"Click here to livestream the funeral"

 Today I attended the virtual funeral of my Auntie Eva. My great aunt on my mom's side. I am at school in Adrian, but I was able to log onto the funeral home's website and watch via Youtube live the service that was held today for her. It was harder than I anticipated, I missed being able to console my family and physically sit with them and tell stories about my Auntie. I sat at my dining room table with headphones on and listened to the kind words that were shared without being able to see my family's faces that were able to attend in person. This was the first virtual funeral that I have ever attended, and hopefully my last. 

It is amazing to me how adaptable we are, as humans. Even though I wish that my country would take a deathly pandemic more seriously, funerals are a tricky situation. We want to be able to honor those who have passed, hence the creativeness that is livestreaming the event. I am appreciative of the opportunity of being able to attend my great aunts funeral in this way, but also very sad that I did not have the opportunity to find comfort in my family the way that one would hope after losing a loved one. As a continuous theme from my last post, I talked about how I am taking some very thought provoking classes this last semester and it seems even more true that the classes I am taking are reflective of what I am working through in my personal life. I am enrolled in an honors course titled "Literary Approaches to Death." In the syllabus for the course, part of what we are doing over the entirety of this course includes: reading literature where the central themes are death, writing our own obituraries, being visited by an undertaker, and taking a trip to a local graveyard. I am working on reading Thomas Lynch's The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade. I don't particularly enjoy talking about death, or confronting it for that matter. This class is challenging me to step outside of that nervousness and talk with my classmates openly about dying. Something profound that Lynch says in his book is "the dead don't care."

What a hauntingly accurate statement about not being alive anymore. Of course the dead matter, they deserve to be cared for and honored for the life that they have lived, but in all actuality so much of who funerals are for are the living. Which brings me back to the virtual one I attended today. I did not know my Auntie Eva as well as I wish I did. But I knew her enough, and her I. We share the same family, traditions, love, and history. She lived her life for the people around her, and always made sure to ask my mom how I am doing. She opened her cabin to us countless times, a little slice of heaven in the Upper Peninsula, a place that holds so many beautiful memories for me. 

I can wish and hope nothing more than Eva is now dancing and laughing with my grandma, her husband, parents, and everyone else she has been waiting to see again. I am grateful that funeral directors and homes understand what funerals mean for the living. I am grateful that there are people in this world that are able to look death in the face everyday. There is so much about death that leaves me feeling puzzled and overwhelmed, but I find comfort in the fact that I am working on it. Someday I will have to face this reality just like everyone else. I can only hope that I will have lived my life as graceful and lovingly as my Auntie Eva.