What I would have murmured to a fellow-speaker, during a memorial for a neighbor who dropped dead (at age 60) while walking his dog.
1. When did Episcopalians become so lurid as to invite congregants to dip into the cremains of the deceased? What is the etiquette, when you never had so much as shaken his living hand?
2. Returned to dust, will we be sneered at by stones, patronized by the earth as late arrivals? Will that final mingle be utterly impersonal, like the World's Largest New Year's Eve Party?
3. Reading the Facebook pages of poor high school kids yields death-sentence names. Someone named Fenyx screams in the fire, never to rise from the ash.
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Maybe funeral services are catching up in some ways (e.g., interacting with cremains), but not in others (the old assumption that neighbors know one another). I'm not sure what I'd say when it became my turn to speak. Maybe a homily on the lawyer's interrogatory to Jesus: "And who is my neighbor?"
ReplyDeleteI wince at those names too. It's some comfort to know that they can change them, at any rate.
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