Illusions

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I have a thing about funerals.

The entire ritual from start to finish strikes me as senseless. You stand in a mortuary reeking of the perfume of already withering flowers and stare down at a wax dummy in a satin-lined box, a dummy with the vague features of someone you once cared for. You sit in a church or synagogue and listen to well-intentioned but hollow eulogies and a lot of words about mortal troubles ended and everlasting life in the Kingdom of Heaven that have little to do with the departed and everything to do with the living. You stand beside a rectangular hole in the ground, listening to more hollow words, smelling grass and freshly turned earth, and if you’re a man like me, what you think about is not the prospect of a blissful eternity but the futility of man’s earthly existence, living and dying both.

Some people, the fortunate ones who have an unshakable faith, find comfort in all of this; it gives them hope to honor the dead in a formalized ceremony. But as far as I’m concerned there is a better, less painful, just as hopeful way to pay your respects. One that has nothing to do with perching on a cemetery lawn waiting for an object like a half-formed pod creature to be lowered into a hole and covered up with a mound of dirt. Honoring the dead ought to be a personal and private act, like making love. And it ought not to involve a preoccupation with death but rather a celebration of life, of one person’s time on this earth and its interaction with your own — memories of good times shared, days lived with pleasure and purpose.

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