Funerals Suck
Funerals suck. And they hurt. On so many different levels. If you were close to the deceased, you’re probably in a great deal of pain. Probably devastated. The sense of loss can be so all-consuming, so overwhelming, so suffocating. You feel like you’re drowning in it.
Grief is best articulated by those who view it from the middle distance. If you’re too far away from it, you probably don’t know what you're talking about. If you’re too close to it, if the wound is fresh, and you’re staring the monster in the face right now, you’re probably too stunned to speak.
No one prepares you for how profoundly physiological it is. Your chest tightens so much that your breathing grows shallow, frightfully shallow, almost asthmatic. Your head swims with a dizziness that’s halfway between roller-coaster gross and the drunk spins. You shake uncontrollably from time to time, for no apparent reason. And you feel really nauseous. You think you might puke. Sometimes you do.
Even if you weren’t particularly close to the deceased, seeing others in so much pain, people you know and love, triggers a powerful empathetic response. Before long, you’re quite literally feeling their pain. There’s no such thing as an easy funeral, but those that force us to confront our own mortality are far harder than those that do not.
1. Funeral for the Sinful: Everybody saw this coming. The deceased made bad decisions which led to their untimely end. An addict who overdosed on heroin. A drunk driver who careened off a cliff. A career criminal stabbed to death in prison. A chain-smoker felled by lung cancer. Though deeply sad, this kind of funeral is, for most people, existentially speaking, the easiest to attend.
2. Funeral for the Elderly: Everybody saw this coming. And you can’t blame grandma for dying at 94. Nor can you deny the fact that her fate will one day be yours. But there’s no reason to dwell on this thought. You’re in your thirties or forties or fifties. And 94 seems so very far away.
3. Funeral for the Innocent: Nobody saw this coming. A 20-year-old athlete who drops dead of a heart attack as a result of a rare genetic defect. A 36-year-old hospital employee who was accidentally shot by a police officer whilst driving to work on a bicycle. A 32-year-old mother of three who dies of breast cancer despite a lifetime of clean living. A 43-year-old academic who randomly chokes to death on a piece of steak at a conference. “When it comes to death,” Epicurus maintained, “all men live in a city without walls.” When the innocent die, we’re forced to remember this.
