We said goodbye to my dad the other day.
A box with Dad’s ashes sits wrapped in a beautiful green wreath on the china hutch in Mom’s dining room. That seems like such an odd juxtaposition, the remains of a dead body wrapped in apparently living greenery – but they are just branches and flowers cut off from their roots and soon to be just as dead as Dad.
But here’s what occurred to me as I drove to his memorial service that morning: literally every day we fill our stomachs with dead things, either plant or animal. That china hutch is made of wood cut from a dead tree. The walls of the house are more dead trees. We walk around in shoes made from the dead skin of animals. More dead skin holds up most of our pants, or keeps our watch on our wrist. Our cars are powered and our houses are heated by oil from dead plants from millions of years ago. Even the very elements that make up our bodies are the remains of dying stars that went supernova many eons ago.
We don’t stop much to think about being literally surrounded by, and fed by, and even made of dead things. It’s just part of life itself.
And yet, that afternoon, our house was filled with living people, reminiscing about Dad’s amazing life. The memorial service was full of life, sharing stories that themselves bring new life and new hope to those who gathered.
The idea of death generally troubles and frightens us. The awareness of the presence of death disgusts many of us; even those paragraphs might have made you uncomfortable to read. Perhaps it’s because the process of dying is intimidating. I don’t want to live through what Dad dealt with, to get to death itself. And we don’t like loss. We’d rather keep what we have forever, including our relationships.
And we don’t really know what comes after death, despite our doctrine. If we are honest with ourselves, I suspect more than a few of us really need those assurances at a funeral to boost our faith for a good eternity, as we grapple with the painful fact that God didn’t heal someone we loved or didn’t stop an unexpected death.
But this celebration – what our family, like many others, called a celebration of life, not a funeral – reminded me that even a death itself brings life. Just as those trees found a second life in the walls of Dad’s home where we gathered; just as the food found a second life renewing and invigorating the human participants; so also the people who joined us to both grieve and to rejoice were edified by our joining together. A new life arose in that gathering that has not previously been experienced by that group. Relationships were created, strengthened, or in some cases revived and restored. And so the cycle of life – which cannot help but include death – continues, and we cannot help but be blessed, even by death.
And no, that doesn’t make any of this loss easier. I’ll miss Dad forever. But I’ll treasure the life and the love that springs from death.
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