05/04/2024
Wise words indeed
If you think you should go to the funeral, you probably should, even if you didn't know the person directly.
At the reception after my dad's funeral, a woman I didn't recognize came up and introduced herself to me. It turns out that she was the daughter of a dear friend and colleague of my dad's from decades earlier.
I had never met the woman, or her father, although when she told me his name, I knew exactly who he was. I had grown up hearing stories about him.
The woman's father had died 20 years earlier, but she'd seen the obituary, and recognized my dad's name the same way I recognized her father's. She took the afternoon off work, and came to my dad's funeral, on her father's behalf, to honour the depth of the friendship between these two men, both now dead.
We hugged each other and cried. We cried for fathers, for friendship, and for the village-making beauty of a funeral.
Why her coming mattered to me is almost impossible to put into words. It's a truth that lives in the realm of symbolic soul reality, not logical, linear, material reality. That's the heart-and-soul part of dying, the part that's made real by participation in ritual.
