I Want a Funeral

When I move on to join the invisible choir; when I kick the bucket and, then, quickly following thereupon, buy the farm, just to be sure I did things properly, I don't want a "Celebration of Life." I want a good, old-fashioned, tear-jerking, black-clad funeral. 

Have whatever you want for your loved ones. Call it what you want. I'm not judging you. These things are personal choices and no one can be told they are doing things "wrong" and I'm not trying to do that. It's just that, for me, I think the best thing to do when someone dies is to be somber and sad. We're wired to cry when we lose loved ones, and cry we should. 

I get it, though -- the whole "celebration of life" thing. A while ago, I lost a close friend. He was younger than I am and we lost him to an unseen heart ailment. He wasn't religious, so there was a remembrance...thing. I don't think anyone called it a "celebration of life" but we spent most of our time sharing funny stories. (He was the most obnoxious, irreverant, inappropriate, foppish oaf I have ever known, and I [and we all] loved him for all of that.) The whole thing was full of laughter with a sprinkling of tears. 

But, it's weird. I find a strange sense of open-endedness in his loss. That's the best I can describe it. Of course, I'm not the important one here. As long as his family got what they needed from the day, that's all that matters. 

In the end, I think I want a little more gloom at my funeral: people standing in the rain in sunglasses, looking all pale and drawn; distraught loved-ones having to be pulled away from my coffin so it can be lowered into the ground; a priest who intones like Max von Sydow; low, slow-rolling thunder; Barber's "Adagio for Strings" running through everyone's heads; one of my sons, kneeling under a rising crane shot as the rain falls, yelling "Why!? WHAAAYYY!!??" up to the deaf,  leaden heavens... That kind of thing. 

Call me grim. (I'll wait.) 

My biggest loss, ever, has been my dad. We had a traditional, Catholic funeral. I wrote this and read it, tearfully, at times, and there were many tears because of it. We only moved away from long-standing tradition in two ways. First, there was no open coffin; he had said, many times in his life, that he did not want that, so that was non-negotiable. Second, he was cremated. I have a small regret about this. When I visit his grave, I really don't feel like I am visiting "him." To have known he was under that headstone in his physical form (at least in my memory) would have been comforting to me. Ashes don't feel the same. 

In the end, all of tthese post-death procedures are for the living. My dad, being dead, doesn't care about any of this; neither does my friend. In the end, I want my family to do what they want -- whatever they need. But I strongly urge them to consider going about things in the way things have been gone about for centuries: tears, gloom and black clothing. Somehow, we decided, at some point, as a human collective, that this is what we needed. There must be a reason for that...

A Footprint in Time

Last week, we attended the "Night of the Arts" program at my sons' school. My boys are in the choir

and in the band and their performances, under the new music teacher, who is excellent, were outstanding. At the end of the night, though, a slight problem: the handle on my son's trumpet case had broken.

Let me tell you about the case, and the trumpet it contains. When I was in middle school, my father, who made his living as an arranger and a trumpet player, decided to buy himself a new horn. He went with a Bach Stradivarius "'73 Lightweight." It was an very expensive instrument; today, to give you an idea, the trumpet lists for around $4,000 to $5000.

My dad played it for awhile, but decided, in the end, that he liked his Yamaha horn better and he went back to that one. So, when it came time for me to start playing trumpet in the school band, he handed me the Stradivarius and said, "Just be careful with it." I have to say, deserving of it or not, I played it for quite a few years, and not a dent.

My son received the treasured (and expensive) family heirloom with the same instructions, and he is also doing well with it.

When the case handles broke, I went to look online for a replacement case. The case my father had (a Bach case), in an updated form, costs $300, so I decided to simply look for replacement handles. I found them and ordered them, so, problem solved.

Before I ordered, though, I wanted to measure the broken handle. For this, I needed to take it off of the case. As I unbuckled the ends, I had to pause. That handle had also been a replacement for the original one. It struck me pretty hard: the last pair of hands to buckle that handle onto the case had been my dad's.

He's gone now, but, that small thing he did remained done until that moment. A moment, from the past, overlooked and, in the grand scheme, unimportant was preserved. That moment in which he simply fixed that case was preserved as long as that handle remained buckled. A silly thing, isn't it? But it always seems to be those things are the most profound evidence of a person's existence -- things from the everyday that endure like footprints in time.

It feels a little like I brushed my dad's hand when I took that handle off -- like we touched each other, if only in the most brief and ethereal way.

"Soul" (Why I Don't Miss My Dad So Much)

Many of my fairly regular readers know that my dad passed away in December of 2013. Ever since then, I have been very much aware of people online and in life posting and talking about missing their deceased parents, every day -- even parents who have been gone for decades.  I see memes about the "hole" in the lives of children who lost their fathers and mothers and I feel a mix of guilt and puzzlement, because I don't feel that way.

Our view. A little bit of loss of the strings'
presence, at times, but a visual feast for the
boys' impressionable minds -- and mine.

Should I feel slightly emptier without my dad in the world? Strangely, I feel just the opposite.

I have long thought that people who have an extremely hard time with life after the normally-timed and non-tragic loss of their parents (that is, excluding those who lost their parents way too early or whose parents were eaten by escaped zoo animals) might be wrestling with regrets. I do miss my dad from time to time, but that is all. I sometimes miss his presence. For us, there was nothing left unsaid; there was no movie-plot father and son headbutting or dark competition between us. He loved and respected me and I knew it; I loved and respected him and he knew it.

So, there's that.

Corny as it may sound, though, real connections cannot be broken even by death. I think of Donne's great poem "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" and though his poem refers to romantic love (and even makes some bawdy references) the general idea can apply to familial love, too, especially when the speaker says:

In Memoriam of "In Memoriam"

I have had this thought for a long time and I have hesitated to say it for fear of seeming insensitive. But, what the hay?

My heart goes out to all who have lost a loved one. I know the feeling, intimately and recently. It is horrible. And when we lose someone, we want to do something to make things feel better for ourselves and for everyone else associated with the loss. In my case, recently, that something was to write a post about my dad, which became his tribute at the funeral.

I think that people are losing an important concept.

Today, I was reminded again of this. I was driving to work past a VFW hall and there was this message on the sign: "In Memory of Lou Smith." Very often, too, I will see people with stickers on their rear windows: "In Memory of..."