Drinkin’ the Kool-Aid

Winter’s getting to me. That last dump of snow we had Saturday evening, even though it’s mostly taken care of now and certainly will be by week’s end (I hope) really got under my skin. It’s for this reason that I know I’m not all that stable at the moment where it comes to emotions. If I’m getting genuinely pissed off at the weather, well that’s a problem.

So, I guess it’s not all that great to be listening to any of my own insights at this time, although sometimes, it feels like maybe I should. Not necessarily the stuff about the weather, or the little annoyances that I’ve gotten pretty good at overlooking. The thing that’s been playing on me lately is the whole “live the life you love” thing.

In case it’s not clear, I’ve become, for better or worse, an avid reader of certain blogs that espouse the sort of life I think that I want. As an entry point, it comes down to minimalism/decluttering, personal finance, and meditation. The reasoning being that if I want peace, I kinda need to start with me, as that is pretty well the only sovereign ground I have. And, if I look critically at it, I’ve met with some success. I meditate every day, and I have better finance habits than most of the people I know. I’m still struggling both on a personal and spousal level with minimalism and decluttering. These things I see as doable, so I’m pretty much still striving, and hopeful that I improve every day a little bit.

The really irksome thing is that a lot of these blogs preach all about living the life you want regardless of responsibilities. The foremost of these is Zen Habits (and ironically, the grand daddy of them all that got me started), which I’ve stopped reading because for reasons I can’t put my finger on, Leo makes me feel worse rather than better, or inspired. Maybe that’s not entirely accurate that they say you can live the good life regardless of responsibilities, as many people do state that you can do it–you just need to re-jig your expectations and your day-to-day spending and then go on diatribes about how to shift one’s focus of what is truly important. Many of them, most recently Joshua of the Minimalists, practice what they preach by quitting their traditional jobs in order to ‘follow their passion’.

I think the reason I find this irksome is that nothing would please me more than to ‘follow my passion’ but there’s all sorts of reasons why it can’t be done, and I find this incredibly depressing. Much as these online gurus state time and again that yes, it can be done “Just look at me!” and then cite everything from fear to lack of direction as reasons why people still think that they can’t follow their dreams, I think that it’s just a cold hard fact that not everyone can. In fact, I wager the vast majority can’t. There’s a ton of reasons why people can’t do this from financial to disability to psychological. Some people sure can, but my god, they are few and far between.

I’m thinking this whole self-improvement racket is a little like a cleaned up version of Cosmopolitan. It’s become pretty clear that the women in these magazines are not real. No one in a regular human body looks like that, and if they do, they’re unhealthy and have external funding. And yet there’s a lot of women who stare longingly at these idols, quietly loathing themselves and dreaming of a life they won’t ever have. That’s what I’ve started to feel like reading a lot of these blogs. Yup, there’s people out there who write for a living, get enough cash to support themselves, maybe even to support their families if they decide to pare down all possessions and give up keeping up with the Joneses.

But dammit, look at the math. There’s what, maybe 100 noted online self-help/improvement guru blogs that anyone cares about. And then there’s hundreds of thousands of people who go there, just looking for a life they’d love to grab but will never grab, no matter what the gurus say, or more importantly, what the people can realistically do.

Being one of these hundreds of thousands can be profoundly depressing. And honestly, my sights aren’t set all that high. And honestly, I do much of the work that they recommend. Do I see results? Sometimes. Are they good? Sure. Are they things that I “Digest slowly that just might change my life”? Christ, no. I once thought so, but holding on to that hope is as stupid as buying a lottery ticket every week. The only thing it does is up the web traffic of the gurus.

Probably the best bit of wisdom I have heard in a while came out of the following TED talk, in which Mike Rowe talks about dirty jobs. The best bit is the middle toward the end from when he says the guy who cleans up the road kill whistles while he works. If you want to skip the first bit (which is worth a listen, but not necessary), go to 10:45:

Maybe the real Zen Habit here, as much as the mere thought of it depresses the hell out of me–no doubt thanks in part to all the life-coach cheerleaders out there telling me I can do what’s not possible–is to learn a certain amount of resignation to temper one’s dreams with. No, we cannot, no matter what the gurus say, all quit our jobs and follow our dreams, no matter how much we pare down and change our focus. That’s just the way it is. Suck it up, sunshine. Better to try to find peace somewhere in what you are required to do to make money and be useful to yourself and family. If the gurus spent more time on that, it might be worth reading again. As it stands, they’re just making everyone who already feels shitty about their lot feel shittier when they realize there’s no changing it.

