Grief

Probably there exists some etiquette regarding funeral attendance. Maybe it's mandatory for even the most casual of acquaintances, maybe especially if you attend church with them, even and especially more if they live just across the street from you.

A few weeks ago, one of SMAA's members died very suddenly, tragically, having fallen and hit her head in her house. While I knew who she was and that she had once been a very active member at our church - she even painted a beautiful mural in the room where I teach Sunday school each Sunday - I stayed home with my boys during the time I knew her funeral was happening, because I didn't really know her. I felt out of place even considering showing up around her family and close friends to join them in mourning her loss together. It seemed wrong to me. (I'd never say anyone else should make the same decision in a similar circumstance, only that I did.)

Then just before Thanksgiving, another member of our congregation was found deceased in her home, where she'd died alone, of causes I'm still not sure about. While I had spent more time with her and was more acquainted with her than the first lady, I still felt strange about attending her funeral, so I chickened out.

Yesterday, I noticed when I left to pick G up from school that there were lots of at the house across the street from us. Andrew and I are acquainted with these neighbors enough to know that the wife has been fighting cancer for a while. We've taken a meal over before, and we spent a few hours there last winter when our power was out but theirs was still on. We're friendly with them, but not enough so that I felt comfortable asking one of the many people milling around outside the house of our neighbor lady had passed away. Of course I want to know so that I can offer my condolences, a meal if it's needed, and just to show that we care. But it seems wiser to me to wait and ask today, when the cars are gone rather than yesterday, when so many people (likely family, friends, and others who really knew her) were around.

Grief is a hard thing. And it's so personal. I never want to make anyone uncomfortable while they're trying to hang on to memories of a loved one who's no longer with them. I don't want to be the nosy church lady asking a million questions, the lady who introduces herself to a widower for the first time at his wife's funeral. Perhaps it's cowardly of me. But I'd much rather pray for a family from afar and leave them their time to grieve without feeling they have some social obligation to shake my hand, than show up to an acquaintance's funeral as a spectator - on the outside of their grief, looking in.