August 7th, 2006 by Hoopleton

Funeral homes seem to all have been built sometime in the 1940s. Worn carpeting, tattered wallpaper stained yellow. It’s always yellow. Low ceilings that look as though they may cave in on top of the mourners. The furniture is always a dark wood. There are curtains hanging up along the walls.

I was at the funeral of my friend’s brother today. A long hallway led from the entrance to a large room where photographs of the deceased were displayed on poster board. Some people cried, but most just kept their hands in their pockets in an awkward gesture of impotence. No one really knew what to say to the family.

“My condolences.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

“It’s a good turnout today.”

Eventually the tears gave way to conversations about cars and work. The weather was mentioned often. Sometimes some poor soul would think it proper to bring up the reason why everyone was gathered there. A moment of reflection usually followed, but it wouldn’t take long for the chatter to return to less important things.

I sat on a couch at one point, staring at the window and the sunny day outside. I did what most of us do when confronted by someone else’s death… I thought about my own.

It is sad to me how little time we all have here. If we’re very lucky we might get seventy-five to eighty good years on the planet. That’s just enough time to accomplish barely anything. It’s just enough time to fill yourself up with a laundry list of regrets. And yet that short time seems so full of beauty and possibility that it almost brings tears to your eyes.

No one will ever know the precious few moments that you keep with you. No one will ever understand the complexity of emotion and experience that makes you who you are. To try and capture everything that makes an individual life is so difficult that for millennia, writers, philosophers and saints have been trying to find a language capable of even offering a glimmer of insight into what it means to live.

We are all so different. We are all so complex. But in the end we all end up at some 1940s style funeral home, starring up at a dilapidated ceiling while around us people chose to ignore that death is simply the most ironically fitting part of living.

“At least it’s not as hot today.”