Vocal Point: Funeral brings up thoughts of long, long life

Not much in life is as emotion-filled as attending a funeral. Maybe for me like a lot of others, funerals are some combination of treasured memories, some words you wish you had said, others you wish you had let go, and a crazy mix of grief morphing into humor.

Standing graveside at Fairmount recently, I smiled at how people were “getting it.” No cell phones rang, no text messages flew overhead. And just as quick as having that thought, I found myself thinking “Gee, I didn’t know she knew celebrities … That mourner in the VFW jacket must be Mickey Rooney.” Maybe that quick transition from solemnity to hilarity is how we handle grief. Or possibly it’s my irresponsible upbringing.

Growing up in my large family, funerals were an event – from the emotional final goodbye to gathering afterward for dinner and to play football with my Uncle Bob, a former Navy heavyweight boxing champ. If he heard our entreaties of “Uncle Bob, over here!” and he sent one of his “heat-seeking missiles” toward us, the youngsters would go suddenly weak-kneed and alligator-armed as we squealed and ducked out of the way.

“Final chapter” honesty married to undying love, plumbed from the depths of the heart, is the beauty of any funeral. A graveside recitation of words written by the deceased’s daughter, describing her mom’s life, made it readily apparent that even great writers like Hemingway and Anne Tyler, to the hacks like me, fail to ever connect with readers like these words did in a simple, but oh, so eloquent collection of goodbye words to a mom from a loving daughter.

As the ceremony drew to a close, seeing the grief on the deceased’s significant other’s face brought to mind a recent article I read in an AARP magazine article – an article where a noted British gerontologist, Aubrey De Grey, stated that aging is a curable disease and we should all live to be 1,000 years old.

Before this is dismissed as some misplaced supermarket tabloid headline, this gerontologist has strong supporters, such as millions from the founder of PayPal, as well as detractors, though the detractors are better quote material. One detractor, nose in the air, stated he believed De Grey could do it, right after he got pigs to fly.

But standing there, I wondered if my friend would have wanted to live 1,000 years. Does any of us want to live that long? I find the concept scary.

It’s scary because war wouldn’t end. Would one want to mourn the tragic loss of a son or daughter for say, 960 years? Would a 1,000-year span allow one to see peace in the Middle East in the same way we saw the Berlin Wall come down?

What about cultural change? Think where society was 1,000 years ago – the tools that were used, the thought that the world was flat, the way medicine was practiced, and a whole host of other drastic changes that have come to pass.

The rate of change, just in the last 100 years, for example – from air travel, to space flight, to drones in war zones, to weapons of mass destruction – surely would increase with modern technology. Society already faces major upheavals well within a 1,000-year span – space travel, possible global warming consequences, and world shakeup with the end of fossil fuels. I already find changing garbage collection day to require major personal adjustments. That’s about my change tolerance limit.

Then there’s the absurd to think about. What would the Social Security department set the retirement age at, 800? Now it only seems like I’ve been sitting at the same desk for centuries – to actually do it, well, yikes! As people age, would they still want face-lifts etc, trying to look a youthful 500? Can you hear a wife telling her hubby, “that shirt is 400 years old – rag bag it!”? Could the Cubs finally win a World Series in the next 10 centuries?

After the services, on the drive home, a J.D. Souther song came on my radio with words that really struck me. “I was there when you were a queen, and I’ll be the last one there beside you.” Wow! A life with that loyalty – full of emotion, giving and receiving love, shared joys and sorrows, is a real life – not something measured by 1,000 or so rings around our trunk.