Put your records on

On Thursday, I went to Ashley’s grandma’s funeral wake. For those who don’t know, her grandmother passed away over the past week and I thought the least I could do was support her by going. So after I finished up at a fashion photo shoot, I put on a black hoodie and headed down to the funeral home to pay my respects to the family and to make sure Ashley was ok. Thankfully, she was and so was the rest of the family for the most part. In fact, I found it so odd at first that people were all laughing and chatting freely amongst each other. I guess I was so used to “sad” wakes where everybody just sits in their best posture and remains in meditative silence while others slowly walked in. My goodness, was I blown away by this one. So I walk in and of course, I am kinda keeping to myself so I don’t accidentally make a scene. I greet Ashley’s parents and then walk over to Ashley. Everything is good up to this point and then her mom introduces me to Ashley’s aunt who is my boss’ mom. Yeah, it’s kinda confusing. I’ll draw a diagram–one day. Anyway, so Ashley’s aunt starts dragging me over to Serena (my boss) and we say hi and then I begin to meet the entire family. I felt like a roadshow character! It was so weird! And throughout all of this, I was trying to hold laughter and smiles in because, well, there I was thinking that I was at a wake and that I should be in mourning. But then I looked around at everyone and I noticed that everybody else was genuinely happy and that they were all just enjoying each other’s company amidst the huge coffin that lay to one end of the room. It was a bit of a surreal experience for me at first and as I think back on it now, I realized there was nothing awkward about happy people at a wake at all. These were truly happy people and I loved it. I’ve heard this saying once that said that if someone lives over 70, their wake is supposed to be a happy celebration of a full life. There’s no doubt that that’s what this wake was.

I’m kinda babbling at the moment, so I just want to say that I felt like the wake was a bit of a small reunion of lots of groups of people. I could tell right when I walked in that some of these people, whether they were family or friends, haven’t seen each other in a very long time. It’s funny how the death and passing of one person can be such an incredible blessing to you and to the families directly involved. I just couldn’t help thinking about how happy everyone was even though they had just lost their grandmother. It was seriously a true-life “blessing in disguise”. And even though I may say that term every now and then to describe an event in my life, I think for the first time, I truly realized and experienced it for myself that night.

If you’re lost on hope, take another look, and you’ll find that everything is intertwined. The good; the bad; and those things you can’t seem to extract. Oh well, look at that, it’s that grand life of mine, and I’m living. Are you? :)