M.'s memorial

I went to the memorial service for M. (the man from my church who passed away this weekend) today. (I was able to because morning classes on campus were cancelled today for a "testing day.")

At first I was apprehensive about going; I always am about funerals and the like. Also, I always wonder - does the family REALLY want all those people there? Or do they want more privacy to say goodbye?

But I decided to go anyway. I grabbed a handful of Kleenex as I left my office (I never know how things are going to affect me and this has been a borderline-weepy week for me any way; one way that allergies affect me badly is that they make me kind of depressed, I feel like there's this gray fuzz on the world. I take allergy meds and shots and they alleviate it somewhat, but it's just pretty much something I have to endure every spring).

I didn't cry, though. I teared up a little when I saw his widow walk in on the arm of (who I presume was) M.'s son (M.'s current wife - his widow - was a second marriage after his first wife died). She looked a lot frailer than the last time I saw her just a few weeks ago.

It was a fairly short service - a couple of solos by a singer, a eulogy from the minister, words from the family. (I hadn't known it but apparently M. and his wife had served as sort of an emergency-basis foster family to a set of siblings in tough circumstances. And in his role as a school principal, he made arrangements for kids whose families couldn't afford shoes to have shoes. Things like that that are not all that SURPRISING given what I knew about the man, but things I hadn't heard before.)

One comment the minister said struck me: At one point he described M. as having lead a "useful" life. And I felt a little pang there. You know, that is what I would like for them to be able to say about me, at the end of my life. That I was useful. That what I did brought some good into the world and helped people.

And you know? It makes me sad to think that there are hundreds - thousands - of people like M. out there, leading their quiet useful lives, helping people out, showing God's love to others, and just generally being an asset to the human race, and yet when they die, it's barely even noted. But let someone who is frankly somewhat of a wastrel die - like a famous stripper-turned-actress we've all heard about - and their death is treated with more attention and more coverage than the death of a world leader. And that says something sad about our society - that someone who did real and concrete good in the lives of people gets a couple inches in the local newspaper when he dies, and some woman who's best known for turning her life into a giant train wreck becomes "breaking news" on all the national channels, with even breathless descriptions of the shroud that covers her casket.

It just reminds that what the world seems to value is not the same thing that I find valuable.

I will say I wish the world's values were more in line with my own; I think I would feel less distress when I look out at the wider world were that true.

I do feel better having gone to the memorial. For all I roll my eyes at the pop-psych use of the word "closure," I do think there's a certain - if it's not bad to call it this - relief when the funeral is over. It's like: well, there's not anything we can do to bring this person back. We have mourned this person, we have commended his soul to God. Now it is time to get back to the business of living.

And so, we did. I talked briefly with the minister's wife after the service and she said it was time to get back to the bank where she worked. And I went back to school and led the afternoon lab field-trip that I had scheduled. I will admit a bit of passing sadness as we drove by the funeral home and crematorium where M. had made his arrangements, but I also knew that I had students to teach.

And M., having been a lifelong teacher, would have understood that.