This time next week, I will be in Minneapolis remembering and celebrating the life of my friend Dave Jones, who died after battling cancer.
In trying to remember everything I might want to say so I can sift it out and distill it properly, I can’t help but think about the funeral of our friend Lonnie. He died in a car accident and was buried with odd ceremony in Hazard, Kentucky. Somewhere between the old Protestant hymns and the Tom Waits songs, Lonnie … who was an atheist, more or less … was preached into Hell. This is not an uncommon occurrence in Eastern Kentucky funerals when the dead wasn’t “saved.”
Both my 2nd ex-wife and Dave were a bit horrified by my reaction. I found myself laughing. Lonnie would have found the combination of things absurd, and because he was not there to laugh, I laughed for him.
It was both my gift to his memory and my manner of mourning him publicly. (I drank a 5th of Bulliet Bourbon and cried like a baby in private, to the horror of my 2nd exwife, then wife, who had never really seen me cry.)
I do not handle death in a socially appropriate manner. I suppose I could try and learn, but the fact is that since my father’s death when I was 17, I’ve been aware of the fact that most of what is socially acceptable mourning is mostly about not making other people uncomfortable.
When someone dies, the thing that made them them is gone. The body… now a corpse… is a machine with insufficient energy to remain in motion. Whatever we think or believe about what happens to the stuff that makes us us after we die, the fact remains that what remains is a switched off machine.
I wrote recently that one of the other things I’ve been pondering is the first law of thermodynamics: namely, that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changed. A machine, by definition, is a contraption designed to allow energy to do useful work.
The energy that allowed Dave Jones to do useful work has changed form. It is the work he did, the people whose lives he touched and by his very existence improved, that I hope to help celebrate.
