For a blog that is supposed to be about how I live my 30,000 days, I seem to write a lot about death.  But, hey, I went to a funeral this morning.  For a friend.  Who was younger than me.  Who was strong and handsome and funny and generous and creative and kind.  And I am mad.

The minister at the service spoke about coming together to share our grief, which was nice, and about how good it was that our friend had “come home” to Christ, which was stupid.  Not because I’m not Christian, or because I don’t believe in God.  I do, actually, although why I do is a discussion for another day.  It was stupid because it so patently obvious that the guy was not ready to go home.  I hate it when people ignore the elephant in the room.

I went to a funeral for an old man once.  He had a lot of grandchildren, many of whom were in the church all somber and suited, looking for the life of me like some kind of surreal performance art.  Small children should never be dressed in a jacket and tie, just like you should never dress your cat in a nightgown and put him in a stroller.

Anyway, the priest asked them if they were angry that God had taken their grandfather and they gave a hesitant, scattered chorus of “yeses,” with some giggling and after a brief pause to make sure they really should answer out loud in church.  The priest said that it was OK to be angry with God, because God was not some wimpy thing that would blow away like a puff of smoke if you were mad at Him.  He said God was strong, and did things that human beings could not understand.  At all.  Like decide to take a beloved grandfather away from his family.

He said we should be angry. He said that God did things we did not understand.  He said that someday we might understand but maybe we would never understand and always believe that it was wrong and unfair.  He said that was OK, because we were human and God was divine.  He said you could be mad at God and still believe in His (or Her, if you prefer although the priest certainly didn’t mention that) goodness and mercy.

He did  not say that we should be glad that the old man had gone to his heavenly home.  He knew we were not glad and might never be glad.  So now my friend Wayne is with God, riding his motorcycle without a helmet and telling God all the good jokes and the best gossip and God is laughing his ass off and I am really pissed off.

Amen.

It piles up –

the unwashed dishes,

the undone laundry,

the organizing baskets and boxes unfilled and dusty –

and you swear you will always

wake up and look for the beauty in the world, but

all you see

are the unmade beds,

the stinking litter box,

the shoes the kids kicked off in front of the hall closet – WHY can’t they put them inside the closet, just a few damn inches, is it really that hard?  Do I ask too much? –

and it is so easy to not look 

at the sticky kitchen table,

the unopened mail with its attendant unpaid bills,

the plants with the browning leaves

and give it up to the hot gray day fetid with humidity and still as breath held,

no breeze to make the boughs of the trees move

like Russian ballerinas

with a heartbreaking near-perfect curve of shoulder elbow wrist fingers,

and only the swift straight line of the brown birds, the sparrows,

no bright flash of red cardinal or the arrogant bluebird or even

the shiny black slash of the crow, whose smooth feathers have always reminded me of my friend Kiki and her chin-length bob of 20 years ago, but could it really be 20 years?

and your life feels like an ocean

very very early on a very cloudy morning when you can’t separate water and sky

and you can’t see any damn beauty and

you don’t even want to get out of bed and look for it because your head

hurts and your left hip hurts, like it has for the past month,

and that is why, I think, that

sometimes I still read People magazine

so that I can distract myself from the fact that I swore that

I would always wake up and look for the beauty in the world. 

One of the participants in the Fourth of July parade in my medium-sized New Jersey town was a 90 year old man who was a veteran of the South Pacific theater in WWII.  The convertible in which he was riding listed his medals: a Purple Heart, two Silver Stars, two Bronze Stars, service awards….He was an old man, in his American legion cap, white haired and waving.  He was small and stooped.  If I’d passed him in the park, I would have assumed he was just another one of the little old men who take their very slow walks in the shade of the early morning or the early evening.  I would not have known that he was a brave man.

I was glad that he got to ride in the parade.  Glad that I got to sit on the curb in the shade of my friend’s big old house and cheer for the WWII vet.  I stood up when he went by, and cheered, and yelled and whooped for him.

He reminded me of my father, of course, who was also a WWII vet but did not live to be 90 or ride in any parades.  Like so many of his fellow vets, my father came home after the horrors of war and didn’t talk about what it felt like to be the bombardier in a B-24 in Italy in the last few years of the war.  He did talk about what it meant to be brave, though.  He said that being brave wasn’t like it was in the movies, and that courage wasn’t about being the biggest or the the strongest or the loudest but about being the one who did what he was sent out to do and who came home alive.  He said that being brave was about living through what you lived through, and that courage was about going home and living your life.

Which is what he did, along with many of his peers.  They came home and planted gardens, taught us how to play poker, and showed us what a family was for.  Like the veteran in the convertible in our parade, they were brave when it mattered and aged into the little old men in the park in the early evening.

It made me realize that we look into the faces of the brave every day, and we probably never realize that we do.   My friend in the big old house decided to hold her traditional Fourth of July party, even though her husband, who was the prime mover behind the annual bash, had died the month before.  She and her children decided that it would be sadder for them to watch the parade alone, or to spend the day in some other place, feeling wrong about where they were.  And when the old soldier went by and I stood up and cheered, I realized that the faces of the brave were standing right next to me.