Funerals and Weddings

Having been informed that it would be only a small event for colleagues and friends in relation to the career of the deceased, I gave up the idea of attending the memorial gathering for him.

He passed away last October, a distressing loss to people around him. I did not know him well, but he interviewed me for a job, and although we did not see each other often after that, I had always thought that he was a respectable acquaintance.

I was upset when being denied my condolence in person, but it does not bother me any more. No matter how much one minds, nothing will change the fact of death.

My dismay did not result from the absence of an invitation, perhaps. It was probably a more selfish reason that I felt strongly being prevented from showing my gratitude and sending my heart. So it was perhaps more about the living rather than the dead in this case.

A friend of mine believes that invitations to occasions, such as weddings, are a testament to friendship. Is this thought applicable to the understanding of the significance of a funeral note? Perhaps not, given that the deceased is no longer in charge of the guest list for his own party. I do not believe in the analogy between invitation and friendship, as there are many indeterminable factors to complicate the issue. Funerals and weddings are supposed to be occasions, I think, where a relationship is re-established or created between hosts and guests.

Interestingly, funerals and weddings have become an issue on which I muse since then. Having been living away from my hometown for half of my life now, I have missed many weddings and some funerals. Geographical distance has been the main hindrance. Although I do not necessarily believe in the importance of these rituals, I cannot help but feel lost many times. I think that wedding is the last chance for friends to be just friends before they go on separate ways to make their respective families; funeral is another last (already too late) opportunity before an extant relationship falls apart gradually. I have no objection to the value of family or to the natural development for human beings to peel off from their shared life and to march on their due course. Therefore, such moment proves to be significant in the sense that one has to say goodbye to his foregone past. These occasions help to nurture a self-acknowledge of what is lost and a preparation for what it will become in the future.

On the one hand, I am probably blessed with the fact that I am always far away to be exempted from the formalities all these customs would involve; on the other, I feel inevitably deprived of a sense of belonging in a social surrounding in which there is no custom to oblige me.

Without these rites de passage, existence feels innocent and somehow weightless.