This should be a wedding, not a funeral. There should be smiles through the tears, tears shed for joy, shed because now in addition to daughter, sister, friend, girlfriend, she becomes wife, and perhaps someday mother. We should cry because we know she will change and her relationship to us will change, but we know she will be happier for it. She should be standing here, laughing, pleased that so many people came to share this moment with her.
I couldn't escape these thoughts, the feeling of everything being so wrong.
But instead of standing before the assembled crowd, Amy lay still in that polished wooden casket at the front of the church--beautiful, tiny Amy, her face probably still framed by those perfect strawberry ringlets, except this time her eyes won't light up with merriment and mischief. They'll never light again.
I've been to funerals before, including funerals of those close to me, the most memorable being my grandmother's, just a shade over 3 years ago. In most of those instances, though, even though the deaths weren't necessarily expected, they made sense in my schemata of how life progresses; the older people in your life slowly fall away. This, however, was my first funeral for someone my age that I'd considered a friend. I'm having a hard time with it still. I ache. My sinus cavities feel like I've been crying for days, which isn't entirely untrue, and a general malaise has settled itself in my breast. It just aches. I can't stop thinking about it, about her, about her dying (god it's such a difficult word to utter). I can't stop thinking about--and hurting for--all those who were closest to her, those people whose lives now have big gaps that used to be filled by Amy.
I know her parents are a wreck; parents who lose a child always are, and I wish there was something I could do or say to make this not haunt them for the rest of their lives. Parents expect their children to bury them, not to bury their children. I've known this family for...god, fifteen years, and I know how close Amy was to her parents and how much they loved her. Something will always be missing during Christmas and birthdays. Moving forward, her bright smile will no longer appear in family photographs. Significant anniversaries of hers will never go unnoted, but now they will be acknowledged with mourning instead of celebration. How will they answer when asked if they have children? Do you ever get used to that look on people's faces when they learn your child has died?
Amy's younger sister has been one of my dearest friends for three quarters of my life, and I know Amy was, really, her best friend. I can't begin to imagine just how hard it will be when she picks up the phone to call Amy and tell her some silly anecdote or good news and then puts it down again when she realizes there will never again be anyone at the end of that line. She's known her older sister better than anyone in our peer group for as long as she's been alive. Amy helped shape the person she is today. She was a never-ending source of unjudgmental love and support. They've shared so many memories, so many private jokes, practically a language that no one else could fully understand, and they had so many more to share. Their children were meant to play in the dirt together, finger paint pictures together, perform creative skits they've co-written for their mom's and aunt's joint entertainment. Robin and Amy would see shadows of themselves in these small people and smile at each other knowingly. But now Robin's children will have no adorably petite and possibly redheaded cousins, and she won't call her sister to tell her about the kids or the cats or e-mail her to find out how to care for the baby raccoon or opossum she may one day find abandoned in her back yard.
And Christian...this one hit home for me hard, because just imagining what he must be going through, what he will continue to go through for a long time, still takes my breath away. I can't pretend to fully fathom what it must be like to love someone so thoroughly that you'd change many of your destructive ways, to know that you've found the person with whom you want to spend the rest of your life, to wake up next to that person every day for the past few years, and more than that, seeing her at work every day too, feeling like the luckiest man alive every time she smiles at you, and then having that all ripped away so soon when you thought you had years to share your hopes and dreams and struggles and triumphs. How do you get back in the bed you shared and fall asleep without holding the person you expected to hold until you were both aged, greyer versions of yourselves? Really I barely know him, but I can't stop thinking about him.
I still struggle to make sense of this. I want to find a reason that this happened, to understand why, to reconcile to myself that despite the unfairness of the situation, it's going to be okay because there's really a purpose behind it all.
Yet one thing that's become painfully clear to me is that sometimes there aren't reasons that bad things happen to good people, and sometimes life is just not fair.
When you're young, no one ever warns you that this is what life has in store--that slowly, one by one, you lose the people who mean the most to you, or they lose you. Your elders tell you about all the wonderful things that can happen to you throughout life--finding a passion and a career, falling in love, raising children, creating a home. But people don't talk about death's pervasive presence and how it will play a profound role in the course of your life.
So here: the only thing I can take away from this is that life is tenuous at best. Nothing's a sure bet, no matter how hard we work to lead a good life and no matter how perfectly we construct our worlds. However, the things that really make life worth living are the people we know and love. They add a richness and depth to our short terrestrial experience that can't be paralleled by any kind of object or success, but sadly, we never know how long we have with them.
Of course I can go on to espouse the necessity of making the most of every possible moment, of sucking the marrow from life, but anyone who has ever grown up and lived the day-to-day grind can tell you that all that "dance as if no one can see you" (and do it all the time) crap is not realistic. We should, however, never fail to tell those we love what they mean to us. They're the ones who make the marrow sucking and silly dancing experiences significant. And who knows; tomorrow we may not be able to tell them all the things they do that saturate us with so much joy we feel like our chests will explode, the ways that they fill our lives and allow us to go to bed happy to have lived another day.
I say this in writing, and it will live on the internet in a blog that hardly anyone ever reads. I will sound to the cyberworld like I am a person who is not afraid to love and to express love. In reality, though, I grapple with communicating my feelings for people. I am afraid. I'm afraid that saying how I feel will make me vulnerable to worlds of pain and I suppose I believe that I can control my susceptibility to heartache through rejection or abandonment or death by never orally validating the things I think (despite my best efforts to put those thoughts away). "If you don't want to talk about it, then it isn't love," right? But can I live with that?
So maybe, just maybe, one tiny, tiny good thing can come from this horrible tragedy. Perhaps this confrontation with the reality of life and loss can allow me to stop being so afraid to say what I feel, to stop being so scared of getting hurt that the words I want to say die behind my lips. Because really, wouldn't the haunting ache of things left unsaid be much more painful?
PS. Robin, I love you and your family.
