****************************************Funerals would be awesome get-togethers, if not for death and families.
At a funeral we gather to sing praises, tell stories, raise up in honor a loved one or friend. We focus at least a few hours on remembering them, hugging each other, reuniting, and if we are really blessed, we eat. You could not plan a better event...except that someone had to die to get us there. We promise we will get together more often; not let a death be the reason to unite. We commit to celebrate life with the living, not wait to celebrate life over their grave. Too little, too late, too many promises we’ll never keep…and of course, just like with any gathering, there is the issue of having too much family together in too close a proximity for too long a time.
Why is death and families a subject to discuss today? Well death is one of the Elephants we all fear. After all if that Elephant arrives for us we won’t be here to eat it. This is true, but God willing our death will be someone else’s Elephant. I mean by that, if we have lived in a way that a single person loved us, our passing will be an Elephant to swallow in even some small meal.
This week I encountered an Elephant in my own family. This was a big rogue bull Elephant that is not mine but someone I love. It is my sister’s Elephant and it looks overwhelmingly inedible. What is her Elephant? This week, one of the saddest things to ever happen to anyone I know happened to my sister "Bambi". She buried her young husband.
At least to the world it appeared Jim, dad and husband extraordinaire, died last week in a far away land called Afghanistan. It even appeared that they helped her bury him. To the world they put this big, gregarious man in a box and placed him and his big dimpled smile securely in a plot of dirt sanctified for veterans in a military cemetery. There was even witnesses and men in uniforms from the Navy there to insure that Jim was safely tucked away for all eternity. Yep, that’s what the world saw. I saw something different.
You see, I know my sister Bambi. I know my sister will never keep her man in a box. Not her “Elvis”, her “Superman”, her hero. I know that Jim is not in any box and never will be. Just as Jim was too big in personality and heart to contain in a box while alive, he cannot be contained in a box in the ground. Bambi is not the kind of woman to let his spirit die. Bambi will keep him alive every day. There will not be a day when their girls do not know about their dad and his big life.
When he was a young man, sneaking out of the house as young men do, he convinced his younger brother that he could not tell anyone that the reason he snuck out was because, in fact, he was the one, the only “Superman”. Awestruck, many years went by before there was a fact finding that Jim may not be the legendary comic book hero. In fact, he was bigger than a one dimensional cartoon.
So, I know what the world does not. I know that James Harold Blick is not in a box in the ground but in his daughter’s eyes and his wife’s devoted heart. After all, Superman cannot be contained in a phone booth so how can a casket contain him? Welcome back home, Jim.
Elvis and Superman Photos>The work is in the public domain because it was published in the United States between 1923 and 1963 with a copyright notice, and its copyright was not renewed.
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