Death Is Supposed to Be Inconvenient

When an entire world ends, what else would you expect?

Photo by Mike Bird

The death of someone close is always surreal. An entire world has ended, and yet the rest of the world continues as if nothing has happened.

On the same day someone dies, multiple babies are born, men and women are married, people drive to work like normal, they smile and share pleasantries with their waiter. You want to scream at the haze of activity around you, to make people stop and pay attention.

Something terrible has happened! Why don't you care?! Is death not even an inconvenience?

This is why funerals are important. Because a group of people come together, stop what they are doing, and pay attention. They let death be inconvenient for them, if only for a little while. This is good and proper.

People will stop or slow down their automobile for a funeral procession, a quiet nod to this truth. The death of a loved one causes random strangers to be inconvenienced. But there is a deeper tradition still practiced in some parts of the country, though mostly forgotten. The cars will not only slow down and stop, but the driver will get out and stand at attention as the hearse drives by. If he is wearing a hat, he will take it off in respect.

This simple act doesn’t actually do anything. Unless it’s a very small town, they don’t know the deceased, and they probably don’t know anyone in the procession. Practically, the gesture is pointless. Purely symbolic. But an entire world has ended, and an unknown stranger is willing to acknowledge that fact and do something.

Just because the gesture is symbolic doesn’t mean it’s powerless. Symbols are powerful, and we forget that fact to our peril. Symbols with a clear, obvious praxis are even stronger. In this case, the gesture slows the entire world down for a moment and shows the living that the dead still matter. And since that is the way of all flesh, it is good and proper to be reminded.

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I remember the awkward hug like it was yesterday. I was 21 years old and in the kitchen of our cramped apartment getting breakfast when my roommate walked in to tell me Deryck was dead.

The statement didn’t process. My roommate gave me a hug while I stood as stiff as an oak tree.

I had seen Deryck the previous night at our church’s midweek bible study. It was also the beginning of fall break for school, so he was heading home that night.

“I’ll see you next week,” I said.

But I never saw him again. A car crash on the dark, rainslick roads.

Deryck’s family lived about twelve hours away. Despite that, about twenty people from our church drove up for the visitation and funeral. I carpooled with two others for the two-day trip. I missed a mid-term test, which my professor was gracious enough to let me retake.

It was the most inconvenient funeral I’ve ever been to, during a time when I had almost no money to my time as a poor college student. That is good and proper. The sting of death is still real, but people, sometimes complete strangers to those left behind, who cared enough to inconvenience their lives for a small while, may add a little novacaine.

I still remember Deryck from time to time. And the fact that every “goodbye” might be the last.

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I never knew either of my grandfathers, but both of my grandmothers are a constant presence in my memories. Both of their funerals, despite just being the periods at the end of long sentences, loom just as large. What I remember most are the people I had never met before. Friends of my father from his youth, old friends of my mother who had drifted away but were sucked back in by the gravity of the occasion, entire stories and lives and relationships to learn about as each grandmother brought people together one last time.

Whenever someone dies, whether you knew them or know one of the people left behind, resolve to be inconvenienced. It might ruin your lunch break. It might destroy your plans for the day or evening. It might even cost you some hard-earned money.

But it’s supposed to. Lean into the inconvenience. Be reminded of death. It will be good for them and it will be good for you.

It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart.

Ecclesiastes 7:2