Step To The Music, March in Time

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

I went to a funeral this week. It was not for an old friend or a treasured family member. In fact, the funeral was for a person whom I had met formally only once and since then have had fewer than a ½ dozen very short in-person conversations over the last several years. Instead, almost all of our interactions have been through long strings of text on Facebook!

He was a music teacher at a local middle school which several of my grandchildren have attended (though I don’t think any of them were his students). But it’s evident that he was an outstanding educator because even at my age, I learned a lot from him. I clearly remember the day he posted that he had finished his cancer treatments. What he did not say is that they had not helped.

Less than a month ago, we had an online conversation about a funeral he, himself, had recently attended. It was for an elderly woman—so old that almost all of her friends had already passed away. But he told me that when the friends and family filed into the chapel after the family prayer, the room was filled to capacity. We agreed that a chapel bursting with people who loved her testified that the old woman must have had a very fulfilling life, indeed.

Fewer than 30 days later, I sat in a chapel packed to overflowing with his friends and family. It was an eccentric group because as his brother said, their family consisted of parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles, in-laws, out-laws, adopted members, and random folks they had learned to love and welcomed into their home—bonus family is what Son #1 likes to call that. There were some terrible dad jokes, some hilarious stories with audience members occasionally calling out additional details, and lots of music! It was, in fact, what a funeral is supposed to be—the celebration of a good life well-lived. And I expect he’s been welcomed with open arms on the Other Side–especially since angels are apparently really fond of music!

In contrast to that, a couple of weeks before, I had visited twice with a former daughter-in-law to help with a small problem related to a grandchild. During both visits she expressed her rising anxiety about the current political unrest in this country. It was oddly disturbing since I have known her almost 25 years, and she is normally so disinterested in politics that she didn’t even register to vote when I ran for office in her precinct. If she is worried, then our national government’s inability to manage itself effectively must have ripples far deeper than even our elected officials realize. She asked me how she could reconcile her escalating fear for the future with what she feels is her duty to her children—to teach them that life is an investment worth making?

My brother–a former history teacher–and I have such a discussion fairly regularly. He spends a good deal of time researching one crisis after another in countries around the world, and he is more and more convinced that the future we are facing does not end well. So does that mean we should all just quit trying? Certainly, sometimes it feels as though, like Katniss Everdeen in Hunger Games, the odds are not in our favor.

Perhaps my friend, the music teacher, had some answers. He loved marching bands. (In fact, I saw on Facebook yesterday morning that his wife stepped on the field for Alumni Band without him for the first time in 37 years!) At his funeral his brother said my friend had designed his first marching band routine for the high school band he belonged to when he was only 18 years old. (Trust me, that’s incredible.) But the most remarkable part is that he just kept marching. The bands changed; the skills increased, the talents broadened, new members were trained and inducted, but he never stopped marching.

I guess, in the end, I don’t have much power over the big problems facing world governments, but that doesn’t mean I’m off the hook. The dishes still need to be done, the garden weeded, dinner taken to the sick neighbor, books lent to local students taking the ACT exam, grandchildren supported on missions and in college, bad jokes shared with friends, and gratitude for a rich life expressed to Heaven every  day–so that when my times comes, like my friend, I, too, will still be marching.