(a meditation on grief and the things that keep me up at night)

I don’t remember much from my first funeral. We stood in line waiting to view the body. When it was my turn, I observed how the body was ashy, its arms arranged stiffly by the hips, nostrils oozing with cotton wool. I didn’t know who the dead person was. My mother told me that didn’t matter. In our community, you don’t have to know who the person is in order to pray for their passage to Heaven. Every utterance counts, she told me. And in the haze of incense, I pictured the body’s soul as a shimmery soapy bubble bouncing gently upwards with each gust of prayer. I was eleven years old.

Over the decades I would go to many funerals in our community, some of people I knew, others were complete strangers. We all show up…