I went to a lot of funerals when I was young.

When I was 14, Mimi died. She had been sick and we knew that her death was inevitable, but it’s hard at any age to bury a grandparent. Then, my senior year of high school, my cousin T passed away. She was only a few days old. Her twin sister M is now a beautiful, smart, kind high school sophomore. She’s a busy girl whose future is so full of all those inevitable good things that come after a child works hard and has overcome heartache that the rest of us can’t even wrap our heads around. But I miss what could have been. I have to remember that M will always be a twin and that she carries her sister even though she may not talk about her or even remember her.

Then The Year happened. The year when my grandmother, my grandfather, and my dad all died within 14 months. I was 20.

I cried a lot, but the thing that twists the knife more than anything else was that at 20, I was this person who knew how to attend a funeral.

Depending on my relationship with the deceased, I knew how to behave and what cadence to adopt. When Mimi died, I knew to lock into my brain what it sounded like when my dad cried. I knew not to be scared by that sound but to sit next to him in the pew and hold his hand because he needed it. He was grieving his mother. When my grandfather died, I knew to stand by my mom at the small-town funeral home and look nice and smile when people who I hadn’t seen since I was a baby talked to me like I was an active part of their life. I knew that even though I wanted to stay at the reception after the burial, it was my job to drive my cousin who I had never really liked back to Memphis so she could catch her flight back to wherever she lived. And in the days leading up to my grandmother’s passing, I knew to listen closely as she read poetry. I was an English major and I had never even known that she knew who Robert Browning was, much less had a place in her heart for him.

At her funeral, these words kept echoing in my mind:

My mom is an orphan now. My mom is an orphan now. 

A month after my grandmother died, Dad died.

Then my mom was a widow and an orphan.

And my ability to be the Be All End All Funeral Girl was put to the test.

This time, I was in The Immediate Family, the Inner Sanctum. I knew to accept prayers, cold cuts, blank books – whatever I was given as a sign of sympathy. I knew to be graceful. My cousin who I had driven to the airport months before didn’t know how to be graceful. She melted into a puddle at my own dad’s wake and wouldn’t even accept my brother’s hugs when he – the 13-year-old child of the departed who was by his side the moment he died – tried to console her. I didn’t know exactly what Funeral Grace entailed, but I knew that my brother and I had it. When people came out in droves to my dad’s wake and his funeral and his reception, I knew to thank them both with my words and with my spirit. Having been to a lot of funerals at that time, I knew that they didn’t have to come.

But they did.

And they came because they they loved him and they loved us.

♥

Here is a thing you start to hear often when you go to a lot of funerals:

We should do this more often, under better circumstances. We should see each other more.

So there are a lot of really, really awful platitudes that people tend to spout when someone dies. Here are a few of them, and this article was written for a secular publication and doesn’t even scratch the surface of some of the awful God-wouldn’t-give-you-more-than-you-can-handle religious sentiments that do more harm than good to a person who’s suffering loss. Y’know what? Sometimes God does give us more than we can handle.

But the thing about seeing each other more? That’s a good thing to say, as long as you actually mean it. Death brings us together in support of those who are experiencing loss and also in remembrance of someone who impacted our lives. That’s why I am one of those people who wants their funeral to be happy and fun. You don’t have to wear black when I die, unless you want to. I want you to talk to someone you don’t know at my funeral, though. Tell them something goofy I did. Tell them something goofy you did. Just talk to them. Celebrate the good things. Exchange numbers. Make the world smaller by making a connection.

Just talk. Talk until you find a place of happiness and remembrance.

♥

A week ago, David Bowie died.

My husband, C, and I had been on a kindergarten tour that morning for the school that she’ll attend in the fall when she’s four. When we got in the car to leave – the smell of school still lingering in our clothes – I checked Facebook and heard the news.

David Bowie died.

What? Seriously?

Yep.

Dang.

I went to work and was off-kilter for the rest of the day. At first I chalked it up to the fact that my kid is now old enough to tour kindergartens, but then I turned on the David Bowie channel on Pandora and couldn’t make it through “Golden Years” without tearing up. It’s always been mine, the lyrics meaning something different but equally-powerful to me throughout the chapters of my life.

I’ll stick with you baby for a thousand years

Nothing’s gonna touch you in these golden years

Tributes trickled in the rest of the day on Facebook and Twitter. The memes. The quotes. Testimonies to this man whose songs we can all sing verbatim but whose words were written to us as individuals and captured wholly personal moments in our lives. Posts like Karen’s and Denise‘s and Samara‘s made me realize that David Bowie’s passing was one that I wanted – needed – to mourn in my own way.

Full disclosure: I have never been a die-hard fan. I have his greatest hits album and nothing else and I’ve only seen Labyrinth once. But in his death, I realized that David Bowie and his music meant more than I could have guessed simply because of the conversations I have had in the past week. I have the luxury at work to be surrounded by amazing, creative people who I also call friends. During the week of his death, we talked about what Bowie meant to us and how his music provided a soundtrack to our lives. In my office, we talk about a lot of things, but until he died, we never knew that David Bowie all brought us such joy.

It was almost like we all showed up at his funeral, not expecting to see each other there.

We should do this more often, I thought.

B and I will celebrate our 10 year anniversary this summer. We talked about Bowie this week the same way we talked about “Golden Years” on our second date in 2003.

♥

I finally turned on Pandora. The Bowie channel plays a lot of Beatles and Rolling Stones. I had missed them too. I’ve been listening to too much M83 and Cut Copy lately. I need to get back to the music I listened to on the radio when I was a kid.

I need to do that more often.

My birthday was a couple days ago. I told C I wanted to have a dance party, and we went into her room and I turned on “Let’s Dance” and then “Golden Years.” She shimmied and shook in her own little almost-four-year-old way, and I felt like this was probably the best possible way I could ever remember Ziggy Stardust.

We need to do this more often.  

♥

I thought I knew how to funeral when I was 20. I am now 34 and I realize that the best way we can honor the dead is by celebrating with the living.