Working at my family’s funeral home during COVID really opened my eyes to seeing the pain that happens in our world on a daily basis. So many people’s lives completely fell apart because of the loss of a spouse or a parent or a son or daughter. I had a front row seat to grief, misery and hopelessness from the time of a first phone call all the way to the actual funeral. When working at a funeral home, you truly see people at the worst. They are in essence buying a service they truly don’t want. As opposed to working at a department store or a restaurant or some sort of entertainment venue where customers walk in and are excited to be purchasing wares, at a funeral home, no customers are happy to be there.
One very memorable situation I remember was where we had an older woman pass and she only had one real next of kin, her son. Let’s call him Frank. When I first saw Frank, he looked like a little lost puppy. He had spent the last ten years taking care of her. They were extremely close and she had died on the week of Mother’s Day.
Now I had heard about Frank through the funeral home grapevine. He could definitely qualify as a “momma’s boy,” even comically so. But what God allowed me to see was a guy who had put his whole life on hold in order to care for another human being. I believe God blessed him all these years to really be an honest to goodness friend to his mother. They enjoyed meals and television shows, classical music and opera. And now she was gone.
Frank and his mom did have some relatives in other cities, but this was May 2020, and COVID was severely limiting travel. Frank wanted there to be a wake for some reason, but we all knew that he would be the only one attending.
Something about the idea of Frank being the only one present at his mother’s wake tore my heart in two.
Now, I didn’t know Frank. I had only heard about this particular case in passing. Something told me to ask Frank and my co-workers if it would be okay to attend the wake for its whole duration. The funeral home staff was extremely supportive of it, however I think Frank was at first wary, but regardless of any hesitance, he agreed.
I remember being tempted to worry about what my co-workers thought. I remember being tempted to worry about whether or not my desire to attend a stranger’s wake was weird. I remember wondering what Frank might think of me, whether he would think I had an angle or an agenda. Even with all those concerns, I just decided that God had put this on my heart and I would just accept people’s opinions of me and move on.
I remember Frank’s mom lay in a beautiful casket. Little statues of Michelangelo’s Pieta graced the corners. She wore a pink evening gown and Andrea Bocelli’s Time To Say Goodbye played on the internal sound system at Frank’s request.
Frank and I sat in the front row. I kept asking him to tell me stories about his mother, which he did. The conversation flowed from what he was going to do now, to more reminiscing about his mother, to God and to Jesus and back to his future. At some point during the wake, my beautiful wife, Sarah visited and had brought chocolate chip cookies that she and our kids baked.
In the end, Frank was truly comforted and I felt great about it. I was there for another human being when they needed it the most. I just did what I would’ve wanted someone to do for me. I’d like to say I live my life always doing the things that I’d want someone to do for me, but I can’t say that I do. More often than not, I let me own insecurities or selfishness get in the way of helping someone who truly needs it. However, when I fought through some of those feelings and decided to just meet the need, it felt great! Like I was fulfilling a purpose I didn’t know I had.
I don’t think we have to move to a third world country or give all our money to a local charity to make the world better. If we can just meet the needs in front of us, the world changes for the better.
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