None of us can leave here today unchanged

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A mourner, holding herself upright, stands and speaks passionately with love about the husband she is here to farewell. In doing so, she honours his life, their love and his memory. Soon, she leads a procession of walkers, following the hearse as it moves out of the churchyard. I look at her walking behind the grey hearse while sun streams down and tears catch in my throat, the beginning of a loud, uncontrolled keening that I swallow.  In the church hall, she hugs others, and as is typical of her, inquires if they are okay, laughs at their memories and wipes tears away when old friends envelop her in a hug. At the cemetery, they say ‘The Irish bury their dead and today we are here to bury our dead’ and she picks up a shovel and is the first to begin. Like a working bee for death, others join in, a mother, sisters, friends, they all take a turn and what at first seemed heartbreakingly grim becomes a tribute to the dead, with the living doing their duty and saying goodbye.

When finished, the priest says ‘None of us can leave here today unchanged.’

In my minds eye these moments are like stills from a distant and foreign time when people grieved differently.  There were moments when this day was tough, moments when it was uncomfortable, moments when there was a loud and open lamentation for both life and death. I’m fascinated by grief, fascinated by the way that we in contemporary society think we can outrun it, can outsource it, can outplay the reality that with life comes loss, and with loss comes grief.

In the funeral booklet it reads ‘To love someone is to risk the pain of parting. Not to love is never to have lived. The grief which we now experience is the honouring of that love’.  The words resonate deep within me. In the days that have passed since our friend died, I’ve wondered about life, love and loss. I’ve wanted to run at the sea and scream into the roar of the ocean at the unfair nature of life, at my friend finding herself a widow at 39, with a small, beautiful child by her side. I’ve felt flashes of pain as I think of never being able to again enjoy the witty humour, passionate mind and beautiful voice of our dear friend MK. In the church, the words from the booklet thrum through my brain and I begin to realize that today, hard as it is, is the honouring of the love we feel for MK.

There is no escape from the grief that I feel for him, for Carla, for Ailish. There is however, a charting of his journey, of the way that he touched all of our lives and the way he will continue to do so. In writing of my memories of MK, I wrote that I always walked away from him, feeling better about the world. In celebrating his life, I see that this feeling was not unique, and was in fact a quality that every single one of the people spilling out of the church knew, recognized and loved about him. In leaving his funeral today, he has made me feel better about the world and instilled in me a desire to be a better person, to make the choice to speak well of people rather than to waste words with meanness.

I like to think of grief as an ocean, a sea that surrounds us. We cannot live without it, yet there are times we do not wish to swim out into its depths. There are times when it is calm and still, we see it around us, but its waves do not touch our shores. Other times, grief, batters us, rolling down wave after wave until we feel swamped and wonder if we will be able to stay afloat. In time, the sea stills, the waves break into gentle ripples, the sky clears and it seems as if all is well once more.

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Today, over a week and half later the sun is again streaming down and I’m heading off to vote. I’m thinking of MK as I do this, knowing how passionately he felt about politics and knowing that he would want each of us to make our vote count today. So today, when we use our voices to vote, when we think of the kind of world we want to live in, I’m thinking that I want it to be a world in which people treat each other with kindness and gentleness.

The ripples touch the shore and hope lies within them.