Different Approaches to Funerals

Thank God I'm back in the land of the living.  The stress of building our new home, my husband's incapacitating illness, and the death of a child we knew, was too much for me to cope with. I stopped believing in God and I felt hopeless.

I was ready to ask my MD friend to prescribe an antidepressant for me, but before I did that, I took a high dose of a consititutional homeopathic remedy that within 1/2 an hour turned my brain around. 

I felt peaceful and calm for the first time in months.  I started believing in God again.  I was accepting of the trials that had happened and were happening.

Thank God for homeopathy.  I studied it for 7 years, helping others, but never had this type of medicine help me until now.  I am grateful.

Anyway, peter explains in his testimony "Bad" Days and the Enneagram, about personality type and personality development.  I think that's really informative and useful info, but at the end of the day, when the shit hits the fan, I think treatment is more important than theory.  But when the fan is humming along smoothly, theory is far more fascinating than treatment, in my opinion.

Okay, about funerals. 

Where I live, (in the northern Canadian boonies of pristine wilderness), I have been to quite a few funerals, and there were many more that I did not attend of people whom I saw as patients. 

When I lived in Ontario, a visible coffin, and often a visible body were the "norm".  Up where I live now, I have never seen this or heard of it.  Actually nobody does that here.  What everybody has is a "Celebration of Life".  No coffin.  No body.  But lots of beauiful pictures of the deceased and then a collage of photos put to music.

I guess all cultures have their own way of doing things.  I know in the Greek culture that the funerals are quite morose.  Lots of black, lots of hard and loud sobbing, very, very depressing.  But also cathartic.

Peter talks of tingling.  That's a unique experience.  I can't say that I've experienced that feeling at a funeral yet.  Come to think of it, I can't think of a time when I felt that feeling in a situation that would be otherwise considered "sad" or "tragic".

I only feel that tingling during 2 times.  When I listen to music and I start feeling sentimental and have the thought:  "all is right with the world because the only thing that matters in this life is love".  Or when I have that thought without music because of my life situation in that moment.

Now if I could only have that as a perpetual thought.  Right now I'll settle for the occasional gifts of this experience.  I am grateful.