On Funerals and Friendship

When my father was dying, I wrote a lot. I wrote at home, in the car, at the office, at his funeral.

I had realized at some point that I was feeling new things that I had no names for, and I wanted to remember them. So I wrote them down. Much of it was awful, but some of it was also enlightening. I understood things I had no concept of before. Things I had only observed from a sterile distance. And I was afraid that if I didn’t write them down, I would forget them, and then it would all be for nothing.

Grief is 96% terrible, no matter what. But the other 4% gives you a choice. As awful as it is, it is also Life. In the most literal and visceral sense. It is actual Life. And it carries with it the last lessons that person will ever teach you. If you are attentive to them and let yourself learn them, they will be among your most precious possessions for the rest of your life.

This is some of what my father taught me.

1

The best preparation for grief is to make distinctions between friends and acquaintances. Starting now.

Friends are especially important in grief. Often when a parent dies, everyone in your family is in the same position as you. You can support each other. But you also need fresh air. To be away. To leave the mourning place.

A true friend is a respite. But be careful.

Some will offer to be a distraction. Others will appear under the guise of being there for you, while nonetheless insisting on the levity of casual conversation. Even as you lack the marrow for casual conversation. These are people who care for you, but who don’t have the stomach for your pain. It is important to know the difference between people who love you and people who care about you. People who love you run toward the fire. People who care about you wish you well from a safe distance.

This will not happen all at once. Over weeks and months, you will hit the limits of others’ ability to be honest, to be available, to be vulnerable. There will be those whose mouths say, “If you ever need anything…,” and whose eyes say, “… please don’t ask.” And none of it is personal. What feels like neglect is simply the tide going out, and showing the depth of what remains. The grief will subside. The water will return. There will be easier conversations to have. But you will never un-know what lay beneath, and what does not.

Still…

2

Be more grateful than disappointed.

There will be disappointments. But… If you are so blessed as to bear your grief under the cover of genuine friendship, do all that you can to inhabit and inherit that blessing. Let yourself be loved, coddled, comforted, indulged, forgiven, excused, waited on, and whatever else may come between the time you are broken and the time you stitch yourself back together. Receive voicemails, texts, emails, flowers, and all manner of considerations. Do not puzzle over how much anyone spent, how they learned of your loss, how close to them you aren’t, or any other detail. Breathe. And be loved. These are enough.

This is important because…

3

The person you are grieving will not be your only loss.

Death has a way of clarifying life. Where the specter of death is present, the things that matter obviously matter and the things that don’t obviously don’t.

Grief slashes and burns its way through your life, cutting whatever is not essential. Anything you can breathe without gets cut and burned away. Wide swaths of what you were interested in will fade into nothing. Years will go by and you will not miss them until someone asks you if you still… ? And then you will remember that you were a person who did this thing, who loved this thing, and now the thing is nothing to you. There will be hobbies you never pick up again and clubs you don’t return to. And it is all fine.

You will also lose other people. There will be relationships that aren’t intimate enough to be privy to your grief while it’s happening and aren’t important enough to resume afterward. Lose them without guilt.

Speaking of guilt…

4

When people who know tell you to be kind to yourself, listen.

Twenty years ago, my college roommate walked into my dorm room, leaned against my desk, and said, “Crystal, I have to tell you something. My mom died today.”

What followed was a grief I could not fathom at the time, but of which I would become a student and beneficiary many years later. That roommate, today my sister and Friend, was the first person I spoke to after I kissed my father good-bye. She has been my constant counselor and comforter, my advisor in every stage of grief. She has spent hours recounting her own losses, her own brokenness, the betrayals that compounded her pain, the paralysis, the depression, and all of the other things that grief entails. She has done this because she saw me floundering, wondering “why”, and wanted me to know that it is all part of the thing.

And I have taken her advice because, through her mother, I knew that she knew. And so she was the person whose permission freed me to be all of the dysfunctional things without guilt. I ignored text messages, let voicemails go stale, left work early, returned my students’ papers late, spent long hours walking the world alone, declined invitations, ghosted acquaintances… And it was all fine. It was all part of the thing.

There will be people who do not understand who reach out to comfort you in ways that make you want to run screaming from the room. That is part of the thing, too. But if you are fortunate enough to be loved by someone who knows, let them love you. Listen to them. It will spare you.

5

Your standards are your life. Raise them. Then defend them.

Of all the words in the English language, I am most unapologetically particular in my application of the word friend. It is among the most abused words we have. Henry Adams said, “One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible.” I wouldn’t go that far, but friendship is indeed a rare thing. And if you are counting your friends on more than one hand, you are probably counting wrong.

Jay Leno said that if you want to know who your friends are, “call people and ask them to drive you to the airport. The ones who will drive you are your true friends. The rest aren’t bad people; they’re just acquaintances.” Substitute “help you bury your parents” for “drive you to the airport,” and you get what I’m saying.

In the days before my father’s funeral, I took a call from a friend who was working in Costa Rica. We hadn’t spoken much of his passing, but she was working on rerouting her travel to come to the funeral. I told her this was ridiculous. Being out of the country gets you a pass on funerals. She said, “I know. But I’d rather be with you and the family.”

When the time comes that you are grieving, because loss is a part of life, may you be loved with a love that chooses you in your brokenness, over everything. May you believe in the reality of that love, and save space for it in your life.

*

Cicero wrote that friendship is different than any other relationship because it is not a technicality. It exists only in substance. You can technically be someone’s spouse without ever bothering to be good at it. You cannot technically be someone’s friend. You either are, in practice, or you are not.

Hold fast to this principle. Embed it in every area of your life, and it will save you countless disappointments. I received calls from people who explained that, as much as they wanted to be there, they simply couldn’t make it to the funeral. I was not disappointed by any of these calls. These were people who genuinely cared for me and whose reaching out was actual comfort in a dark time. And anyway, I already knew they were acquaintances.

Today, I know what it is to lose my father, and to be utterly undone by the loss. But I also know what it is to have people who love me move heaven and earth to show up for me. Unasked. That is friendship. I didn’t not know that. But now I know it. It is a thing my father taught me.