Funeral

I drove down to West Hartford today for the memorial service for Sally Ayer Rossetti, my mother's favorite cousin. The readings and music were standard - Dvorak, "How Great Thou Art*," "Amazing Grace," "His Eye is on the Sparrow;" The 23rd Psalm, The Lord's Prayer, 2 Timothy 4:7-8, and John 14:1-7. It turns out that the whole service was based on the bulletin to another service Sally had gone to years ago.  She brought the bulletin to her daughter and said "This is perfect.  Do this."

The medley of instrumental ABBA songs for the prelude was a little different, though.

My brother was there, and Sally's children, who I had not seen in decades, though we have corresponded a bit. Only one other relative, one of her brother's grandsons. It felt odd.  Yogi Berra supposedly said "If you don't go to other people's funerals they won't come to yours," one of those impossibilities that is nonetheless true. The number of people likely to attend your funeral slowly trickles away.  If you are still in the workforce there will be people for whom you are currently a big deal in their lives.  Ten years later, not so much. This is also true for how active you are at church or in other groups. You start to become invisible when you are gone. 

I keep telling people some things they can do as they age to fight invisibility, because regardless of whether you care about the attendance at your funeral, you might need someone to drive you to a consult you have to be drugged for more than an hour away, to wait in the lobby for you to be able to return home, or need meals when you have a hip replacement. 

I am already destined to be set on an ice floe and pushed out to sea, but what about the last few years before that?

Revelation

Robert Frost  A Boy's Will 1913

We make ourselves a place apart
     Behind light words that tease and flout,
But oh, the agitated heart
     Till someone find us really out.

’Tis pity if the case require
     (Or so we say) that in the end
We speak the literal to inspire
     The understanding of a friend.

But so with all, from babes that play
     At hide-and-seek to God afar,
So all who hide too well away
     Must speak and tell us where they are.

 

I'll have a go at it because of the last stanza, though I am not known for being good at all at poetry analysis.

We hide ourselves, quietly or noisily, because of some fear of discovery and rejection. Yet discovery is what we desire, so we craft our hiding cleverly, in hopes of inspiring someone to look more closely. Sadly, few pursue to the degree we would like, and in the end we forego the disguises and say the truth more baldly.

Because few will look, or none, all must eventually reveal themselves.  Even God must spell it out and appear before us, because so few earnestly desired to know Him.

 

Entrepreneur

All five of my sons work for employers, as my wife and I did our entire careers.  But the three younger ones especially are also moving out into self-employment. John-Adrian works as an accountant at a hospital, where his wife also works. But he also makes money at his hobbies - catching king crab and salmon, metal detecting, fleecing overconfident drunks at poker tables in Vegas, hunting caribou.  His wife makes money as a media influencer to Filipinos. Their side hustles put together are about a decent salary now. Son #4 works for Mercedes above the Arctic Circle in Norway, but also has a car rental business, having discerned that the only other rentals are all very high-end, leaving an unserved market.  Kyle has started a photography business, particularly dog photography, which he hopes soon becomes his only business. He has a few other ways of making side cash, though he is not pursuing those as careers.

Son #2 used to make side money as a wedding photographer, not longer does.

Having to hustle for your livelihood is not something I well understand.  They have qualities of resilience and enduring rejection that I seem to lack. Bully for them, then. I tip my hat.

Replacing Biden

I am already hearing people saying that the Democrats who want to replace Biden should be taken at face value when they say that they are doing this "for the country."  I can see that.  I'll bet some of them are. It is not a crazy argument to look at this and say "the country must be led by someone else."

But there is something deeply worrisome in terms of precedent to say "we have an elaborate but understandable and long-established method of consulting the American people about who they want to have as president, but we don't like how that worked out this time, so let's scrap it and do something else."

What could possibly go wrong with that in the next election, or the one after that?