“Take your time,

think a lot,

why think of everything you’ve got,

for you will still be here tomorrow,

but your dreams may not.”

-Cat Stevens.

I am never sleeping again

Okay.

Okay… I’m not even sure where to start.

I guess the best thing to do is ask you to hearken back to your childhood. Say when you were around 6 or 7. I think there’s some psychological chart somewhere that’ll chart the course of the mental development of a child, but I’m talking about the time where you have an utterly heightened sense of imagination. The time where you have real imaginary friends. The time where you’re old enough to play outside on your own and you can nearly see the imaginary images you conjure. You are spiderman, or a princess, or a wizard. The trees do talk to you, the wind obeys you, and there’s an image of something in each and every cloud. You can be friends with everything from cats to rocks, and they talk to you. You are a little god of creation, and when your world is magical, it is so very good. I loved that time in my life. I barely remember it, and I know I didn’t know it at the time, but man, it was glorious.

But you see, that sense of imagination has its shadow, too. Kids are afraid of the dark at least in part because that self same sense of imagination that makes things magical can also make things utterly terrifying. There are monsters under the bed who will eat you. Your mom really is never coming home again when she leaves the house to run errands. The neighbour’s dog is actually a hell hound that will tear your throat out. The lightning will kill you and the thunder will do things you can’t even imagine. There’s some serious, very real fear involved when you’re a kid with an active imagination.

The thing is, I think fear, at least for the young Martin, was more accessible than wonder was. I didn’t figure out the opposite of the sort of terror I experienced as a child until much later in life, when I somehow managed to connect to the numinous, or my idea of god. Seems the devil was lower on the rung, and easier to reach, and my imagination consumed that devil more readily than it did the good god. My point here isn’t to set up the whole god/devil dichotomy. What I wanted to get across is that there is a numinous side to both. When I studied religious experience, this numinous, ineffable thing that people contacted in all sorts of ways and knew was god seemed to always come in the form of goodness, light. People don’t have words and can’t explain the goodness in all of this. Maybe when you’re older you can see it that way because the good will absorb the bad, and it’s all good somehow. But for the kid, or at least for this Martin-kid, there was a kind of numinous, ineffable evil, too. The sort of thing that was so scary I couldn’t wrap my head around it. Such things were usually reserved for nightmares of the sort I had when I was feverish and incoherent. I used to wake up and rattle off all this dream imagery that made no sense at all, and when I spoke the words, I knew that what I was describing wasn’t at all scary… maybe weird, but not scary. And yet while I was in that space it was a level of terror that was just unreal.

I know I’m not alone in this. My best friend Erik and I used to enjoy telling one another of our fears, and especially our nightmares. I got the feeling that when I told Erik about the big shiny blob that occupied the upstairs washroom and when I went to open the door it put a water droplet on my baby finger that I couldn’t get off that he somehow understood how this could be unspeakably terrifying. And I could, and honestly still can, see how it would be heart stoppingly scary to have a little fisher price telephone, it’s googly eyes bobbing up and down as it rolled into view to introduce a nightmare, as it was for Erik. It’s just kid logic, but it doesn’t make it any less real for a kid. Logic doesn’t live in those realms of imagination.

But then there’s things that take place in waking memory that are supposed to be really great for kids, which somehow get twisted into nightmares. I look at kid’s programming today and think it’s more often than not some sort of hypnotic acid trip. Have you ever seen those Baby Einstein shows? One was on at Heather’s place for Madeleine once and I found myself watching it like some sort of chicken fixated on a finger tip. We won’t even go into that truly messed up sun with the baby face that hangs in the sky in the Teletubbies shows. Well, what is now an acid trip, when I was a kid was just plain scary a lot of the time, but I still watched it, transfixed much like I was with the Baby Einstein stuff. It worms its way into your brain on some subliminal level, and there it sits, and no one really knows what effect it’ll have in the longer term.

