Post #30 Living and Dying

Baby Boomers experience death and funerals more and more.

Jun 16, 2025

We drove slowly on the one-way asphalt roadway past markers and stones and the bones of people in suits and dresses who had been placed in wooden boxes now residing six feet into the ground.

The sky was blue, people were dressed in black and there was a green canopy with two rows of brown metal chairs neatly placed together waiting for those living to sit in them.

One of those wooden boxes held a person I used to know lying inside of it which was propped up by metal tubing with six feet of an empty hole below it, with a big pile of dirt that used to be in that hole next to it with a shovel shoved into it in which we would take the dirt and throw it on the box as a way of saying goodbye.

With the exception of being born, considering that leaving this world may be the most profound occurrence of our life and the people closest to us, and considering how much time we spend focusing on the most insignificant and trivial events such as a dog doing a cute trick or what celebrity just broke up with whomever, it seems to me we spend an inordinately miniscule amount of time talking about, contemplating and processing death.

Living is given such monumental significance and yet dying gets even the most famous people on the planet a few paragraphs in a national newspaper or website and a few seconds at the Academy awards. For the rest of us, we’re lucky if we get a nice obituary in the local paper and a few dozen people at our funeral.

When they are alive, presidents, queens, movie stars and sports superstars are bigger than life itself, and it seems the world couldn’t survive without them, but when they die they are gone from our lives, the world survives, and they are forgotten a few days later.

Yet only when a person we love is about to pass on, do we start contemplating their soon-to-be disappearance on this earth and in our lives, and think about the void they will leave when they are gone and how the future will be different with them not being here.

As many great scholars and philosophers have noted, we seldom focus on the void that was here before they were born, which if you think about it, is much more consequential. They weren’t here for millions of years, came by to say hello for a few decades, and then they were gone again.

With that perspective, you’ve got to admit that each individual life seems pretty insignificant, a grain of sand, an ant in a mountain, with millions of years of existence before and after our paltry little seventy or eighty years, more or less, of our short walk in the world.

And yet……

for that hour, a few short days after we are gone, for those twenty or forty or one hundred people standing there under that green canopy and blue sky sitting on brown chairs, we are the most important person in their lives, the most important person in their universe.

We celebrate the love, beauty, brilliance, passion, compassion, humor and unbounding joy of life of that person. Like we seldom do when they are alive, we forgive their mistakes, forget their flaws, bypass their weaknesses, picadilloes and imperfections - as we should - and for maybe the only time ever, celebrate the incredible gift of life this person was to each of us individually and to the collective group.

Why is it, we barely think about, discuss, analyze and contemplate this herculean dichotomy and juxtaposition, that in the big picture, each of our lives are equally inconsequential – not the smallest blip on the radar of all life – and, at the same time, each of us is immeasurably beautiful, radiant, brilliant and perfectly imperfect, the most important person in the world to ourselves and the few people around us?

Why is it we only see this at the moment of death and the few days afterwards?

And why don’t we say to that person, whom we have shared life with for decades and decades with how utterly important, incredible, and a blessing to the world they have been? What do you think that person would have felt if they knew that the one hundred or so people that make up their life thought that their existence was the greatest gift that could be bestowed upon them?

The only thing that I can think of is that it is the same, that it is all the same, at the same time. That each of us IS totally insignificant AND we are the most important person in the world to ourselves and the few people around us. That the smallest pebble on the mountain is equal to the vastness of the sun. That each of us is as magnificent as the greatest love and beauty the universe can express AND that we are all as common as a blade of grass, the blue sky above, and brown folding chairs sitting in a row under a green canopy.

I’m going to try and remember what a blessing each person is around me and try to tell them that more often as well.

But I’m sure I’ll forget in a few days.

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