Post 80: Frustrating Funeral

Post 80: Frustrating Funeral

This post has nothing to do with sex, but maybe everything to do with no sex. If I got as many invitations to dates as I did to go to the shiva, I'd have an amazing dating schedule.  I attended the funeral and shiva of an acquaintance who lost her battle with cancer.  She wasn't a close friend, but I was in touch with her and visited her and the people whom I met through her are close friends to this day.  I won't write her name here as I change the people and identifying factors.  Despite my respect for Jewish tradition, I just about verbally attacked the Rabbi who showed up at the shiva.  He did not know the age or reason for the death but tried to comfort the family members and friends there by saying that G-d created everything for a reason. There is even a reason for weeds (and moquitoes, and cockroaches, I thought.)  But I didn't want to upset the household.  It wasn't my daughter/aunt/sister who died.  But I wanted to ask him, what is the USE of a cancer cell.  What does it give the people or animals on this earth, other than some income for oncologists and lab researchers?  I'm sure this has been asked before and "believers" are supposed to take the leap of faith and think that there was a reason for her premature death and a purpose for the cancer to strike.  Twice....



Well, I don't buy it.  The only thing her death did is for us to put things into perspective...and the only thing I could come up was anger, in this poem.  It's a little childish, a little angry, but that's how this writer feels:


The only thing I know
Is that when I go
I do not want to suffer so
I want to glow until the end
Don't want to show illness to my friends
Just sing and dance and make them laugh
Until they write my epitaph

So why are people so in shock?
Did they ever think to call or knock?
Denying what was going on
Until they reached the cemetary gate
Then apologizing on Facebook, when it was too late.

But denial is human
And human means you're alive
Not for me to judge as I survive
This world of hurdles, high and low
And this writer knows nothing, that's what I know.