Gaucho
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- Jul 13, 2000
- Posts
- 2,631
Yesterday I did something I'd never done in my entire life and hope I never have to do again. I attended a funeral. I've always taken the attitude that only one funeral really requires my attendance and if I could figure out a way to skip that one, I would. But yesterday…well, yesterday was different. The son of a neighbor, a 10-year old boy, died on Friday after battling brain cancer for a year. And so I took part in what has to be one of life's more difficult and emotional tasks, the funeral of a child.
Living in Vermont for the past several years has forced me to confront my method of dealing with tragedy. When I lived in Southern California, it was a simpler matter to blow by the obituary page and gloss over the seamier articles that dotted the newspaper on a daily basis. The size of the communities (one city blending into another) and the sheer quantity of the suffering combined to create an emotional sedative of sorts, a numbing effect. The lightning might strike all around me but as long as it didn't hit me or mine, it didn't register. For the better part of 25 years I lived and worked each day, whistling past the freeway, irrationally secure in the cocoon I'd constructed for myself.
Moving east changed all that. Vermont is more of a large township than a small state. You could, after all, fit the population of Vermont five times over into San Diego County alone. When tragedy happens here it is harder to ignore and, all too often, the local news or the obituary page carries a name and a face that you recognize. As you might imagine, the turnout for this boy's funeral filled the church to capacity and then some. As the mass began, the family and friends and well-wishers all took their place. And then the casket was rolled in. Unbidden and against my will, my eyes welled with tears.
Surely there are few things in life more obscene than a child-sized casket.
I looked at the parents for a reaction and saw none. They stood with their backs ramrod straight and their heads high, their eyes unblinking as the coffin bearing the body of their son slid silently into its place of honor in front of the altar. I suspected that their grief had pushed them to a place somewhere on the other side of exhaustion where their very existence had been reduced to living from this moment to the next, with no thought of what lay beyond. Beside them stood two of their daughters (a third, too young for this ordeal, had been left with a sitter) and the girls mirrored their parents' resolve as they stared at their brother. In the pews around them I saw a number of children, classmates of the deceased, who had been let out of school in order to attend the service. I had to think that for most of them this was their first meaningful brush with the actuality of death, certainly with someone their own age, as opposed to a concept that they might have read about in a book or seen acted out in a movie.
After a few moments my reverie was interrupted by a woman squeezing into the last seat of the pew in front of me. In her arms she carried a baby who couldn't have been more than six months old. The child was cheerful and, like most babies, full of unbridled curiosity about his surroundings (The baby wasn't gussied up so I assumed it had to be a boy). He smiled at anything and everything, gnawed on his chew toys, and generally charmed all of us within sitting distance. His presence in the church was so incongruous, so completely at odds with the purpose of the gathering, that for the next hour or so a silent battle raged in my heart between the hope of the simple joy of life that this child represented and the diminutive casket just a few feet away that seemed to negate that hope. As I left the church, I told myself that hope won the battle, that hope must always win that battle because without hope, what else do we have? But there has been such a heaviness hanging over me since yesterday, a sturm und drang that I just can't seem to shake, that I felt compelled to sit down and write about it.
In another couple of days I will have completed my 47th year of living on this planet. And if there is some Cosmic Entity somewhere keeping score, tallying up the runs, hits and errors that we accumulate in our life, then I can think of no reason why I should be allowed 47 years and that boy only 10. While I believe in God, I find that that our beliefs and philosophies about a Supreme Being, and the subsequent religions that have grown out of those beliefs and philosophies, are so subjective and so fundamentally devoid of logic and reasoning as to render any message they might convey meaningless at best and dangerous at worst. And none of the "eternal truths" that these religions espouse help me to bring any meaning to the death of this child.
So where does that leave me?
After thinking about this almost constantly for the past two days, I have some definite thoughts on the subject but I'd rather throw the subject out to the board for your thoughts.
And yes, Dixon, I suppose this post is sensitive enough to qualify me for pussy-duty, but if you're a member of that club then count me in.
Living in Vermont for the past several years has forced me to confront my method of dealing with tragedy. When I lived in Southern California, it was a simpler matter to blow by the obituary page and gloss over the seamier articles that dotted the newspaper on a daily basis. The size of the communities (one city blending into another) and the sheer quantity of the suffering combined to create an emotional sedative of sorts, a numbing effect. The lightning might strike all around me but as long as it didn't hit me or mine, it didn't register. For the better part of 25 years I lived and worked each day, whistling past the freeway, irrationally secure in the cocoon I'd constructed for myself.
Moving east changed all that. Vermont is more of a large township than a small state. You could, after all, fit the population of Vermont five times over into San Diego County alone. When tragedy happens here it is harder to ignore and, all too often, the local news or the obituary page carries a name and a face that you recognize. As you might imagine, the turnout for this boy's funeral filled the church to capacity and then some. As the mass began, the family and friends and well-wishers all took their place. And then the casket was rolled in. Unbidden and against my will, my eyes welled with tears.
Surely there are few things in life more obscene than a child-sized casket.
I looked at the parents for a reaction and saw none. They stood with their backs ramrod straight and their heads high, their eyes unblinking as the coffin bearing the body of their son slid silently into its place of honor in front of the altar. I suspected that their grief had pushed them to a place somewhere on the other side of exhaustion where their very existence had been reduced to living from this moment to the next, with no thought of what lay beyond. Beside them stood two of their daughters (a third, too young for this ordeal, had been left with a sitter) and the girls mirrored their parents' resolve as they stared at their brother. In the pews around them I saw a number of children, classmates of the deceased, who had been let out of school in order to attend the service. I had to think that for most of them this was their first meaningful brush with the actuality of death, certainly with someone their own age, as opposed to a concept that they might have read about in a book or seen acted out in a movie.
After a few moments my reverie was interrupted by a woman squeezing into the last seat of the pew in front of me. In her arms she carried a baby who couldn't have been more than six months old. The child was cheerful and, like most babies, full of unbridled curiosity about his surroundings (The baby wasn't gussied up so I assumed it had to be a boy). He smiled at anything and everything, gnawed on his chew toys, and generally charmed all of us within sitting distance. His presence in the church was so incongruous, so completely at odds with the purpose of the gathering, that for the next hour or so a silent battle raged in my heart between the hope of the simple joy of life that this child represented and the diminutive casket just a few feet away that seemed to negate that hope. As I left the church, I told myself that hope won the battle, that hope must always win that battle because without hope, what else do we have? But there has been such a heaviness hanging over me since yesterday, a sturm und drang that I just can't seem to shake, that I felt compelled to sit down and write about it.
In another couple of days I will have completed my 47th year of living on this planet. And if there is some Cosmic Entity somewhere keeping score, tallying up the runs, hits and errors that we accumulate in our life, then I can think of no reason why I should be allowed 47 years and that boy only 10. While I believe in God, I find that that our beliefs and philosophies about a Supreme Being, and the subsequent religions that have grown out of those beliefs and philosophies, are so subjective and so fundamentally devoid of logic and reasoning as to render any message they might convey meaningless at best and dangerous at worst. And none of the "eternal truths" that these religions espouse help me to bring any meaning to the death of this child.
So where does that leave me?
After thinking about this almost constantly for the past two days, I have some definite thoughts on the subject but I'd rather throw the subject out to the board for your thoughts.
And yes, Dixon, I suppose this post is sensitive enough to qualify me for pussy-duty, but if you're a member of that club then count me in.