One personal nemesis of mine was Uncle Bobby. Most of you–scratch that, all but a fraction of you will have no knowledge whatsoever about Uncle Bobby. He was a decidedly Southwestern Ontario phenomenon, and I don’t think he has a wide reach. I honestly don’t remember much about his show. I think that they did various crafts, and there were puppets and special guests who did science tricks and stuff. By most accounts Uncle Bobby himself was a drunk. One guy said he met him as a child and wasn’t very nice, and smelled like barf. I have no idea why anyone like him would ever want to become a children’s show host, to say nothing of how he actually secured a show. But the terrifying thing about the show wasn’t Uncle Bobby–it was Bimbo.

Bimbo the Birthday Clown.

Up until now, I was being serious, and I know that some of what follows is silly, but in all honesty, if ever there was a clown that could conjure the demons of hell, it was Bimbo. As a child, Bimbo scared the unholy fuck out of me. I mean, a lot of people will tell you there’s something inherently scary about clowns, but Bimbo? I think him and the evil clown in Poltergeist take the cake. It’s just that the Poltergeist clown was supposed to be scary. Bimbo was scary in that way you couldn’t put a finger on. He wormed his way into your psyche and took up residence in your dreams. And your parents couldn’t protect you–in fact, they’re the ones who let you watch, because you see, they didn’t see how scary Bimbo really was.

They kept him in a closet. In a closet like some sort of bad family secret, and they only let him out to sing his birthday song. And when he did, it was demonic. The way his mouth moved and his eyes rolled back into his head like a dead man. His voice was like satan… it was this duo-tone high pitched and bassy sound at the same time, and then this knitted, dangly spider like sacrificial puppet (who in true B-rate horror fashion was named “Son Of Happy”) would fall from the ceiling like a man from the gallows and get hung right there in front of Bimbo. And then they’d hang Son Of Happy’s entire family after him. Most often there was some poor child who would subsequently spend thousands on psychologist bills standing underneath Son Of Happy, and the kid would get smacked in the head by the falling demon puppet. It was straight out of the bowels of childhood hell. I spent years thinking about that damned clown. I talked about him even after I was done University… he was the hallmark of terror. But he was no where to be found, and after years, it got so I thought I imagined how bad all of it was. Only Erik remembered him as the scary nightmare he was, and while I met some people who remembered him, no one thought he was all that scary.

Tonight that all changed.

I most certainly did not understate the terror that was Bimbo. Tonight I hit YouTube and someone had actually found and posted a clip of the whole Bimbo routine. This particular clip doesn’t include any children, but it captures the whole bit, and as it turns out, I remembered it very accurately. Bimbo’s been in my head for so long, it was with a certain amount of tentative fear that I clicked that link. And I tell you, I squealed like a little girl. Erik was right. It is like watching some sort of childhood nightmare. Seriously, would you let your kids watch this?

I’m sure that if there’s a hell, Satan must have called Uncle Bobby home by now, and I don’t know where Bimbo might be, but I just bet that he’s somewhere in a closet, in hell, waiting for the next kid to come along so he can mess with him. Stay away from the dark places, kids… there’s things that really can hurt you, and you’ll never know!

I hope that now that he’s been released from my consciousness, I can make peace, but for tonight, I’m going to go check under the bed, and then hug my teddy bear and weep, in fear that if I sleep… Bimbo will be there.

Wanna be startin’ something

All right, Ed McMahon… I knew he was probably still alive, but I wouldn’t have been surprized to learn he’d kicked off and I hadn’t heard before. Farah Faucett… a little closer to my awareness, enough that I knew she was sick with cancer, and so when she kicked off, at the very least, I was prepared to hear the news. But Michael Jackson to complete the trifecta? Colour me utterly shocked. I never imagined I’d be hearing that one this year. I guess because his work had such a profound effect on me and my ilk, who were coming into their own in the early 80′s, I feel like I want to write a little bit about what goes through my head when I think of Michael Jackson.

