Three Funerals in a Week

   This week was supposed to be a joyous week.  Getting ready for a close friend’s daughter’s wedding.  Planning what to wear, practicing the dances.  Joy was to be had. 

     Then the messages start coming, one of my husband’s school mate’s son, just 31, fit, healthy, died.  He had been exercising when he got dizzy.  When he felt better he decided to go home.  Unfortunately, he went on an escalator and when he reached the top, he got dizzy again and fell backwards all the way down.  At the hospital they said that he had a tear in his aorta which caused the dizziness, that they were able to repair, the fall however had caused a brain injury, that they were unable to fix, and after three weeks he passed.  The father’s classmates who had prayed for a miracle came out in droves, arriving at the crematorium to help a friend say good-bye.  When the person is very old or has been very unwell, it is a bit easier to say good-bye, but a young man in the prime of his life, who has died in a strange series of events, it in unfathomable.

     We were attending a wedding reception, when we received news that a close friend’s father passed.  He had been unwell, but it was not expected.  So we went from celebration to mourning in an instant.  The next afternoon once again we arrived at a cremation ground to say good-bye and to offer comfort to the grieving family. 

     Two days later I am awakened by an early morning call, knowing what is coming just from seeing the name I braced myself for the bad news.  My husband’s maternal uncle (his mom’s cousin), had gone into the hospital with a severe gastric infection, he had delayed going to the doctor and his blood results were extremely bad, and he was placed in the ICU, after treatment started, he had rebounded and all of his blood work was starting to normalize, but the damage had already been done and he went into multi organ failure and septicemia.  A man whom I loved and respected, whose sense of humor was so wry and witty, was gone.

    Three years ago I lost my mom.  After more than in a month in different hospitals, my mother passed in hospice with my siblings and I holding her hands and telling her it was OK to go. Shortly after her passing we left her there, knowing that the funeral home would pick her up and take care of what needed to be taken care of for the funeral.  My siblings and I went to the funeral home two days later.  In a conference room we made such important decisions as to flowers and poems and what her obituary would say.  We then went down to the funeral home basement and chose her coffin and burial liner (I never even knew they had to have a liner) and the design of her memorial pamphlet.   We met with the pastor at my sister’s house and she listened to our stories.  We then had a viewing where many of Mom’s friends and family came to see her and tell their stories to each other.  The next morning was the final funeral service.  We decided not to have any eulogies, because no one thought they would be able to get through, but the Pastor told our stories well.  We then went in a procession to the cemetery and said our last good-bye prayers.  We then invited everyone to join us for lunch. That was the end of the funeral rites.

   Almost two years ago we lost my mother-in-law.  She passed in her own bed in the late afternoon during her nap, as her loved ones talked in the living room.  While she had been unwell, her passing was unexpected.   The drawing room was cleared and her body placed on a sheet on the floor, with her head facing east.  Friends and family began to arrive.  Once again decisions were made, which paper the obituary would be in, what it would say.  A mortuary van was booked and so was a cremation time slot.  My father-in-law stayed with Mummy’s body until the early morning.  I woke him up and sent him away so I could wash her body and dress her in her wedding sari.  Shortly after the family and friends began to arrive again.  Prayers and rituals were performed by the family and friends.  She was then transported in the mortuary van to the cremation grounds where once again some rituals were done.  Finally she was carried to the crematory furnace, last prayers and rituals were said, she was then slid into the furnace and her son had to push the button that started the fire.

    I have come to realize that it matters not which style of mourning you follow.  Grief will come at you in waves, sometimes small waves lapping at your ankles, other times a tsunami that doubles you in pain.  It is just important to have a way, a process, of saying good-bye.  Funerals are not for the dead for they are gone, they are for the living.  Funerals are a way to begin letting go of our loved ones.  With my Mom, she was there one moment and her soul left and she was gone, but I knew she was gone and I said my good-byes and wished her well.  Hoping that loved ones who have gone before would meet her.  With my Mother-in-law she was coherent in the morning, but never woke from her nap. It was only as I bathed and changed her that I could say good-bye and hope that loved ones who have gone before would meet her.  

    This week there have been too many losses.  The ache and sympathy I have for all mourners awakens the desolation within me regarding those I have lost.  My thoughts twirl with memories of those whom I’ll not meet again until it is my time to go. Now that the final rituals are done, I must once again consign my feelings of loss to the back of my mind and turn my attention to the living, to rejoice in those I still have around me.