Nobody gets invited to a funeral. Unlike other life stage rituals where weeks can be spent fine tuning the guest list, negotiating between family members, and attempting to put some sort of metric to the quality of our relationships, with funerals everyone has a place and people just know to show up.
The first thing that happens when someone you love dies is that you have to clean the house. The clutter and mess of those last few days when all you’re doing is sleeping in shifts, going to the hospital and maybe managing to eat something that barely gets finished let alone cleaned… all of that mess has got to go. The fear and despair that’s been accumulating like the energetic equivalent of rancid unwashed dishes… it all has to go. The air has to move, the house must be clean, not for your own sake, not for the sake of the immediate family who are all about to enter deep grief and couldn’t give a fuck what kind of space they are going to melt into. The house must be clean because people are coming.
People, the people who’ve been calling to see how he’s doing and also the ones who have not; the people who loved him and the people who love you; the people who live far away but are always close to your heart and the people who live nearby however close you ever actually were; the people who will know what to say, who will know how not to say anything, and the people who won’t know what to do and will need you to comfort them. The people, all the people, are coming, and the house must be clean.
They’re coming, of course, so that you’ll clean the house. They’re coming so that you’ll have something to do. They’re coming because there is nothing else they can do. And you clean the house because there’s nothing else you can do either.
My father died young. At 53 years old, his was the first funeral of a friend for many of his peers and the first funeral of a friend’s parent for many of mine. Arrangements for the funeral came together very quickly. I didn’t invite anyone, I barely even talked to anyone in the days after his death, but somehow people knew to show up. They didn’t know what to say, they didn’t know what to do. They were mostly awkward and uncomfortable, fumbling around this notion of death that just moved from an abstract idea to a very concrete reality. But amid all of their discomfort around death, they knew to show up.
In dealing with death, the funeral, imperfect and strange of a ritual as it may be, does the job of a container and, all things considered, does it well.
Containers are the structures that hold our lives together. They are flawed and imperfect, they sometimes uphold outdated ideas and they can be slow to change, but they also give us enough of an outline so that we are not moving through life on a completely blank canvas. The container’s job is to provide us with a space to show up in, our job is to fill that space, to add texture, to add color. We get to work with the container to make it what it needs to be. We get to work with the structures, to name them and to shape them to meet our needs and our values. The best containers are strong but nimble: flexible enough to meet the needs of the particular humans inside them, solid enough to hold their form and hold us when we aren’t able to hold ourselves.