I guess the first time he showed up in earnest in my little music world was in 1983 with the release of Thriller. That’s no real surprize, given it was his masterpiece and the fact that it was pretty damned near omnipresent. I discovered all his other stuff retroactively, as so often happens with me. I hear something, and then go looking, and a lot of the time, I find that I actually know the artist from singles or radio play, but just never really followed up. I discovered I actually knew a load of Jackson’s earlier work, although I’m not sure how. But yeah, the main hit came with Thriller.

It was presumably sometime in 1983, which places me in about grade 7. Ye gods. Anyway, one of the things to do at the time on weekends in Ontario was watch the CHUM top 30 video countdown. Video was just about to come into its own with MuchMusic launching in about a year’s time, so we as budding consumers of all things culture had to get our hit of music videos from shows like Toronto Rocks, hosted by Jon Majhor (and OMFGBBQ he’s dead too… a small search reveals he died of lung cancer in ’07 jesuschristthey’redroppinglikeflies) and the CHUM top 30 video show. One fine weekend, I was watching the top 30 show and something completely unprecedented happened that changed my musical landscape. A song and video, which had not yet tracked on the top 30, leapfrogged into the number one spot. Nothing like that had ever happened, and I don’t think it’s happened since (not that shows like the top 30 are around anymore to inform us). When they got down to number one, I distinctly remember thinking something must be wrong, because they had wayyy too much time left in the show to have only one video left to air. Well, I was wrong. With 15 minutes left, they started playing Thriller, and it changed everything.

Not only was it instantly the de-facto standard for ubercool, it managed to synergize music and video in a way that no one had seen before and the ripple effects were also unprecedented. Before we just listened, but now, it was an ears AND eyes sort of thing. The song was awesome, danceable, energetic fun firepower. The video embodied the 80′s at the same time it confused the hell out of us by being cool, scary, and fun at the same time. And more, we we were shown what cool was, how you had to move when you listened. In a way it was pretty constrictive, I suppose, but in another way, it brought teenage confusion to a clear focus, and my god, it was all that. Kinda like joining the cult of Mac–you give up control to King Steve, but you get some awesome stuff in return.

And so, all of Motown entered into my world when I started digging into MJ’s, and much more too. Radio at that time was popular top 40 stuff, and while I didn’t know it at the time, it was largely formulaic. This certainly doesn’t detract from its charm, at least not to me, even decades later. But Jackson was coming from a totally different place, and my god, it was like a beautiful black Trans AM in a sea of Chevy Impalas. You couldn’t help but look and just say, “dayam!”

Suddenly everyone wanted to be Michael Jackson. Break dancing clubs formed in my school and the minority of black kids all suddenly could be cool just by sheer association. Jackson, you boob… you had such a power of mentorship and you blew it with your wanting to become white. Sigh. But to us white masses, we didn’t give a shit. We wanted to be Michael, too. We wanted to move like that. To this day, I can still moonwalk. But yeah, I couldn’t ever hold my own with the other break dancers. I nearly effin’ killed myself trying the worm–what sane person pitches himself head first into the pavement without any training or practice? Sigh.

From there, I think I started to seek out other forms of music in addition to top 40. I discovered Jackson’s back catalogue, and loved it all, but I also suddenly had permission to enjoy all of Motown and discovered more folk, too. I branched out, and I think that’s Jackson’s doing… at least a little. It was cool to be different.

And the hits off of Thriller just kept on coming. And ALL of it was awesome, and people started to emulate Jackson on their recordings. In particular I always think of Rockwell, who sometimes sounded more like MJ than MJ did. And then there were TV crossovers like Alfonso Ribeiro, who showed kids our age how kids our age looked when we were emulating MJ. And we all grew up, and although the trail is cold, you don’t have to dig very far to find musicians today in the R&B and Rap genres who will happily point to MJ as an influence.

Oh, yes Mike, you did start somethin’.

The later years were what everyone knows they were. He just let it all get to him, and I think, while maybe he could have avoided all that, I think it was really hard to do. I dunno if I want to blame Jackson for his idiocy in later years, or if I want to blame all of us for creating him. Either way, it kinda got sad after Thriller faded, and he became a caricature of himself, as anything that’s as big as he was eventually does. I think that one of the people I heard interviewed recently had it right–his apex was Thriller, but he kept trying to top it, and it was totally untoppable.

