Starting the Year with Two Funerals

We have two funerals this week.

One is for a longtime community activist and the other for a former alderman, people we’ve known for forty years. I won’t eulogize them here. They were just really solid people who showed up consistently over decades, listened to people, spoke up, and wrestled with the endless job of making things better. Are we better off because these two were on the earth? I suppose we are but we don’t have metrics. We just have what we want to believe.

I wonder who will be at their funerals. There will be family, for sure, and their oldest friends, even though both of the deceased were plenty old themselves. I remember my 89-year-old dad telling me his friends were dying and it was harder to find someone to play golf with. So there may not be many of their contemporaries there, but my husband and I would be close. Still junior to both of them as they would surely point out, especially as they retrieved various bits of advice to give us. They saw that as their job – nudging us to do better, warning us about this or that. Now we don’t have anybody doing that. We’re on our own out here.

Who will come to the funerals becomes a question of who will remember? I remember my brother waving away the need to have a funeral for my 84-year-old mother because, as he kind of heartlessly put it, “Who would come?” One of the people who passed away was still very present in local goings-on, a fixture at fundraisers and government meetings. The other had been in assisted living for a long time, retired from public life. So we don’t know who will show up, whether we need to arrive early to get a good seat or can wander in at the last minute. And then there’s the matter of what to wear.

There are people who refer to their blogs as musings. That might be what this is, a directionless riff on two funerals this week. Not everything has a beginning, middle, and an end. Sometimes there is just the end and figuring out what to make of it.