Babies and Funerals

It was a race between Terry and the Pope. On March 31, 2005, Terry beat the Pope.

Mitch Albom wrote:

Fairness does not govern life and death. If it did, no good person would ever die young…

Was at a funeral four weeks ago. Couldn’t write about it till now.

My cousin’s wife died from cervical cancer at the age of 43. I was not at all close to her. I can probably count the number of times we’d met. I’m not even at all close to my cousin. On my way to the funeral I was feeling the fear build up on the thought of having to walk into a funeral home all by myself for the first time, and contemplating on the minimum length of time I’d be expected to stay at the service before I could go home and catch my favorite TV show.

Though the funeral took a Christian style, Chinese traditions were not to be completely abandoned. Upon arrival, each guest was to take three bows in front of the deceased’s photo at the altar, then turn to the left and take a bow to the family.

The second I took my first bow, I felt my eyes filled with tears, and I was overwhelmed with emotions I couldn’t even explain. For the next three hours my eyes worked like a broken tap. But I was almost positive I wasn’t crying about my cousin’s wife. In fact, it felt as if at every drop, there’d be a whole new reason to cry.

Albom wrote:

Did you ever wonder why people gather when others die? Why people feel they should? It is because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn’t just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed.

When lightning strikes a minute after you are gone, or an airplane crashes that you might have been on. When your colleague falls ill and you do not. We think such things are random. But there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole. It is why we are drawn to babies…and funerals.