The Waiting Room

When I went home last week, my mom and I went to a funeral of a friend of hers. She was 88.

I don’t have a good track record at funerals. I have been know to cry so hard I have to leave (and twice this happened when I accompanied my mother to funerals of people I didn’t know). I was still in my twenties then but really!

Anyway mom says we have to roll through and says “don’t worry it won’t be sad. She 88. There won’t be many people there anyway. We’re all dying off.”

And she was right. It wasn’t sad. In fact, it was more of a social hour. A few young people and I mean folks in their 30’s – her grandchildren – were there, but everyone else was around her age or just a bit younger.

That’s when it struck me.

You know that song about The Upper Room? It’s a gospel song talking about when people die they go to the ‘upper room’.

Well, we were in The Waiting Room. My mom even joked with one of her girl friends “See you next time – or maybe not – it might be me.”

Time is chipping away at my Rock of Gibraltar and I don’t like it. I accept it. I understand it. But frankly the heart usually doesn’t give a good you know what for what the head knows.

My mother saw the look on my face when she said that. She retorted: “Life is an inherently fatal disease – buck up.”

And that, I guess, is what that is.