We Are More

I refuse to use the app that counts how many words this piece runs. Quantity would cheapen what I am about to write.

Reason? I have just walked my only and older sister to final resting place. Do I count how many paces from the hearse to the grave? How many police escorts ( checking funeral party clip-ons) and how much was her belonging (donated to Veteran Org) worth?

She was a CPA. I am sure in her times, she counted, quantified and calculated.

Had to, for the jobs.

But in totality, I refuse to put a number on her marker. Just her name, birth year and burial year.

She is resting in peace. As our parents and her husband are.

Once at my Mom’s funeral, I tried to make relatives understand the multi-dimensional values of my Mom (teacher, who as of last week, I found her class picture: 57 to 1 student-teacher ratio).

I said “If her love could be quantified, all relatives and siblings would get a new SUV’s”.

This time around, another round of losing “Mom” (19 years my senior whom I considered next in line in my imaginary hierarchy).

Write this when I am dead. Celebrate my life. Forget the dreaded and forgetful disease (dementia).

Remember the good times and my last embalmed appearance. All the bowing and the crying. As if tears could be measured and quantified.

We are more.

Than just a vote, a donation, a membership, a class roster, a CPA certificate.

Just death certificate. Memorial day each year will see fewer and fewer visitor.

The grave diggers and ground keepers have gone on to their next job.

The funeral home hired police have parked their vehicles, taken off their sunglasses and helmets.

Bless them and their last kind gestures of humanity. In getting stopped for funeral party, perhaps by passers might pause and reflect on their own mortality while rushing to Costco and Walmart.

Then, maybe, some will “get it” (that they are more) than the sum of their earthly possession.

We have heard a lot about “death by a thousand cuts”.

My sister’s life consisted of ” a thousand (kind) acts”.

They added up. She told me. I believed her. Not because she got analytic credentials to back up her claims.

But because she was my sister whom I lived close by, took in her every habits and hobbies.

She was good at churning those millions of calculations in the back of her brain and turning them into immediate deliverable and actionable.

Brain that was reinforced and refilled with new data stream, observation and verification.

In short, She Was More.

So are we.

As the priest said, “we are blessed”.

Like it or not, she made her transition in the middle of “What a wonderful world” serenaded by the weekly roving singer.

I would say, that “Wonderful World”, was hers and was with her who lived “a Wonderful Life”.

Si tu n’existais pas. Could someone, please, play it for fade out music track.

That way, we can’t easily put it out of our head.

Words we can be counted and forgotten.

But how someone made us feel lasts a lifetime.