Figuring out the Funk

Okay, I think I finally have it figured out.  For most of the summer of 2018 I was kind of mired in a funk.  Not totally, just a thin veil of a funk.  Enough to let me know that things were not quite right.

At first I took the simple route.  Turning 58.  Growing older (and not wiser).  The political climate.  The world.  Technology.  Losing friends and relatives.  Well, I should have been buried in a funk three feet thick by the sounds of it.

Earlier this summer we lost Madeline’s brother Gary, at all too early an age.  While on vacation a few weeks back we learned of the passing of Madeline’s dear friend Jay.  I say Madeline’s friend because although I came to know Jay over the past 20 years we never really became friends.  I always felt like I was infringing on an ongoing friendship.  Jay of course, never made me feel that way.  I also felt he probably never thought I was good enough for her.  And of course, he was right.

From what I knew of him, Jay could never have actually had those feelings.  He was a man that embodied everything that was right with the world, and to the best of my knowledge, never exhibited any of its ugliness.  When he became ill there was an outpouring of people who came to express their love for him.  Fitting, it was, for a good man taken from his life all too early.

It of course made me ponder, “Who would come to express their love for me when I am the person in that situation?”

We live our lives for many reasons.  And if most of us aspire to even reach the age of 80, then my imitation of life is nearly three-quarters passed.  It makes you take a closer look at things.  About how you don’t have time for funks.  Or for people in your life who have no business being there.

Waking Ned Devine is one of our favorite films and in a bittersweet moment late in that film a main character asks how wonderful it would be to sit at your own funeral.  To hear what is said about you and to maybe say a few things yourself.  That is what we need our day to day life to be about.  To always tell the people who matter to us how very important they are in our lives.  To not wait until it is too late.

I’ve famously said that half the people who show up at your funeral come to mourn you.  The other half come to make sure you’re dead.  I’d say that’s about right for me.  I’ve seemed to have pissed off about the same number of people who have come to endear me.

In figuring out the funk I came to the following conclusion.  We hate Trump.  We hate the political climate of this country.  And we’d like nothing better than to move.  To Canada, to England, wherever.  Waking up every day is like shaking off a nightmare before starting into your day.  But we always reach the same conclusion.  We could never leave the people we love.  Our family, our friends.  The people who make it bearable to live through these difficult days.  Who make us laugh, make us cry, make us feel more human.  And when we lose people who make us feel those thing things, people like Jay, the world seems like that much more lonely a place.

So it remains, more than ever, necessary that we cling to the people most important in our lives and celebrate this life, the life we have come to realize will not go on forever.  If we live till 80, we get about 29,000 days and nights.  It’s okay to take a few off when we deserve it.  But let’s not waste them, certainly on the likes of His Orange Assness.

So, like a snake, it’s time to shed our funky skin.  To reveal the true us for everything to see and hear, for the good of it and the bad of it.