departure

I will never understand what love is. Maybe it's my ignorant 16-year-old mind, but I believe love is a foreign language to anyone; no matter how much you may try to translate it, it will never have a true translation. 

As morbid as it may sound, the sadness of truth is that love in its most raw and genuine form is shown in funerals. 

The comfort I saw when I went shook an earthquake in my heart. Their love story emphasizes the beauty of the falling in love in the "olden days"; their love was the love we all wish we had. They met in 9th grade; they were classmates. He sat around her, and he admired her. She finally went out with him. They spent 56 years together. He died the Friday after they celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. 

Personally, the only time I cry at a funeral is when the body is lowered towards the earth; that's when death hits me. 

I leaned into my dad and he comforted me as they lowered the body into the grave. The cries of the family played the softest symphony known to man.  

It's tradition for the family to help bury the body by putting the dirt that was dug up on the body. His wife, sister, daughter, and granddaughter were the first to throw the dirt into the undeserved hole in the ground.  

Nobody could understand why such a good man was taken away. What was the purpose of his death?  

His death shouldn't have happened.  

He came home on a Friday night. After work. He ate dinner with his wife. And their daughter was on her way to visit. A normal visit.

He was tired, so he went upstairs, and laid down in his bed. 

And suffered a massive heart attack that caused him to never wake up.  

Life continued the way it would on any Friday night. 

When my dad showed up to their house, he was in a body bag, and being carried down the stairs.  

The funeral was on Sunday. Neither his wife or daughter were in the house since Friday. The house was immutable, food left the dinner table, his clothes worn during that day, were scattered around the room. The house survived a disaster and nothing was ruined.  

The service continued into a restaurant, where we all sat and comforted each other from such a traumatic event. Friends from his childhood told stories of their times together. Cousins shared the stories of them all living together in the same apartment growing up in the USSR.  

He shouldn't have died. 

Everyone has a purpose; to me, in life and death.  

It bothers me that we only see raw love at heartbreaking events in our life. 

After funerals, we all say we need to have family reunions or weekly family dinners, and nothing ever happens. 

Is the point of death to remind everyone what love truly is?