A Safe Space for Grief

There's a time in your life when it seems every weekend features a wedding and a time when it seems every week contains a funeral.

I have entered the funeral stage, it appears.

In the last two years, I have attended no fewer than nine funerals.

A cousin, an uncle, a friend, a former neighbour, all of them of a certain age and all of them taken by cancer or heart disease.

Tomorrow, another one, for a farmer and father of six I had known all my life, who was good friends with my parents, whose children are my friends and to whose house I was shipped for a few days each summer when I was a kid, to give my mother 'a break'.

The thing about funerals is, they're never solely for the person being mourned that day. Of course you're crying for the person being eulogized, but aren't you also crying for your own previous losses? That's why we still have funerals, I think, when so many other public and formerly religious ceremonies have gone by the wayside. There's comfort on offer for the family, but also a safe and public space for each of us to mourn other departures.

While in the United church in Creemore offering support to the Millsap family tomorrow, I will think of Glenn, but I will also shed a tear for my uncle, my cousin and the other people I've already mourned this year, plus my own Dad and my grandparents who have been gone for more than two decades. I know everyone around me will be doing the very same thing, and that's OK.