The World Stops When a Kind Person Dies
I had a couple funerals this week, for people known for their kindness to others. Both had lived for nearly a century.
I’ve had the holy privilege of officiating at several funerals for people known for their kindness.
These funerals stand out. They are unusually large, typically drawing over a hundred people to pay their respects, from all over the country.
Earlier in the covid-19 pandemic, our funerals were held outdoors, graveside. And still, even in the rain, or in the cold, or in the summer swelter, crowds stood on the grass to be present.
The world stops when a kind person dies.
People drop everything to express their love and gratitude for the life of a kind person. And some people sacrifice more than a couple of hours, to say thank you, to remember, to be present with the family.
They travel significant distances, at significant expense. (Plane tickets, last minute, are costly.) They stop working for a few days, even though they will face a pile-up when they get home. They find someone to take care of the dog.
This has nothing to do with workplace titles. I’ve buried people with some impressive credentials. And many kind people also accomplish newsworthy things. But kindnesses cannot be listed on a résumé.
However.
The world stops when a kind person dies.
You might fly three thousand miles across the country during a pandemic to visit a dying woman in the hospital, because she was the mother you never had; and the grandmother your kids got to have.
You might drive six hours one way and book a hotel room to attend the funeral of the man who gave you a second chance at a job you would have lost from any other manager. A job that was the first — but not the last — job you were able to keep, because the man then started coaching you in the life skills you’d missed.
You might take leave without pay to attend the funeral of a woman, who, when you were drowning in your teens, always kept a place open at her family’s dinner table. For you.
Often the kind people that others drop everything to visit, or whose funerals they drop everything to attend, retired from the workplace decades ago. Some never worked outside the home at all. They might have lived in a care home or have been home-bound for the last decade or two, unable to walk, unable to see, perhaps even unable to remember what they did, that was kind.
But when people known for their kindness die, quite literally one or two hundred other people will stop everything, everything, everything else, to attend that funeral.
Bittersweet. I know a lot of kind people here.
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