Today I went to the funeral...

of a woman I do not know. It was so poetic. To see the tears of her relatives. Young people crying narcissistically as they contemplated their own mortality. Older people crying weary tears of resolve. Babies just crying because they were confined to a lap. I felt like a spectator, but not a voyeur. I was looking at a familiar, intimate ritual.
Funerals are very much for the living. The minister conceded he did not know the decedent very well at all. His eulogy, about due time, was meant mostly to comfort the woman's elderly siblings. They all seemed tired of living themselves. Envious that their sister had gone first. There was no fear of death in the room. The young people feeling too invincible still to really grasp it, the older so worn they were ready to embrace it.
And I sat there realizing that I had no fear of it either. I like life. Breathing it in and out, but I do not fear the day when I will close my eyes and leave this world behind. My understanding of death has come in stages. As a child, it was like peek-a-boo. I resented that life would go on as I lay, left behind and forgotten. That angered and frightened me. Made me feel small and unimportant. Then as I grew older, I came to obsess about the stillness of death. That I would be at rest while others were in motion, that worse I would be confined while others we're unfettered. For awhile, I thought I would have to have a tomb or mausolem. That I could face death only if I knew I would not be placed in a claustrophobic grave. Six feet under and certainly consumed.
I'm still not sure about the burial...But today I realized that I now really see death as part of life. As the next thing. Not to be feared or avoided or rushed. But a certainty. Which is almost comforting. In my life, so uncertain, that one thing is both certain and inevitable. One day will be my last. And when that day comes I will move to that next thing as we all will. I do not have to study for it or prepare, when it is my time, I will go and I will be sufficient. I will be taken as I am, where I am.
There is a certain poetry there. And I embrace it.