Today I went to his funeral, Nolan Myers, and it was really weird, almost surreal for me. I didnt know him that well, really at all. We had bumped into each other in the halls once or twice and I had heard his name occasionally. I went to show support for classmates and the family and more importantly some of my good friends who knew him.
To be even more honest this is a subject I have taken great strides to avoid before this week. Ever since my bouts with depression I never was quite sure what to make of death, I learned to downplay it so that it didnt seem like such a big deal, what I had been considering at the time. Now that Ive come a long ways since then my views of it havent changed. Even after sitting through Petes funeral last summer and all the work I did with that did it not even start to hit me. Now that it has I cant but help myself from crying. Everything happens for a reason, and for some reason today has been full of this reality of death, woke up to a funeral, just came upstairs after watching one on some tv show.
For a large part of the time I was there it seemed like déjà vu or that somehow I had been there before. For a while I couldnt put my finger on it and then all of a sudden I realized where I had seen it before. I had imagined what that day would look like, the only difference was who was in the casket, when I had thought of it I was the one people came to see. It was one of the things I would do to pass time when I was depressed, I would play out how I wish my funeral would happen. Then think about how it would probably be put together. I remember dropping hints about it, that I want it to be happy and uplifting, even if that wasnt how I had felt inside at the time.
They also said something today that hit me really hard, that he had always lived to try to match up to his dad somehow but he never had asked his dad and his dad had never told him. Thats something that I battle with all the time. I never know what my dad thinks of what Im doing, if he approves of me going to art school, or wanting to go to brazil next summer on mission work. Not that the decisions are up to him but I just dont know the answer.
I enjoy and spend most of my time in philosophical thought, it allows me to leave who I am personally and look at me more objectively. It has quelled some of my emotions (although there are things I wont think about this way, Love being one of them) to the point were something so drastic as today has to unfold for me to realize how it is I feel. I dont even know if this is coherent or not, not that it matters anyway. My thoughts were just running a muck in my mind and I needed/wanted to get them out there.
Take care and may God bless you,
~paul