Another Funeral
/For the first time in my life, there have been two family funerals in close succession: my mom and, more recently, a cousin. The cousin was 9 years younger than me...succumbed to cancer rather than old age. I’ve discovered that my thoughts spiral in a different direction to the death of someone younger than myself; I suspect they are more intense because I knew her as a child.
I was old enough when she was born to remember her young childhood. We interacted when our visits to our shared grandparents coincided. By the time she was entering her teens, I was married and working full time while going to college part time. Then our grandparents died and I moved to the east coast. In all, there were 50 years when we didn’t see each other at all --- just heard about each other from family members. And then there was a memorable lunch at my uncle’s house during the last overnight travel my parents enjoyed – traveling through Oklahoma to have Thanksgiving at my daughter’s house in Springfield MO in 2019.
After my mother’s death, my dominant thought trended toward being grateful that she’d lived as long as she had….that she was enjoying her life up to the very end. For my cousin, I cycle through feeling like her life ended too soon, regretting not knowing her better over the years, and grateful to learn at her funeral how keen her zest for life had endured.
I don’t dwell on my own mortality very often, but I found myself doing so at my cousin’s funeral. Healthy lifestyle can help us sustain our ability to continue to enjoy our life…but there are a lot of things that happen (accidents, natural disasters, genetics, cancer, etc.) that can evade the benefit healthy lifestyle provides. All my grandparents lived past the life expectancy age, and one lived into her late 90s. Both parents lived into their 90s. So – genetics is probably a positive for me…but there are unpredictable life shortening things that can happen to anyone. The best we can do, is to live every day in the best way that we can.
