The Funeral

It was such a beautiful morning, cool still with a whisper soft breeze, under a blindingly bright blue sky. The heat that would wilt the morning's resolve was hours away. I delighted at the opening fuchsia flowers an their bright pink and purple petals, as hummingbirds swooped by like miniature jets in metallic sound. The neighbours 'chickens were singing their pride and as I closed my eyes and let the still gentle sun engulf me like a warm bath, half a dozen bird songs gave me surround sound pleasure. What a treat to be soaking up this solitude and peace. I went inside for a bowl of cereal and turned on the national news to see the funeral service remembering our Vice President's son, Beau Biden. The church of St. John of Padua, a beautiful Romanesque building, exuded dignity and hope amidst the somber realization of the tragedy of the event. As I watched the stately Catholic funeral ritual, one I grew up with, I drifted back in time to April 1998, and the day my youngest sister was buried a week after her suicide by hanging at age 35. The funeral I was watching on national news was inspiring, dignified, full of quiet hope and a sense of community and love. The funeral of my sister 17 years ago was a bizarre affair. My other sister did not sit with my mother and brother and I, but decided to sit with her boss and his family. My father wandered around the church during the service, dazed, confused. The burial was surreal. When the coffin was being lowered into the ground on that hot Georgia day, my mother and other sister started laughing out loud in some sort of twisted private joke. It was beyond undignified and insulting. There was no sense of community, of love or togetherness. The funeral I was watching on my television gave me a sense of personal hope, and also a sense of national pride. Politics in the US right now were so divisive, so toxic; to see our President and Vice President and their families so united in a deep bond of mutual love and respect made me be proud to be a citizen of this country, for the first time in years. This was an occasion of mourning, but the quiet strength it brought to the foreground, emphasizing virtues I love of this country I made my own as one of its citizens 21 years ago, deeply moved me. For a brief moment in time I was forgetting the caustic national politics that made me doubt the future of our democracy. I felt my cynicism melt and it was replaced with a spark of pride and love. Maybe we would be alright after all. I so wished that for all the effort my father put into bringing us to this country, for my own dreams I still hold here, and mostly for my son and his future. But I also wished it for this country, this USA that I made my country, my home, and that I love, and so much want to believe in still.