Aware

I've come to find the moments of peril and despair, are the moments that bring back everything into perspective. The more good we experience, we tend to drift further away from the meaning of life and find ourselves investing so much importance on trivial pursuits. I remember attending a funeral for a friend's mother who passed away. Thoughts ran around inside my head as I drove to the funeral service, but as soon as I stepped through the double doors into the chapel, all those thoughts disappeared, and the only thing I had was an awareness of the moment I was in, a moment that I was finding myself in communion with friends and strangers, yet somehow feeling a sense of connection, as if death made a way for us to understand one another, to not look at each other so differently, but finding a common denominator that we rested upon.
The first person that spoke was her husband. I watched as he walked up to the pulpit, bracing his right and left hands against the white painted wood. He closed his eyes tight, praying and waiting for strength. His words were calm and soft. They were a wall, held up against a rush of tears. You could feel the mourning through his tone, occasionally breaking his voice to let out pockets of crying that ripped through the seems of his composure. Restraining cries broke out among the gathered, like chimes colliding with the abrupt winds of loss and change. I prayed for each family member as they came up to say loving words of their beloved mother. I listened undividedly to every word, every pause, every silent sound of each tear that fell from their eyes into their hands and tissues, my heart was mourning in their unsung requiems that filled every pew and living soul. Everyone spoke of her like she was an angel. Every word just brought pieces that fit to make a beautiful portrait of a divine being as that, only without wings.
I proceeded along to the burial site. Standing in that gray stillness that traveled in the caravan of the mourning. I watched as my friend along with her family carried the white and silver laced casket to the welcoming abyss carved out, revealing earthly soil in some sobering painful resolution. My friend broke down in a loud mournful cry as she extended her hand, releasing her mother back to the dust from whence she came from, it was finally hitting her, she was letting go, she too was dying, laying down her hopes and waiting for God to raise the dead in her, as He raised her mother to the place many of us dream of and imagine, a place that we are reminded of each time we are captivated by beauty.
It made me think of life and how in this moment, it gets stripped of anything superficial and laying on the surface. The reputation we work tirelessly to uphold and expand, the clothes we brandish, the car we drive, the people we labor to impress, the money we flaunt, the job titles we broadcast, the lovers we showcase, lose their comfortless significance, and you are forced to realize what really matters. That a life is made by what is given, by what is sacrificed. It rings deep within me, the word legacy rolling around in the barrel of my stomach. I don't want to live for finite things; being worried about whether or not people like who I really am, if I'm wearing the right brand of clothing, driving the nicest car, and so forth. I want to live knowing I gave myself for other people, for love, for something worth dying for.