On Monday I sang for a funeral.
I've sung for a handful of funerals since the one I wrote about. I haven't known any of the deceased, but each one has moved me. The Church offers such a tender farewell in the funeral Mass: the white pall, the incense for the coffin. We say, "This body was redeemed by Our Lord, and we believe He will raise it up."
This guy was one of the founding members of our parish. A long procession of family filed in, dressed somberly. The line of black was broken up by a white cloth diaper flung over one suitcoat shoulder. Was that a great-grandbaby? I don't know, but I was glad to hear those squeaks and coos during the Mass -- an audible reminder that life goes on.
In the coffin he held his rosary, and his veteran's flag was tucked in beside him. I was acutely aware, there in view of his stilled body, of the evanescence of life. That morning my legs had run five glad miles for me; somewhere in their future lies a last step. My cricothyroid muscle contracted just so to hit the high notes in the Ave Maria; someday it will be stiff and cold. It's a good thing, I was thinking as I biked home afterward, to be reminded of what's coming-- to pull my head out of my various electronic conversations and work preoccupations and remember what matters.
On Friday a message on my answering machine shook me hard.
It was kind of silly for me to get so upset but I did it anyway. There was an Incident at one of the local high schools, a lockdown followed by frantic sirens and police with assault rifles looking for suspects kind of Incident. A 70-point headline on the front page of the local paper kind of Incident. As Incidents go, this one was fairly minor. No one was hurt. My kids don't even go to school there. And still, I couldn't quite get a grip afterward.
School violence hits me hard: the idea that high school kids would willfully try to kill their peers knocks me back every time. We were living in Edinburgh when Columbine happened and I read the London Times coverage of it obsessively, sending prayers across the ocean to our friends in Littleton, wiping away tears and snot to keep reading so I could understand.
I still don't understand. I still can't talk about Columbine without choking up.
It made for strange bookends to the week-- Monday's calm certainty (we're all going to die) juxtaposed with Friday's wobbly uncertainty (and sometimes it's really ugly). I don't have a tidy ending for this post, just an echo of the prayer that the man from my parish offered tens of thousands of times: pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.
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