On Death

An Mini-Memory of Emori Loul's

I went to a funeral quite recently. It was the funeral of a good friend's father.

I remember thinking how extravagant and luxurious the funeral parlor was, even though it only housed the dead. I remember, too, that when my Great-Grandmother (we called her Nana) died, she too had gone to a Funeral Parlor before the funeral, and it was even grander than the one I have recently been to. But at the recent one, everything—the tables, the chairs, the old grandfather clock—had an antique look about them, detailed and finely crafted, and a color scheme of swarming royal reds and golds.

I remember sitting down in the little metal collapsible chairs before the funeral, and I remember when the pastor stood up and spoke to us.

The first thing he said seemed unrelated. I cannot remember it in its full entirety, but it was an old Hebrew verse that, according to him, had once been a song.

Cast your eyes upon that hill.

That was the line he kept repeating. And, as I said, at first it seemed to have nothing to do with a funeral.

Then he abruptly changed. He began talking of Lazarus, the man Jesus brought back from the dead—which I suppose must be a very popular topic at funerals—and then he spoke of Jesus' own death and resurrection.

Cast your eyes upon that hill, and know that the tomb is empty.

And when the body was there, lying in the open in its casket, with my friend's mother stroking its hair and holding its hand, I was of the private opinion that when they buried him, his tomb, too, would be empty, and that what she was touching and stroking was nothing more than a shell like that which the cicadas cast aside in the summer. I was certain that there was nothing special about the body now—while it physically resembled the man who had lived in its skin, it was not, and never could pretend, to be him.

Matter cannot be created or destroyed. That is a known law to everyone, be it scientist or believer. But what of the things we can't see?

When we were standing in the graveyard, I in black and my friend in casual, they spoke again and everyone began to cry. My friend and another began picking flowers off the many arrangements there for the deceased man in the graveyard, but I stayed a few feet away, staring down, underneath the platform they had the casket resting on, down into the dirt hole that had been lined with dark green plastic to prevent erosion.

I was not scared of death. I did wonder, though, where each of us went when we died. Surely a devout Catholic would start spewing all these rehearsed verses from the Bible, but me? I just stood there, thinking quietly.

I felt sorry for my friend. I felt sorry for a lot of people then, but ironically enough, least of which was the dead man in the casket. My Dad told me that he'd read a quote somewhere; "When I go to a funeral, the person I feel sorry for is myself." I told him that at first glance the quote sounds selfish, but then at a second glance you see that the dead don't feel grief or sorrow, as they lived their lives. The ones who feel the pain are the ones still around to feel it.

I imagine lots of scenarios when we die. Maybe our soul leaves our body, maybe it decomposes like the rest of us into the ground and becomes one with the flowers and the bees and trees. Maybe it doesn't.

But what I really wanted to say to my friend, standing over that empty grave, was this:

Cast your eyes upon that hill, and know that the tomb is empty.

Can this only be said for Jesus?

Here, yes, is physically the body of the deceased. But just because the casket is physically full, doesn't make it spiritually full. There's a sense of destiny and fulfillment in the air that I can't place as the people begin to return to their cars and leave the cemetery.

People measure life in Time.

I heard someone say that. Once. But if this is true… what happens to eternity? Is it because humans have this idea that they can no longer see it?

What happens when we reach said eternity? Do we stop being able to feel the flow of time, forever awaiting the time of revival, or do we wait out eternity as it only lasts a second due to the lack of life and reality, only to return to the same lives we led before, only at the beginning?

I look over through the graveyard, at the different 'gardens' and the trees and flowers. The gardens each have names, like 'Salvation Garden' and 'Sunrise Garden.' All of them basically mean the same thing, and it strikes me how ironic it is.

In our quest to obtain the answer for what death is, we have connected it with its exact and equal opposite: Eternal Life.

And the oddest part is that we don't even realize how odd we are in thinking that until we sit down and think about it, or sit in a place so concentrated with death and have it only advertise longevity. Even as a human myself, I don't think I'll ever understand human nature.

I didn't say any of this. I didn't tell them my thoughts on the body-that-was-a-shell, or the eternity of circling, flowing time, or the irony of the place I stood at that moment. Though I was wondering what was true, I did not wish to hurt their feelings by wondering out loud these questions.

I breathed in the air. Though we were in a cemetery, the air was not fresh. It smelled of car exhaust and fumes from factories and maybe even cigarette smoke. Enough to let me know that outside this graveyard, the world was still continuing, growing, dying, existing.

My friend's mother bid her daughter a small goodbye that would only extend for an hour or so. She took her husband's motorcycle helmet, placed it on her head, and then laughed at the fact that it was too big. But she wore it anyways, because it 'felt right', according to her. And then she rode away on her motorcycle.

I didn't see her go, as I was trying to keep my friend company, but I realized what a wonderful day it was for a tribute of that kind. The cloud cover was slowly dispersing as the sun grew closer to the horizon, and the graveyard turned a peaceful, sleepy orange. For a second. Only for a second. And then the clouds were back, and the world once again turned grey. But the sense of a fulfillment was still there, like the peaceful, sad endings you read in the most wonderful of fairy tales.

I thought about mortality one more time as I looked over the endless field of flat plaques in the ground. I thought about how, if the soul really did become free from its body, it was probably still alive. It was alive in the funny photographs that had covered the funeral parlor walls, tables, and poster boards. It was alive in its old house, with its favorite furniture, favorite things, and favorite people. But mostly, I thought, spying the ever-stereotyped carrion crows hanging around a couple hundred yards away, it was in the blood of the daughter he left behind.

Because that, of course, is physical and spiritual proof.

A/N: I wrote this... I don't know why, but I needed to let some stuff out that I couldn't really tell the people I knew. I think I might offend some people I know because of their various differences in belief and I really didn't want to inspire uncomfortable doubt of where a person goes after they die at a funeral. So this was born.