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Showing posts from July 6, 2014

Becoming Them

This morning, I was listening to a story on the radio about a gentlemen who had been brought up in the family business of undertaking. The meat of the story was about the death of his father, and how he had requested that his sons prepare his body for burial. To be honest, I was only half listening. But a specific line caught my attention, and as I often do, I wrote it down to ponder on a later date: We bury our dead, then we become them . In the context of the story, I believe the man was commenting on the inevitability of his own death. Burying his father brought up all the feelings of one's own mortality that you might expect. Nevertheless, his words struck me as more complex than he had perhaps intended. Maybe because I tend to over think things. Maybe because this time of year is marked with the sadness of loss for my family. Maybe I had a premonition. Whatever the reason, I continued to listen to the story, now a bit more carefully, and turned his words over in my mind.