“Be happy at my funeral”
From loss to gift
Every now and then I remember something my mother repeated, again and again, making sure we wouldn’t forget. “I want everyone to be happy at my funeral. I want there to be singing and dancing. I want people to remember the best parts of my life.”
My mother was a perpetually joyous woman. She was exceptionally charming, winning the hearts of everyone she met with her easy smile, shining eyes, and caring manner. Her laughter tickled the strings of the heart, from top to bottom, and she laughed often.
Her innate joy did not mean she did not suffer trials — she simply preferred not to. In my earlier years, I struggled with reconciling the forms of escapism she turned to (drugs and alcohol being the most damaging). Her attitude of living fast and dying young — of leaving a beautiful corpse, something she must have accomplished as the hospice workers knew her as “Hollywood” — felt intrinsically hurtful to me.
But, I’ve come to see it differently now. My mother was living how she preferred to live. At high speed, riding whatever dragon she could latch herself on to. She always chose euphoria (albeit taking shortcuts at times), and she wanted that for everyone around her, too.
Even facing her death, she was almost disturbingly cheerful (alright, it was disturbing, and at one point I cried, to which she looked confused — as if wondering why I was upset — then said, through her morphine haze, “Oh, don’t be sad, Wuwu,” and pulled me to her).
After my mother passed, I had a dream. She was on the other side of a door, and I could hear her say, “Don’t worry. I’m okay. I’m right here.” In the immediacy of my grief, I wanted more, and that was the sensation I woke up with.
Since then, however, remembering that dream, remembering her wish for people to think of her and to be happy rather than to grieve — I see it as a gift.
My mother passed away six years ago, but I’ve felt her with me in ways she could never have been when she was alive. Her voice in my head, her warmth around my heart, is as strong and as palpable as I can remember it in life.
It isn’t easy to reflect on loss, or to scrape away at the edges of grief, but it is helpful. The scars left by physical absence can be filled in with memories built by layer after layer of applied gratitude, celebration, and joy.
Those memories are real, the emotions are real, and their impact is timeless.
Finally, I understand, and finally, Ma, I could be happy at your funeral.
