It’s become impossible to ignore the fact that I’ve been going to a lot of funerals lately.
The latest was last Friday, for longtime Enterprise-Journal employee Donald Carlisle. But I can think of at least three other funerals or visitations that I’ve attended in the last few weeks. It’s a lot more than usual.
And since November, I can think of two other funerals I would have gone to, one for a former employee and the other for a former carrier. But each time, there was a schedule conflict.
I’ve come up with reasons for the funeral increase. First, obviously, is that people I know have died within a few weeks of each other. And apparently more people I know are getting older.
My age is playing a role, too. At 64, I put more importance on stopping by a visitation to greet family members than I did in the past.
I used to let work get in the way. Charles Dunagin, the former editor, sometimes joked that I hated funerals, since I rarely went to them.
He had a point. But back then, in my 30s or 40s, the value of attendance at a funeral or visitation didn’t register.
I was thinking about this during Donald’s funeral. And the irony is that even though I didn’t have a good attendance record in the past, the best time I ever had at a funeral was in 1987, when I was just 25 years old.
It was when my mother Elizabeth died. Actually, it was the wake, as the visitation is called in Catholic New Orleans, that was such fun.
My mom was 62 when she died of cancer. It seemed like a thousand people who knew her or my dad came into the funeral home that night for the wake. There were friends and relatives that I hadn’t seen in years. We laughed and talked about things from childhood.
More meaningful, though, were the kind words from total strangers, all of them much older than me. They said the nicest things. She had retired as a nurse anesthetist, and had a whole career before she got married and had two sons.
Several people told me about her conscientious work at the Eye, Ear, Nose & Throat Hospital. It was like the end of “It’s A Wonderful Life,” when people were saying to Jimmy Stewart, “I wouldn’t have a roof over my head, George, if it wasn’t for you!” And, “To my big brother George — the richest man in town!”
For me, my mother’s wake was a major stress reliever. Seeing all those people lifted my spirits. And it was the beginning of the realization that we all die one day, and our time here is precious.
Given my willingness for many years to skip funerals, the next irony in the story is that now I prepare all the obituaries for the newspaper and website.
In the 1980s and 1990s, I dreaded the obits. All the information was handwritten from phone calls to funeral homes. It was time-consuming and easy to make mistakes.
Almost two years ago, I took over the obits when we were shortstaffed in the newsroom. Though we’re at full speed now, I’ve kept doing them — because I enjoy it.
But there are so many obituaries for people I know. No wonder I’m going to funeral homes more often, right?
