Obviously I wasn’t really online yesterday, partially because I was so busy and partially because there’s a certain sacredness about a funeral that does demand your attention. Or it should, anyway. Overall, it was a very nice day. My father-in-law wasn’t particularly religious, so it wouldn’t have made sense to do the usual sort of pomp-and-circumstance type funeral.  He wasn’t actually Buddhist either, but much of his family is so there were a lot of little touches in that respect. I actually found it to be far more comforting than other funerals I’ve attended. Maybe it’s because it was so relaxed and laid back – there was no priest, no overtone of forgiveness or sins or anything like that. (Yeah, I come from the Catholic background – every funeral I’ve been to has been dark and depressing and terribly solemn.) We had a table set up with his picture and… Read more

There’s something sort of mind-numbing about the process of death. On one level, there’s grief – however a person chooses to acknowledge it – and sometimes that can take a while. But there’s also the fact that the world as a whole doesn’t stop turning, even if time has halted in yours. There are the mundane tasks of dealing with “arrangements”, banks to be called, hospital bills to take care of, family to notify, clothes and personal belongings to sort through. And memories to hold or cast away as one must. All of it has to get done by someone, so I suspect there’s a coping mechanism of sorts that allows us a few moments of pain and then pushes us forward, back into “normality,” for at least the time it takes us to get things done. Although I have gone through this before, in some ways this is a… Read more