What is a Funeral?

I babysat The Sister's girls this morning so she could attend a very sad funeral.

Yes, I know ALL funerals are sad.

However, when the deceased is in their late 30's and unexpectedly/tragically leaves a spouse and three children, it's a bit more sad than when a 70+ year old person dies.

Unless, of course, that 70+ year old person is related to you.

Or me.

You know what I mean.

Anyway...the 7 year old niece asked me (after Mommy left), what exactly is a funeral? We talked about when someone dies, how people like to:

• get together and talk about the person 
• share fun pictures of the person through all the stages of their life and doing fun things with their family and friends 
• tell funny stories about the person 
• discuss where the person is now

She seemed happy with the discussion and didn't ask any additional questions.

The Sister came home and we were discussing the funeral. I told The Sister the 7 year old niece was asking about what a funeral is and The Sister said to her, "Remember when Grandma Nancy died? That was a funeral."

Which lead to a much deeper discusion of:

"Cousin Katie touched Grandma and she was cold. Why are dead people cold?"

Kids.

They cut right to the heart of issues, don't they?

Good conversations to have, in bad situations, with our little people.

Funerals

We seem to be in one of those phases of life where every time we turn around, someone we know has died.

We've attended three funerals within the last few weeks.

Yesterday we learned that one of The Husband's high school friends had passed away after a long illness. That funeral will be next week.

To top it all off, I opened the obituary section of the paper yesterday and saw that one of The Husband's earliest childhood friends (pre-kindergarten) had passed and his funeral is today.

I'm ready for this phase to finish immediately!  I want to move on to the life phase where we celebrate weddings and babies and such.

Do you find funerals come in multiples in your life?