What would be said at your funeral.

    I am currently reading Mitch Albom's Tuesdays with Morrie. Morrie is a man with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, we'll just call it ALS. ALS is a terminal disease that kills your nerves, making everything in it's part useless while working it's way up from your legs to the top. At a point it makes your whole body useless while your mind is still alert or like Mitch put it, "your soul, perfectly awake, is imprisoned inside a limp husk, perhaps able to blink or cluck a tongue..". It eventually works it's way to your lungs and suffocates you.

    This professor, while his body was degenerating, went to a friends funeral and heard all the nice things people had to say and the pouring out of emotions. He thought it was a huge waste that the guy wasn't there to here all these things being said about him. When he got home he decided to hold his own funeral where friends and family would gather like a real funeral and say everything they had to say in his presence. He laughed and cried with them and in the end declared that his "living funeral" had been a success. 

    I just had to pause and think of my folks. They would be in the air, on a 12 hour flight, while i was reading that passage. I imagined something terrible happening, God forbid. I imagine i would have so many great things to say about them. Meanwhile, i barely spoke to them before they left, because when they called i was running late for a class. I imagined that not just that class but school as a whole would be put on hold if anything bad happened. I was thinking we really don't know the value of what we have, until we lose it.

    Morrie said people saw him as a bridge between life and death. They wanted to know what to pack when they make that great final journey. Mitch had become busy and rich talking about sport stars that couldn't care less. He was flying all over the world covering stories and was beginning to realize what Morrie had told him. "Many people walk around with a meaning less life. They seem half-asleep, even as when they're busy doing the things they think are important. This is because they're chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning to your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning".

    I started feeling bad. When i first started school i would call my dad and talk about everything from politics to spirituality, and discuss with my Mom about how her job is going and other things. Now, i'm too busy to even say an appropriate good bye. I have allowed things that wont matter when it's all said and done to do me in.

    I don't want to imagine what would be said at my funeral by the one;s i love because in the past few years they have taken the back seat in my priorities. If i should die, the silence that i have allowed would become too loud to bare. My conscience would itch me out of my chest.