Funerals
I reckon every person has unique feelings about funerals. Logic dictates that funerals, whatever else they might be, are for the living, not the dead. At least this is the way I view it. As a consequence I don't attend funerals unless I am really close to the survivors. Today people move around a lot, so when many former friends die the funeral is far away. It would help if funerals were just for immediate family in order to get the body buried or cremated and then a month or two later a Memorial Service held at a convenient time with good weather so that people could plan a trip to the Memorial Service. I like Memorial Services better than funerals for another reason: these memorial services tend to be remembrances of the deceased by friends and family. This is far more meaningful to me than some religious droll. People in the audience are usually of varied religious beliefs so trapping them into a captive audience for religious prating is misguided. If I go to a funeral it is to support the family and remember the deceased, not to attend a religious service---that is what people go to church for.
Something is kind of weird about funerals, hard for me to put my finger on it, or generate any solutions. But many times the vast percentage of people present have made no serious effort in recent years to visit with, or communicate with, the deceased---yet there they are at the funeral. It just seems to me that if you are going to take the time, or travel a distance to be supportive of a friend, that ought to be done before they die, not after they are dead. People don't visit as much as they used to, communicative gadgets of various sorts replace visits. So, more and more, social gatherings become funeral oriented. For some, attending funeral services becomes pretty much their social gatherings. Of course there is nothing wrong with this, but it is not my cup of tea.
Even at Memorial Services it crosses my mind how much more it would have meant to the deceased if all these kind reflections on the deceased person's life could have been made while they were still alive to hear them. A kind of "please give me my flowers while I am living. It is funny how much more revered the dead are than when they were living. I have no solution. When I was teaching, required unsigned student evaluations were required. Students filled them out and one of the students would deliver the evaluations to the Dept. Office. Maybe we all need to be evaluated by our friends in a similar fashion. I don't think I would be so good at that. I tend to accept diversity, focus on the good in someone, and would be reluctant to 'burst their balloon' with insulting comments about their character. Of course no one does that at Memorial Services either. Too many people, too often, for too long, muddle through life with few supportive comments about their strengths. Then, when dead, the praise flows freely. Just weird.
I watched a giant front end loader scoop up dead bodies in Haiti and dump them into a mass grave. Just another indication that something is not right about human life on this planet right now. At a funeral some individual is dead and mourned. I for one, mourn less for those who have had a good life and die, than for those ever increasing number of humans on this planet who have essentially nothing, and live lives of quiet desperation until they perish from an early death. There ought to be daily services for these helpless 'living dead'. They ought to be paraded in front of us and we ought to be required to live amongst them. Maybe then, just a slim maybe, we would sacrifice a little to share a good life with them, and just maybe we would realize the atrocity of human overpopulation from irresponsible reproduction. How much human misery must accumulate before we are willing to face what is happening to our planet? How many species must disappear before we are willing to consider this unacceptable? Right now 87 species disappear from existence every day, some 30,000 a year. The death of individual members of a species is of no consequence to God's evolutionary process, but the death of a species? To miss the forest for the sake of the trees is fatal for human progress. Nature is already beginning to address human overpopulation and nature's methods in this area are brutal. This 'best of all possible worlds' appears to be heading full steam ahead to a major evolutionary correction. For people my age the question is: Just how fast is all this going to unravel? I think there ought to be a weekly funeral for all the species made extinct, for all the humans tossed in mass graves, for all the 'living dead' with no property, no health care, no clean water, no education, and no future. There are enough people in this category dying every week so that a front end loader could scoop them up and deliver them around the world so at each regional funeral we could watch them be dumped in a mass grave. Somehow, humans need begin to realize the severity of our situation on this planet. Obama's "yes we can" has no lasting power to it. Tis a pity, the "we" didn't last too long. We live in an age of instant gratification or else.
When I am dead I do not wish a funeral. I have no immediate family so there is no one in that category who need condolences. Most of my friends do not even know each other and live all over the place, so it would hardly be a social gathering with common friends. That leaves no purpose whatsoever to such a gathering. There is no imaginable reason why anyone should be burdened with arranging a funeral for some one in my category. I have had more than enough people be kind to me while living, and that is good fortune enough. A legitimate hermit should depart on his last voyage in solitary solitude. When dead I, for once, will have nothing to say. Death is not even remarkable----not to die would be astounding. When I meander thru a graveyard I look at all these stones and am reminded that for almost everyone, after about one generation, all living memories are gone about a person's existence. Gone with the wind is never more true. Kind of a sobering thought. I understand life is a continuum, that none of our lives started from scratch. Living cells beget living cells ad infinitum, and we but exist for such a fleeting time. In the lifespan of life on this planet our own lives are but a minute blip, like a firefly in the evening---a faint glow and then dark silence. The key to acceptance of all this is to understand, as best one can, the God's evolutionary process. We are, after all is considered, quite inconsequential as individuals BUT taken as a whole one can be ever so grateful for the opportunity presented to have been part of this astounding process. NOTHING LASTS FOREVER. We all know that, we really do. To sour on youth or health or love because it doesn't last forever is to be ungrateful for no purpose. Pretending life is otherwise ensures for sure no real contentment. Pretending that God is going to protect you from His evolutionary laws is to bring upon oneself endless frustration. Enjoy the show while it lasts, the curtain will come down sooner or later. If your family wants to have a funeral it is quite ok. If there is no need for a funeral that is quite ok too.
