Things keep moving

I attended the visitation for Casey, and his widow Heather cried when she saw me, and she gave me a huge hug and told me that Casey loved me. It told her that I loved him, too. I saw a handful of people who went to high school with me, and we’re all pretty old now, and I suppose there’s going to be plenty of these events to attend in the years to come.

Casey’s funeral was last Friday, and it was a good funeral, as far as it goes. These things vary quite a lot. At my grandmother’s funeral, my dad stood at the podium for over an hour and talked about her, and he was frequently pretty funny. That was a side of him I’d never seen before, and really I’ve never been to a funeral like that before. Casey’s was more formal, I think. He worked as a minister at a pretty affluent church, and three different ministers spoke, and that was it. It felt very church-service, and all of the music was the brain-dead contemporary Christian style. That part wasn’t good at all, but I do need to say that Casey probably got into that style of music quite a lot and so it likely was the best choice.

Thoughts:

Nothing quite like a funeral to bring to mind the transitory nature of things. The dead go in the ground, and everbody else just keeps moving until the same thing happens to them. Rinse and repeat. How it all keeps going without disruption is remarkable, I think. I don’t think there’s a lot of fault tolerance in that system, either. We have to always throw bodies at it, like shoveling coal into a furnace. When covid hit, I was watching for a break, and I was interested in what that would look like. It really didn’t break, though. At the grocery stores, food was picked over for about a month, but it was always available, aside from people buying up all of the toilet paper, which was weird. I suppose that’s the closest I’ve ever come to seeing things break.

No one wore a mask at the funeral. It was completely normal. I just thought I’d comment about that, that things are back to some kind of normal, for the most part. Remember when people used to say, “The New Normal”? At my grandmother’s funeral, just a few years ago, everyone was required to wear a mask.

It’s an interesting sensation to have a view of a slice of someone’s existence, and to know that his story is over. Casey had children, but no grandchildren. He’ll probably have grandchildren since he has two daughters, and they’ll never know anything at all about him but maybe some stories. Is becomes was. Things just keep moving, man.