I Pray

I told everyone I had a funeral to attend. I was given condolences and long faces.  Leah suggested a "second funeral" event, and friends deflected the idea. But as I sat in the middle of a magnificent stone church, eyes closed, a tear running down my cheek, and chin tilted slightly upward, open to the choir's mystic energy resounding through the hall, I felt love.  I barely knew him save through the his beautiful daughter, but I felt the laughter, love, joy, and sadness of his life.  Perhaps it is because I am not naturally prone to compassion that I find the ceremony around the most humbling of experiences enlivening.  He brought me to life.  He is not dead.  He did not die.