But if I want to really enjoy his work, it’s just about putting it on and forgetting all that other sensational mumbo-jumbo. Seriously, put on “Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough” and try not to move. It’s bottled positive energy. I love it all. No one will ever do that again, and that loss sorta makes me feel sad. And old.

Michael Jackson was among the first of my generation’s idols to die of something not suicide or substance related. While one can argue that his lifestyle was such that he did indeed do this to himself by taxing his body with stress and psychological sickness teamed with media stalkarazzi, at the end of the day, he had a heart attack.

My iron gods are starting to have their clay feet kicked out from under them. My generation is starting to die, and that is a thought that creates a feeling in me I can’t quite quantify yet. But I think that yeah, even now, Jackson’s startin’ something. Sigh.

I am so going to go marinade my ears in his body of work for a while. He was one of a kind. Truthfully, the Jackson I know has been gone for a long time already. I guess it’s time I both mourn and celebrate him. This is the Jackson I remember. I watch this, and I still think, “dayam!”

I want to try this so bad

I just hate it when the level of something’s hilarity matches the level of its cruelty. I could see myself doing this, but I’d feel bad afterward.

A full weekend of social stuff

This weekend was one of those that just didn’t stop. I had a couple of prior commitments and when I wasn’t filling those, people were opting for my time for spur-of-the-moment gatherings. It made for a busy weekend, but overall quite fun.

Friday night I checked out “Talk Radio”, a play put on by Poor Tom Productions at the Registry Theatre in Kitchener. Pretty good, I must say. Definitely worth the cost of admission. I’ve been a fan of the movie since I saw it ages ago. Recommended for those of you who can get there before it closes at the end of this week.

Saturday morning started off with the Walk for ALS, which turned out to be quite the do. Our team and a load of other folks showed up at RIM park and wandered the country roads for a couple hours, scarfed down donuts and coffee and won a disproportionate amount of door prizes.

I thought I might find the walk to be challenging, but it was not. All it took was the time, and the pace didn’t really matter. I wound up the walk feeling just fine and indeed probably ready for more. I think Stephen Wright had it right when he said that anywhere is walking distance if you have the time. It’s nice to know that in spite of what my energy levels seem to be day to day, there’s nothing much wrong with me. And it was overall a good feeling. When people get together for a common cause, things do happen. The donations we received were truly incredible. Nearly $3500 between me, Suz, Heather and Damo. I wouldn’t have ever believed it, but there it was. Really, really cool.

Then in the afternoon after the walk was over, I met up with Chris and we took in most of the first of four (I think) operas being put on in uptown Waterloo this summer. Honestly, I was impressed. But, I was also reminded of how much I am in agreement with Billy Connolly when he says that Opera is “two thirds too long”:

That aside, it was a surprize to me to learn that we had such talent in our little white-bread town. I didn’t know we even had an opera company, never mind one that could pull off what these folks did. It was really cool, and I enjoyed it (except for the repetition). Apparently they’re planning a Magic Flute opera in the near future, and I think we’ll head out to see that one for sure.

Sunday morning was for family stuff, hanging with my brother and going for a nice ride on the bikes. I couldn’t hope for better riding weather than what we’re having right now. We wound up around Chicopee area, and stopped in to look at some new townhomes they’ve built. My god, they are making them beautiful these days. But at 400K, there’s just no way I will ever be able to afford anything like that. Kinda made me not look forward to returning to our little apartment, which in turn reminded me to keep the Second Noble Truth in mind.

And then, I was done. Just done. For nearly the last two weeks, I’ve done little else but hang at family gatherings and hang out with family members and hang out with a couple friends and go out, and then in there go to work, and all that. The little introvert in me up and yelled and demanded solitude. I think I’ll see if I can cloister myself a little for this week. Spend some time making my environment better, and spend some time with just me, or me and Suz alone. That’d be nice.

