Showing Up To Say Goodbye

I'm not sure how to feel right now. I'm just, finally, starting to keep a budget. It's been a long time coming. It's a word I have often heard about, but not a concept that was ever taught, or shown, to me. The weird part is that as soon as we started one, and are doing our best to stick to it, our hours got cut. It seems like some kind of odd joke. We finally get our earnings and expenditures mapped out to the “T,” and then it all changes. HA! I will keep my head up, I know things will get turned around, they have to. The part that I'm struggling with at this very moment though, is my free time. For the past ten years I was teaching Comedy Traffic School, a couple of times a week. I had plenty of free time. I had to invent things to do, to keep myself occupied. So when I started my new job, my free time kind of went away. Or at least got trimmed way down. Thus, I find myself in an interesting situation, as of this moment, because I'm bummed at my loss of hours (income), but I'm glad to have some of my free time back. I was not made to be busy constantly. I think down time is important. Especially as a creative person. It's hard to be creative moving from task to task. Well, I guess every finished task is an act of creation, but we'll get to that at a later date. I'm talking about artistic creation. Nothing hinders the creative mind more than busy-ness. Busy-ness!? Business!? I just got that right now. That can't be Coincidence! It's especially funny to me because I always say it “busy-ness” in my head, so I know how to spell it.

I also feel a little strange because on Wednesday, my other day off, I went to a funeral. It was only the third funeral I've ever been to. Well, now that I think about it, it was the fourth, but I hardly count the first one. It was a funeral for the stillborn child of my boss when I worked at the hospital when I was 18. Never mind, I guess it counts. Of the four, I only really knew one of them, my Grandmother. It was kind of odd, now that I think about it, because my Grandmother, and Susan's Grandfather, died within months of each other, within weeks of us meeting. As if our relationship, was kind of ushered in through death. Whoa, that was kind of morbid, sorry about that. I had met her Grandfather once or twice, I knew my Grandmother my whole life. They were both so close to death, that by the time they died, I wasn't really sad. In those cases, I see death as the end of suffering, so it's not really “sad” to me. The saddest thing at my Grandmother's funeral was hearing my Mom sob. I had never heard a noise like that before. The thing that impressed me at Susan's Grandfather's funeral was the amount of people who showed up. A lot of people were at my Grandmother's funeral too, but it seemed different. He was everyone's Step-something or other, some didn't even seem to know how they felt about him. Some of them had not seen each other in years, but they all showed up to say goodbye. After what I experienced on Wednesday, that even stands out as more remarkable.

I never met the person who's funeral I attended on Wednesday. I wasn't even sure why I had to go, but Susan was pretty persistent. We know the son of the deceased. But we don't know him that well! However, I took it as an opportunity to do something I don't normally do, a learning experience, so to speak. There were only about 15 of us there. There were only like 6 people there who really even knew him. The rest of us there were just there to support the two sons. No one was there for the deceased's sister. More than half of the people there didn't even know him! It really struck me. I don't know why. Something seemed off about having only a hand full of people who cared. I'm not sure if it was the low turn out, the military honors, or the fact that no one really seemed overly emotional, but I ended up getting pretty emotional. It was weird to shed tears over someone I never even knew. I wasn't a “mess,” or anything, but it definitely got to me. By the end, I was very glad I went, our friend really appreciated it. I can see now that supporting the bereaved is just as, if not more, important than saying goodbye to the deceased. I always thought I wanted to vanish without pomp or circumstance, just slip away into the great beyond. But now for some reason I find myself thinking about the people who'll be left behind, and the people who will comfort them. And for some strange reason I find myself wondering whether I could do better than 6 plus 9.


Daughn