Funerals are for the living. The sad truth? I died yesterday. Yep, that's me, dead old Levi. Dont worry too much about me, nothing can be done now. And I didnt even die painfully, just a little heart attack. It was over before I knew it.
I worked as an accountant for a law firm in Brooklyn. I had a beautiful wife and 2 amazing children and an overall normal, uneventful life. Everything was okay. Everything is okay. The earth keeps turning and lives continue as usual. The world owed me nothing. But there was mourning. My wife and children cried and cried. And for what? Because they missed me. Even dead, I was wrapped in the warm embrace of their love. The funeral went on, normal, uneventful, a perfect representation of the life I had lived. No, not lived, I did not live, for I did nothing to be remembered. I made no impact on the world, or even in my world. I was just another statistic, another body added to the graveyard, another number in the death count, another funeral conducted, another employee lost, just another man. I had survived the world but I had not lived, I had not thrived. But it's okay. It's okay because no one can be disappointed in a dead man. What a horrible person that would make you, having expectations of the deceased. And yet, they cried. I may have not made a difference but I had been loved. I had been loved unconditionally. I did regret giving no warning, but I take solace in the fact that even I didn’t expect to die. As Chief Seatle called it, all of us are condemned to the “common destiny”, we are all fated for death. But somehow, even after millenia, we weep. We weep for the lives we have lost, for the people recalled and for people forgotten, the souls that crossed to the other plane. All the world’s a stage and all the men and women are merely players, each with their entrances and exits, until the final departure. There are 8 billion people in the world and approximately 2 people die every second, and all of them will be missed. They may not have been influential or important or life changing but they were loved. Maybe the point is not to be loved widely but to be loved deeply. I may not have been known by millions but the love I got from the few people close to me was worth more than the love of the masses. I was loved deeply, and maybe that matters. Maybe it matters enough.
Roelif Coe Brinkerhoff said, “Funerals are for the living. If we have not done for the dead while they were yet in flesh, it is too late; let the matter pass at the grave. Day by day we should live for those who are to die; and live so that we may die for those who are to live. Funerals are for the living.”
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