We have never met, but I sat in the back row at your funeral and watched the folded flag get passed to your crying family. I heard people eulogize you, and tell your life as if you were a dead man dying. In a funeral where I should have felt sad for the people you left behind, with their aching hearts for your presence, I felt sad for you. That your life had been summed up in a matter of minutes, and all I could feel was contempt for the speakers who would do this to a human life.
Because there must have been a life there. Because of you my husband always pumps my gas and never gives me a card on my birthday. If you touched no one else’s life, you touched his. This is what should have been said at your funeral:
“Sir, I have never met you but I am reminded of you every year on my birthday. I am reminded of what a great man you were; a loving husband and admired coach. I know you, even though you do not know me, through the people you have touched. Your life will live on through the descendants of your heart, because even though we are not related by blood, I carry you with me.”
I did not get to say those things to the people that came to tell you goodbye, and I do not know what they took away from that day. But I did get to sit at a bar, on thin wobbly stools, beside your ashes, and it was an honor to share that drink with you.