So I declined yet another gathering on Sunday evening and opted instead to engage in the Sisyphusean toil that is cleaning our apartment. I guess it looks better for it. I just wish sometimes I could properly declutter. It still feels to me like I’m living in a student house–with more stuff. Ah well.

The best part though was opting to go for my evening walk. It was really nice outside yesterday evening, in spite of the threat of rain. Lots of bunnies all around, and fresh, wet earth smells. God, but I love me some spring. I guess it’s nearly summer already. Wow. Time goes so quickly. I wish I could slow it all down!

On ancestors

It’s was a heck of a first week of June, most things related around one of the great, and arguably last, rites of passage–death.

It’s taken some time to write all of this, and because the writing was fragmented, it isn’t what I’d hoped. Sigh. I gotta get in the habit of single-sitting writing when I have the time. Of course the trade off would be that things like this may never get written. Hm. More experimentation is in order. Aaaanyway.

The facts of the matter are that my circle of humans managed to lose not one, but two family members the first week of the month. Neither one was what I would call very close to me, so I’ve been afforded a measure of objectivity through the whole thing. For someone like me, that means a lot of thinking, unbridled by emotion. And that sort of thinking makes me want to write. So, this’ll be a long one, I fear. I’m going to split it up, in fact, into two posts so I don’t scare the bejeebus out of any potential readers. I want to write about facts and feeling, but also about the numinous, and spirit. Facts and feelings first.

The first one to leave was my cousin. He was about as far as one could get from me and still be considered family. In fact, I don’t think I’d seen him since my father’s death, some thirteen years ago. His death pretty much means that I’ll be seeing about as much of him as I have been. This in spite of the fact that we lived in the same city. He was a bit of a different sort, at least by way of our personalities. I mean, to be fair, I haven’t ever had too much contact with my aunt and her family for reasons I’ve never really hashed out. And as far as my cousins from that family go, we hardly ever crossed paths, even at the rare family functions that would have otherwise brought us together. But this particular cousin was a rambunctious one, and I don’t recall a single time I saw him and he wasn’t under the influence. He liked his drink, and it’s clear that that little habit was the cause of his demise.

The second to leave, only three days later, was Suzanne’s father, my ‘technical’ father-in-law. Someday I’m going to write about what makes family family. There’s an ongoing debate in my circle of family about whether it is marriage that makes a family, or time. I’m more in the second camp than the first, and I’m happy to find that I think Suzanne’s family is also begrudgingly subscribing to that in certain situations, however much it might run contrary to their traditions. In any case, that’s for another musing. But I can tell you that although he lived in Aurora, some two hours from where Suzanne and I live, I saw him multiple times a year, at least for every one of the family functions, and they had many. Suzanne’s relation’s sense of family is far different from that of my relations. Another entry. The point is, over the nearly 11 years I’ve known Suzanne, I got to know her dad fairly well. At least enough that we spoke frequently, and I think he was cool with me, and I was certainly cool with him. He was a nice man. ALS was a really shitty way for his life to come to an end. Ironically, there’s much more emotion that runs with Suzanne’s dad than does with my cousin. I guess it makes sense, given the time we spent.

My cousin’s death followed a very bare-bones sort of ritual. It was what my brother appropriately called “low key”. There was the fact of the death (no one in my family knew that he was even all that poorly off until just two days before he was gone–truth be told though, I was not surprized). After that followed a very brief service, immediate exodus to the cemetery, and we pretty much just lowered him into the earth. That was that. I guess, at the quick, that’s all we in the New World Christianish traditions do.

The thing that struck me is that for the sake of the human factor, death is really very hard. People say that this death was particularly hard for my aunt and uncle because “no one should have to bury their child”, but I think that although true, it’s not like anyone would argue that it’s an easy thing to bury one’s parent, spouse or kin. It’s probably not fair to say that one is easier than the other. Death’s hard for those closest to the deceased. The service, while quick and low key, did include some moving speeches by his friends and family, who took the time to tell those of us who pretty much didn’t know the heart of the man a little bit more about him. I get the impression that he was a barrel of laughs to his friends, and had the ability to make up alternate lyrics to songs–the thing that struck me most because I do the very same thing. Thing is, they all had trouble getting through their speeches, all choked up thinking about him, and it all seemed quite sincere. I just got the feeling–and it’s probably incorrect due to my own bias, that they were saying things awkwardly from the heart that they never actually said when he was around. I’m not sure if they knew how to give voice to their feelings, and that made it seem strange. I can hardly fault anyone for not knowing how to encompass emotions in a restricted oral format, though.

