The Older I Get, The More Funerals Teach Me About Life

My day began with light. The sky was bright, the air cool, everything felt sharp and alive. I walked to a Memorial service for a friend I had known for most of my life, aware of the contrast between the simplicity of the day and the weight of where I was going.

The beautiful church stood as it always has. Solid, familiar, unchanged in its structure, yet altered by what it now holds for me. I went there as a young woman for weddings. I stood there for christenings, full of promise and beginnings. Now I return for funerals. The same walls, the same pews, yet the meaning shifts with each decade. Time folds in on itself in places like this. It gathers everything that has been and places it beside what is.

As I sat there, I felt as if I had stepped into a kind of time warp. Faces appeared that I had not seen for decades. People I once knew with ease now felt half familiar, half strange. Boys I had once kissed stood before me as old men. Their faces held traces of who they had been, yet life had marked them. Some I knew at once. Others I hesitated over. Did I know them well, or only in passing? Had they mattered to me, or had we simply shared a moment in time?