Day 1: The Happy Death

Wish 1: Closure

The young Filipina took the microphone and started crying. "He always give me money," she said with broken English and an accent, "and he take my picture."

Without the context, this scene looks bad. Actually, it is at a memorial service for the girl’s uncle. He was a photographer who always gave a shiny dollar to every nephew and niece that came to visit his family. All his photos show him with a camera hanging from his neck and surrounded by relatives.

I didn’t know these people, but there I was, listening to bad speeches. The dreadful accents and the sobbing made it so difficult to understand anything.

But the emotions were real. This family was feeling a heavy loss and they were blabbering away in an attempt to express it.

What a year it has been. We have seen many family and friends leave us. My own father passed away last October.

What do you say when someone you care for leaves? How can you articulate the impact of your loved one to you in less than five minutes? Even if you wrote down your speech, I bet you can’t read it straight.

My sister did something great for a eulogy speech. She talked about what was funny about our dad. She got people laughing, just like this funny and touching video clip.

In our faith, at death, you celebrate life. Sure, we will miss our dad, but we fondly recall what endeared us to him.

I just watched an old TV series called Dead Like Me, which follows the activities of grim reapers who look like regular people. In this one episode, they had to put the reaped souls’ data into a database, and decided to sort it by their last thoughts. The last thought is what they were thinking before kicking the bucket. The last thoughts they encoded consisted mostly of regrets (“if only…”), loneliness and the occasional “I’m glad my family will be alright.”

I think these supposedly last thoughts are based on what people go through during memorials. They grieve more if there is unfinished business, or if they couldn’t be there at the last moment. They need to say goodbye in a ritual. Memorials aren’t for the dead. They’re for those left behind.

My wish for today is that those who are left behind find closure, so that they can celebrate life and not mourn death.