Funeral for a Friend

  Last Wednesday I attended a burial service for a friend, a guy barely over fifty. While we were standing at the grave around 11:00AM, I thought back to all the funerals I had attended as a kid. My Dad was heavily involved in Catholic church activities, and I was an altar boy. I only lived a block from the church, so I naturally got the call to serve mass and carry the incense at graveside services during the summer months when school was out. You might think that sucked, going to funerals for people you don't really know, but I got paid by funeral directors, and I didn't complain after the fact. (Yeah, I got my first tips as an altar boy, serving weddings and funerals, go figure.)

      The funeral last week was not a Catholic one, but it was a nice service, nonetheless. While we prayed my mind wandered back to an observation my Dad had shared with me many times, and has stuck with me.
     Jim Casey told me that you could tell much about a person's life by how many people attended the funeral.
    He believed that the more people that attended, the more debts of gratitude the deceased was owed, the fewer that attended, the more debts the deceased owed.
     I have to say, if those are the parameters to judge, then my friend last week had a lot of people who owed him debts of gratitude. The Church was close to SRO, and the graveside had everybody bunched around in a hot sweltering sun. Yet they came and stayed to show their gratitude.

    At both funerals for my elderly parents, I was heartened by the sheer number of people who came forward to share the positive impact my parents had made in their lives. It says much about a person by how those who survive them reflect on the contribution the deceased made to their own well being.

   I have been to sparsely attended services, and it always bothers me. In my opinion Funerals are not so much for the dead, but for the living. We need them to help us transition, and they fulfill that purpose.
    If only a handful show up for a burial, what does that say to you?
 It is a failure of the living, or a failure on the part of the deceased? I think it is both. I feel fortunate to have had the acquaintance of my friend in my life. I guess I should hope that someday  people will feel the same about me. But I live with the knowledge that 100  or even 10 years from now no one will remember who I was or where I lived, and the only thing that I can hope to pass on are that my actions are emulated, and they are for the good.of my community as a whole. That is Life and Death, in Trexlertown.