best, but this one really is good, and it's not just me saying it. (Edited for direct link.)