Parenting Beyond Belief has its own blog and I was reading thru is last night. I ran across a post about death. Death seems to be on the BIG questions that comes up when you talk about raising kids without religion. How do you explain it? But this post focused more on the phenomena that once someone is dead, they are immediately canonized. The hubby likes to joke that just once, just once that he'd like to see a report on TV about some guy who died in a tragic manner that a neighbor complains, "He was the biggest @$$. Never helped anyone without it benefiting himself."

My first experience of the weird immunity we grant to the recently dead was at my dad’s funeral. I was thirteen and he was forty-five, my age next year. I loved my dad. He was a good guy.

Still, the eulogies offered by Dad’s friends and colleagues struck me as…weird.

I remember one colleague of his saying, “Dave didn’t have an enemy in the world.” “He was always thinking of others, never a thought for himself,” said another. “Everyone loved him.” “He loved his family more than any man I’ve ever known.”

Okay. I guess.

Like I said, he was a good guy. But this was my first experience of the genuine canonization of the dead that is socially mandated. Although my dad was funny and smart and hardworking and endlessly curious, he also lost his temper frequently and even sprained his thumb once. Oh, while beating me, I left that part out. I had been a shit to my younger brother, again, and Dad had come off a 60-hour week, and he couldn’t find it in himself to not sprain his thumb on me.

I'm often struck with this subject when I'm at wits end about my mom. I hate to say that sometimes the way I get myself out of my rut is to remember the crappy things like when she told me that I'd just flunk out of college, so why get my hopes up about applying. She did later apologize during another fight that she just said it because she didn't want me to go. That's my mother's love for ya.

Reading Amy's post about her dad's funeral cemented the idea that we need religion or whatever we call it to make it thru the bad days. I've met only a handful of people who seem to thank their deity for the good days. But I think we all fall to our knees when we need help. And honestly, that's not such a bad thing. And just like religion, we need to remember the good things about people when they die. Hopefully those at the things that help us thru our loss. And maybe even make us laugh when our hearts are torn to shreds.

So while the practice of bending over backwards for the recently dead is strange and sometimes unfaithful to who that person is, I excuse at least those closest to the dead for it. It's all apart of the healing process.

That said, when I go (at a very old age and in my sleep) please put on one hell of a dance party. And if my death does make the news, say something about my bad grammar if you want to say something bad about me. *wink*

Labels: Books, goddess, writing