A Break Up With Words

How do you plan a funeral for a 29 year old, hazel eyed wonder who hadn't been inside a church in ten years? The first answer would be "you don't because that kind of crap should never happen." That was my first answer at least.

But last week my sister, mother and father had to answer that question together because it was our reality.

My brother loved music and most of his play lists it couldn't be played inside the walls of a church building and it wasn't something we could have asked anyone to sing. There were also so many funny things that he would say or do or pranks he would pull on us through the years, but again, none of them were "appropriate" for a church service or graveside burial.

Appropriate.

The first time some member of my family said that word, I wanted to slap them. Yup. They were right, my brother dearly loved rap music but leading his casket out of the church to anything by Jay-Z or Dr. Dre was definitely not "appropriate" but how "appropriate" was it to be laying my baby brother to rest one month after his twenty-ninth birthday. "Appropriate" and its converse "inappropriate" can take a flying leap out of my dictionary after these last few weeks. I have lost the ability to discern or care what is and is not "appropriate" during this stage of my life. 

No one has words for this kind of agony. There is no script for telling our mother that her baby boy and only son was no longer here on this earth. There is no pre-written dialogue for driving out to my grandparents farm to break the news to them because we didn't want them reading about it on facebook.

I left the music up to my sister. She was always the lyrically gifted one anyways and she did a stellar job. She weeded out our family's insistence of anything by Adele or Whitney Houston's version of 'I Will Always Love You."

We were able as his final song at the grave site, to play Blink 182's 'I Miss You." If you know my brother, it was the only song he would have approved and it was MOST appropriate.