Always Go to the Funeral

Always go to the funeral. It's an NPR piece - an article that shook me once and I took to heart. When you can, (you almost always can), you show up for the ones left behind - whether you knew or loved the deceased well or at all - because when a life is over, we measure impact by who comes.

Always. Go to the funeral.

I am sitting at the celebration of life for a boy three years my junior, the brother of my dear friend. He was a teacher. There are a hundred middle schoolers here. They are sobbing and holding one another, boys and girls alike, an entire community and I am watching the way they crumple and then carry one another. I think the kids are alright. The crowd overflows and swells and cries and mingles and mourn and I am struck by one face, of course, only. His mother. I am gutted by the idea of burying my son.

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Yesterday I got a call from one of my boy's teachers. "He had an anxiety attack in class. We spent lunch recess talking him down, counting breaths, learning to let go." I am not surprised by this call, not surprised that he holds his anxiety within his gut and his lungs. That when his grandfather is in the hospital and his grandma is fighting cancer, when his home life is sometimes tumultuous, though he is fed and sheltered and loved, he might crack, a little, at the edges. My heart is…