At Her Funeral

So, my aunt’s funeral was two Sundays ago.  As selfish as this sounds, I was tired from the work week and the last thing I wanted to do on the first of my two days off was get up and be steeped in sadness for several hours.  I got up and went anyway, to pay my respects and such.

I found the entire affair quite annoying.  It was too artificial, too generic.  Maybe I say that because I went to so many funerals last year that they’ve all started to blur together or maybe death is something so inexplicable that no one really knows what to do except offer an apology and a hug but it all seemed so surface and standard.  I sat several rows away from my uncle and cousin and watched as person after person hugged them, patted them on the back, offered a condolence and then moved out of the way for another person to do the same thing.  It was like a conveyor belt of bereavement.  Even when the preacher stood up at the podium to speak, he chose a generic verse from the Bible and basically used the time he should have been talking about my aunt to get on a soapbox about salvation. 

I didn’t look at her body.  I never look at the bodies.

After a prayer and dismissal, we were in the car and it was over.  And that was the end of my aunt. 

You’d think after experiencing a real death in my family, it would put my metaphorical death into perspective a little bit, almost like I shouldn’t be talking about being dead and taking it so lightly when death is something so real and permanent and serious.  But, that’s just not the case.  I’m actually not taking it lightly at all.  There are times when I truly feel dead on the inside and that is not a feeling to take lightly and it’s certainly no laughing matter.  I don’t throw around these terms for dramatic effect or for attention.  I’m just trying to express how I feel as accurately, genuinely and creatively as I can and the closest concept I can connect with my feelings is that of death.  And really, isn’t death a disconnect of some sort?  When you die, your body is disconnected from your soul and from the earth.  Your expression, your language, your communication is cut off from everyone else.  You are in a different place entirely.  And really, doesn’t that sum me up?  I’m just as disconnected as the dead, maybe not physically, but mentally and emotionally.  I am just…off.

I suppose that’s easy for me to say because my aunt and I weren’t that close.  Her death really didn’t affect me at all.  Maybe I can continue to keep up my fatal facade because the gravity of true physical death has never hit me.  When it does, I might cast out my death mask as insensitivity and nonsense.  Hopefully it won’t even come to that because I hope to regain my own life before anyone else’s is taken.  Unfortunately, things are looking rather bleak on that front.  Recent circumstances have actually only reinforced my cadaverous condition.  Things just seem to keep getting worse and the worst part of that is that I’m the one exacerbating my own entropy.  It’s funny because my initial goal once I found out I was dead was to preserve myself the best I could until I could find life again but I’ve only managed to scrape deeper the grave that I’ve slowly been carving for myself.

Yet, life goes on.  But, I’m not a part of life anymore so where does that leave me?  I fear I’m falling behind more and more each day.