The real kicker was when they lowered him into the grave, and the immediate family got to toss a flower in with him. When my aunt, now some 80 years old got up to toss hers in, she seemed so utterly frail, and for just a moment, I swore she morphed into my Oma. It was really freaky. And her pain was palpable. it was truly tragic, and very hard to watch, and I felt very sad for her, and also for everyone who was close to him. I guess because I know that due to his drinking, he wasn’t always an easy dude to get along with. My last memory of him was when he showed up at our house shortly after dad died, clearly four sheets to the wind, crying about the loss, and I remember thinking that I didn’t even cry that much, and let’s face it, given how much our families hung out, he didn’t have any business crying that much; at least not in my opinion. He felt fake, and I found myself feeling more put off than thankful. It was also pretty hard to get rid of him, as he had all the social graces that come along with one who is thoroughly inebriated. Anyway, in spite of all the negative things that he must have put people he came into contact with through, they only seemed to remember the good qualities. That’s a really good thing.

The service for my father in law was much more involved, and more well considered, and as a result felt far more appropriate. That is, it felt like the whole thing considered the man, his life, and what he would have wanted, all wonderfully entwined with the real emotions of the family, and truly gave everyone who attended the visitation, service and interment a real idea of what he was like. There were many pictures, all thoughtfully put together in such a way as to showcase his life, there was a well-used book for people to write memories of him, and there was a showing of support of the likes I’ve never seen. People came from very far away both geographically and chronologically to pay their respects. People I never imagined would walk through the doors of the visitation showed up to offer a physical showing of support for everyone in the family and for me, too. I was really touched, and very much humbled at that. Clearly, not only was my father in law a man whose life made a difference, and touched many other lives, but the people that he surrounded himself with also surround themselves with wonderful people. It’s a testament to character, and to human relations. His spirituality shone through in both the fact of the services and the texts chosen, and in the way Suz and her sister delivered a fantastic eulogy that I can’t imagine could have been made any better.

The readings at the graveside weren’t only the usual 23rd Pslam, which I think at this point is so overused that God won’t let you into heaven if you don’t have it read. There was that one, of course, but also chosen was the wonderful passage on Death that appeared in Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet”, one of my favourite texts ever for sheer beauty of phrase and poetry. Although now that I Google it, it comes up as one of the best choices for funerals, so it may well be that it’s as overused as the 23rd Psalm, but what do I know? I guess my point is that I felt like it was a very good send off, or to use a phrase that’s been hovering around these days, way to “tuck him in”.

One thing I found interesting is that the metaphor of the sun setting was used in both funerals. People saying that we should think of the deceased as the sun setting after a beautiful day. We can be sad that it’s gone, but we know we’ll see it again, and it will shine as bright when we witness the dawn of our next life (whatever that is). It’s interesting because it’s a decidedly pre-Christian image. Sun worship is a little out of the mainstream. But it does give good imagery, just like anything we take the time to truly consider.

And I guess now that both these funerals are over, the hard part comes. I think it takes a year at least for people to move on from a death on any practical level. The seasons need to turn once without the deceased, so that those of us still here can learn what it’s like to live our rituals and pass our time without them.

For me, that also includes another element, which is learning to live with them again, in a new way. And I guess that’ll be the next entry about this. However, as a segue, I’ll share the following song with you. It’s got some legs when it comes to death. On the day my dad died, which was my first real time around the whole death/loss/funerals/cope merry-go-round, I woke up with this song in my head. I’m not exactly sure what put it there, but it seemed to fit quite nicely, and it made me feel better for all the fact that it is mainstream pop. It’s entered my head every single time death has entered my life since. I dunno… there’s worse things. In any case, here you go.

Sophie B. Hawkins – As I Lay Me Down (Official Music Video)